From The Book Of Questions Vol I by Edmond Jabés (an achingly beautiful book)

There is a song in the eagle’s heart,
but his wings carry him elsewhere

There are seasons in our lives when we have a song to sing and yet we may not be in the place where it can be sung. Just as the eagle’s wings carry him elsewhere, so we too may find ourselves in a different place, a place where – although beautiful – the song has to remain in the heart because it cannot be sung. Even so, I believe that eventually the song and the wings will consort and the eagle will be carried to the place where the song is to be sung – so it will be for us.

Reading Jung’s autobiographical book Memories. Dreams, Reflections I am nudged along a road I have travelled too infrequently. His understanding of the power of symbol, sign, myth and meaning stir me into a fever of thinking back into my own mythology. Memories are made and hard wired into the brain along with sensory and emotional information that can be stirred into recall by the simplest of things, a fragrance, a sound, a word or a trick of the light. With the stirring of the memory the past becomes present to us once more and we re-experience the moment. Jung sees this as some kind of alchemy of the soul. I am thinking that it is evidence that everything is shot through with meaning and nothing is insignificant. A piece of bread broken, a mouthful of rich red wine and the words, “Do this in memory of me”, are powerful symbols able to rend aside thousands of years and I find myself in a warp of time and space in a mystical reality beyond my comprehension.

trembling
taking the tiniest
steps
into the yet
unknown
my head races
my heart leaps
my guts clench
and my hope
lifts

Being a late developer it wasn’t until I had left school at 16 that I began to take an interest in the arts. The truth is that it was my obsession with all things David Bowie that led me into many of my artistic interests at that time in my life. Indeed, it also led me back into higher education as I left my job and went back to college to study for a diploma in Creative Arts. I was a big fan of surrealism, Salvador Dali being my introduction, but I quickly moved on to an interest in the wider group of Dadaists and Surrealists such as Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and others. What fascinated me about these artists was their commitment to exploring and expressing the depths of the unconscious. Today, I am celebrating the birthday of one of the group who perhaps more than any deserves to be celebrated – Dorothea Tanning, 100 years old. Her accomplishments as a woman in what was then a male dominated world are incredible. She has outlived them all, including her husband, Max Erst, and she has continued to create, turning her hand to sculpture as well as painting and, unable to paint due to a stroke, writing poetry and prose. Happy Birthday Dorothea – you’re an inspiration!

I am a collector, a magpie of the shiny, sparkling bites of inspirational thinking that I come across in poems, articles, essays, newspapers, books, blogs etc etc. I have dozens of little notebooks with scribblings in them and since the advent of the Pocket PC, iPhone and now iPad, I also have dozens of electronic notebooks with collections of inspirational quotes. Sometimes I read something and it’s like I have opened a cupboard door and it’s one of those comic cupboards full of stuff that comes tumbling out as the door opens, and there’s always a bowling ball that drops out right at the very end and smacks you on the head. A quote can do that;

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things hapen.

Sean O’Faolain – Irish Short Story Writer

Reading a book recommended a while ago by a friend – The Contemplative Pastor by Eugene H Peterson I was interested in this question and answer;

You’ve written that everyone is born to live creatively, but many of us fail to do so. Why is that?
Largely because we are lazy. Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do.

Reading this I’m reminded of another great book on creativity by Rollo May called The Courage To Create – a defining characteristic of what it means to be human is that we create – and I agree with Peterson that we are born to create. Also, as the title of May’s book says, it will take courage to create. Most of the world’s woes are as a result of stifled or dysfunctional humans unable or unwilling to find the faith and freedom to create.

Woken by the sun slicing through the gap in the curtains hanging loosely at my bedroom window, I am unaware of the time of day. I am ten years old. I slide out from under the blanket and part the curtains squinting through the grimy glass. It is dawn and on this day the canal is a river winding past the cold flagged yard which is a garden of grass and wild flowers. The gritty brick landscape is transformed by the early morning light into the rolling fields of an imaginary county. For just a short while the bleakness of inner city Manchester is replaced by the glorious countryside of my waking dreams. For a split second I swear I saw a March hare whirling his mad dance across the far field. I still look for him on those mornings when I’m woken unexpectedly at dawn.

Thinking about mysticism and the experience of transformation. Often people strive for the big experience to transform them and by doing so they miss out on the ordinary moments infused with mystery. I have always believed that out-of-the-ordinary experiences come out of the ordinary – the simple mundane things of life looked at from a different angle or in a different light – or just looked at rather than taken for granted. Psychologist Stanley Krippner has this to say on the subject;

Sometimes transformations are not mystical or ephemeral at all. Sometimes they are really very simple and very down to earth. Like Tandy said at the end of the brilliant Nouvelles by Voltaire: “We must cultivate our gardens.” I have seen people who are very self-realised getting great enjoyment out of growing vegetables, growing fruits, growing flowers. And there’s nothing mysterious about that on the surface of  it. Yet, you go a little bit below the surface, yes, whenever a flower blooms, whenever a seed sprouts – that certainly is mysterious.

A poem I love by Gerard Manley Hopkins called Pied Beauty expresses this with such grace I am always moved when I read it. He is simply celebrating freckles and spots and even blemishes evidenced in the natural world as things of beauty;

Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Shielding my eyes I
gaze into the past
the sun I now see
is a different sun
one that shone
eight minutes since
such is the elusiveness
of time

thoughts on a tv program about time

Every now and then I have to get my fix of inspirational stuff and one such bit of stuff is this scene from Dead Poets Society when Mr Keating gets Tod to sound his barbaric YAWP! Taken from Walt Whitman’s Song Of Myself the barbaric YAWP is the cry we each carry within us that longs to be sounded out over the roof tops of the world – the context of the quote is;

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,
he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.

Sensing himself observed by nature (the spotted hawk) Whitman feels the need to proclaim that he too is as free as a bird, despite appearances (gab and loitering), and he is ready to make it known as he sounds his barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world!