Category Archives: paying attention

How to find your golden light

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Fiona writes: “A tender shoot has started up from a root of grace…”

Last night I went to our local carol service in the beautiful Malvern Priory. The pews were packed. The stained glass glowed golden.

The carols were interspersed with readings from the Bible, with unlikely sounding happenings and descriptions of religious experiences.

When I was a girl, I went to a religious school and we’d have similar services at Christmas. I thought it was all ridiculous. How did we know these things really happened? How could Jesus be the son of God? Did people really believe these things?

Since becoming a Buddhist, I heard these readings with completely new ears. I could appreciate the beauty of the language and the aspirational qualities of the stories. I could now appreciate the truth that the Bible stories were pointing towards. The intense emotion no longer scared me. I’d felt some of it myself.

“…it blooms without blight, it blooms without blight…”

You might think of yourself as religious or you might not. I’m not really talking about religion. I’m talking about allowing ourselves to open to new experiences.

If we can open ourselves to new experience, it will change the whole world for us.

As the choir sang, I was touched by the golden light of Christ. I was moved by his compassion and love.

I hope you can find your own golden light, whether it belongs to Jesus, or Amida Buddha, or to delicate pink cyclamens in a Winter garden.

“…blooms in the cold bleak winter, turning our darkness into light…”

*

A tender shoot has started up from a root of grace,
as ancient seers imparted from Jesse’s holy race;
it blooms without a blight, it blooms without a blight,
blooms in the cold bleak winter, turning our darkness into light

(A tender shoot – words & music: Otto Goldschmidt 1829 – 1907)

*

Photo by mharrsh via Creative Commons, with thanks.

I want to speak to you

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I want to speak to you, but I don’t know what I want to say, so I’ll just start typing and see where my fingers take me.


Last night I stood in my kitchen and watched a jay, only a couple of metres away on the outermost branch of the walnut tree. Here’s what I found when I googled him.

Garrulus glandarius: An attractive and colourful bird easily identified by the flash of brilliant blue on its wing. Other key features include a bold black moustache, a pale-pink-light brown upperbody and black tail.

Flash of brilliant blue. Bold black moustached. We can find poetry everywhere we look, if we are using the right eyes.

I have lots of different books on the go at the moment. Elizabeth Gilbert’s new one, Committed, about marriage. R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self. Mark Epstein’s Psychotherapy without the Self. Poetry – Brent Goodman’s the brother swimming beneath me, Roger Housden’s ten poems to open your heart.

Everywhere I look, when I am in the right frame of mind (of heart), there are gems. Little nuggets of wisdom that I can thread together with other half-thought thoughts and make a necklace. Points of intense feeling – ‘ah – that’s what it’s like for me too’. Or – ‘I see that differently now’.

When I’m in the wrong frame of mind (of heart), the words are tangled hedges, the syntax escapes me, the writer bores me.

How do we find the right frame of mind (of heart)?

I just walked downstairs to check my tiny jersey new potatoes which are boiling with a delicious blub-blub-ing sound. They will make potato salad for my lunch with Heather, and I hope their flesh will be buttery and yellow. As I stood at the stove with a sharp knife, testing their insides, the jay landed on the same branch.

The best answer I have right now is: Relax. Open. Let go. It’s all out there, waiting to offer itself to you.
(Here is what happens when we can get out of the way. Beauty like this.)

Our Christmas tree is alive with birds

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Our Christmas tree is alive with birds. Most have tabby-cat coloured feathers and white heads or throats. Two are peacocks. One is blood red. They balance on the tips of the branches as if they might take off at any moment.

Behind the birds, wrapped between the green-scented branches, hundreds of pin-pricks of light blaze and fade, blaze and fade. They make a kind of music for your eyes.

In the foreground Silver is curled up on the sofa, one cheek resting on her arm. As I watch she draws her head in towards her body, turns her chin up. Now she folds her paw over her eyes, as if the light is too bright. She’s smiling.

Behind her, the woodburner window has turned black. I go over and slide the black lever across, using our special lever-sliding stick, a notch cut into the end. The embers come back from the dead – glowing red, pulsating, breathing, then all at once the wood bursts into rich flame.

I put my poetry book onto its stomach and turned on my laptop and write this down. Why? Because I wanted to tell you.

*

Photo by WouterKvG via Creative Commons with gratitude.

Stale small stones and skipping a step

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For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling with my daily small stone. I just haven’t been able to find anything I want to write about.

Yesterday I had a sudden realisation. I’ve been skipping a step.

I’ve been walking through my days casting about for something to write about. Is this interesting? Could I describe that?

I’ve slipped into doing it back to front. The first step is – open your eyes. Become quiet. Notice what is there. Leave a space for the world to show itself to you.

As soon as you do this, small stones are everywhere. They rise of their own accord. All we have to do then is copy them down.

My good friends the blackcurrants (jammy breakfast)

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Look at those glossy beauts.

This morning I have dark unctuous blackcurrant jam for breakfast – spread thickly on white toast from a proper bakery.

If I’d bought it from a posh deli, I imagine I’d be enjoying it very much.

As it is, I know these blackcurrants more intimately. I carried their mother home from the garden centre and dug her a hole. I covered her in mesh to keep the birds’ beaks away. I picked them by the handful when they were good and black. I nicked their tops and tails off (who knew this would be such a long job! but perfectly pleasant if performed whilst sat in the sun and listening to birdsong). I boiled them up with sugar. I poured them into jars I’d washed and then baked in the oven.

How distant we have become from most of the food we eat. If you’d kneaded that bread, left it to prove, would you be gobbling that sandwich so quickly, on the run between meetings?

Here’s to jam. It’s nearly all gone. Here’s to every mouthful.