• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
    • William Carlos Williams
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • wormholes

mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Author Archives: m lewis redford

silence

28 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2019, 5*, being, blue, child, clothes, doing, emptiness, light, mother, others, perseverance, Quakers, shadow, shape, silence, sitting, sun, thinking, walls, windows, woman

                                silence

                there –
                in the round

                some threw fluting gapes
                three to engulf the fourth

                some were cleaved peacefully
                head from leading shoulder

                some wore a chemise, others a shalwar,
                others a collar, one a hand-towel draped quickly over the shoulder be back in a minute

                one projected flanks like enveloping wings
                unaware as she nodded

                her neighbour bathed in the same return, the other sat
                comfortably on nothing at all

                the man held the frame
                with perseverance to allow the shape

                the woman privately understood
                most of what everyone thought, only the

                child contained in the mothers’ arm
                watched the walls dance phantasmagoric

                and only the windows let in
                the blue blue sun

 

Quakers sit in light to worship

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being & sitting wormhole: ‘and is there homage …’
blue & windows wormhole: ‘from the cathedral window two stories / high …’
child wormhole: LIGHT HEARTED WILLIAM by William Carlos Williams
doing & light & thinking wormhole: Four Noble Truths
emptiness wormhole: none and all
mother wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Valley
others & shadow wormhole: poessay XI – piquant love
silence wormhole: travel // when I die
sun wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
walls wormhole: looking hard enough
woman wormhole: Pont Neuf, Paris, 1902

 

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Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 5; reflectionary

24 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in reflectionary

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arm in arm, requres chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 5

Transglomeration: And do I still not see all these ones about, my mothers, felled and finished with, one by one, without let?   And all the while I am one who allows himself a complacent slumber like the buffalo unperturbed before the butcher!

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 4 cornered prey, trapped in birth after birth
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 5 evidence of death all around, but I sit chewing the cud

Glimpse: living (life) in ignorance of death (simile: the buffalo asleep with the butcher – Sharma, ‘…and the butcher’s sword breathing over its neck, one goes on chewing the cud of illusory joys…’); everyone else is dying

Reflection: making the implication of verse 4 even more explicit, there’s nothing clever going on here, no subtlety of argument: death is immanent, it’s there, it’s right behind you!   It really is!   Verses 4-6 are driving the point home, verse 4 a hook – makes us look completely the other way; verse 5 a body punch, right in the ribs, makes us look stupid, wo wind; verse 6 the downing KO, this is what happens when you live stupidly; and what is ‘stupid’: in verse 5 it is the wilful ignorance we exercise, the ostrich-reaction to what is the single most definite thing in life – death; and this is beyond the ‘o, people die’ realisation, the flippant ‘no one can live forever and can I have that last piece of pizza’, and neither is it the perverse reaction to death that makes a ghoulish fetish and fashion out of it, this should be the realisation that should bite, sink its teeth in and draw blood – the fact that we are still sitting around, chewing the cud, means that that realisation has not bitten; `makes us look really stupid

Determination: if I am really serious about making anything out of my life anything more meaningful than swallowed cud, there needs to be an edge that pricks me out of complacency; now!

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Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 4; reflectionary

23 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in reflectionary

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arm in arm, requres chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 4

Transglomeration: Baited then caught in the traps of the hunters, the kleśas, these disruptive emotions; here I am, snared and trapped in birth after birth, endlessly becoming.   And still do I not see that I am lying here in the open jaws of the lord of death?

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 3 languishing in rebirth and becoming through inertia, sleep and learnt-dependence
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 4 like cornered prey, trapped in birth after birth

Simile: kleśas (trappers, hunters), those minds that consent to a sense of a self, distinct from other >>> birth (trap/net and being trapped), the exercise of those kleśas in the building up and identifying that sense of self as a person, self-identity >>> death (mouth of the trapper, death; once trapped, death is inevitable), that once exposed and out on a limb as a self, the downfall of the self is inevitable; kleśas > birth > death happens inexorably

Reflection: there is such a mass out there, in here, of constantly connecting, branching, tiding, consuming, conflicting, incompatible, over-laying, undermining, influencing, exploiting, accruing causes and conditions, like an overwhelming mass of muscle with ever-renewing fibres of connective tissue pulling in all directions, like a self-propelling idea with ever-firing synapses in all directions; and I need to haemorrhage from it all so that I am not consumed by it (but how do I adhere in the first place, and at all – because I seek to define myself in and amidst this amorphous mass of cause and conditioning; if I need to haemorrhage from it I need to dismantle this very needy self that came into existence when I was born and fears that it will go out of existence when it dies (as all cause and conditioning inevitably does) before it was able to prove itself); but I do not need to ignore it for concern of all others caught in the same unnecessary drag and whirl, I do not just inure myself from the mire (even if I do have to lose that self to inure it) and think the job is done; look at all my brothers and sisters bumping into their own walls, I’ve got a job, here, to do

Reflection: … in the human realm, certainly, there is a proliferation, a saturation even, of cause and conditionality within which we exercise our lifetimes and even, to some extent, which we understand: we build our civilisations and technology and science upon it, we personally define our ‘selves’ according to how we navigate through cause and conditionality; but our understanding is, necessarily, only human, it is only a political or social or institutional or technological or economic understanding of how the mass (the chaos) of cause and conditioning can be made to work to a specific goal: from the time the ape triumphantly picked up the bone to the graceful according waltz of the spaceship rendezvous we have channelled cause and conditionality to make the various froth of civilisations through which we live, and this channelling has been achieved by selectivity, by de-finition, by dividing and exclusivising, by hierarchizing … by the exercising of will on cause and conditionality to hone an outcome; we, as humans, have the ability – and have exercised it – to play cause and conditionality, to make certain things happen despite the amorphous mass of cause and condition that is all about – but we are also trapped and caught in those very same outcomes that we ourselves channelled, we are stuck being one side or the other (king or peasant, rich or poor, have or have not) of whichever dichotomy we are proximate to because we are defined by it, and we are such a clever species that we can be proximate to many more than one dichotomy; because the channelling serves a self, the manipulation of cause and conditionality narrows the plethora of possible outcomes to serve a particular need of a self, and because there are all these other ‘selves’ about, the prevailing ‘channel’ becomes the one through which the majority of others can define themselves compromised, whether willingly or coerced; it is the exercise of will over cause and conditionality which defines the human experience; (those practised in the exercise of magic practise the same exertion of will over cause and conditionality which bypasses established political, economic routes of cause and conditionality through tapping into more subtle fibres and synapses of cause and conditionality – but it is nevertheless the exercise of will over (caused and conditioned) existence); OK, so the ethical question arises: is this exercise of will to serve the needs of the selfs (i.e. ‘I’ and, by mutual distinction, ‘other’), good, or not … depends on the extent to which the channelling of causes and conditions is for the sake of a self over and against other selves (on either a macro or micro level) (i.e. selfish, not good), or whether it is for the sake of others over and against oneself (i.e. better, but unsustainable), or whether it is exercised with no sense of self (one’s own or others’) at all (good, as in, wise; wise, as in, plays within cause and conditionality without self-reference, which can only be fully appreciated when cause and conditionality are realised to be empty of any self at all in order to be causal and conditional … emptiness); so, as with chapter 6 which largely played out the exercise of other-concern in the cause and conditional context of difficulty and frustration, chapter 7 likewise exercises will/effort in the cause and conditional context of inertia and self-defeat; but, again as already noted, there is a ‘wise accommodating with’ in the exercise of patience, there is a ‘wise making so’ with effort – the dynamics are contrasting although the wisdom is the same

Reflection: this is very redolent of the suffering of conditioned aggregates – that having the body and receptors of a human being, I am inexorably to experience the fulfilments and frustrations of a human life according to both the constructive and destructive tendencies I packed with me when I came.   The fact that I just don’t feel right today is a peculiarly human condition which might even drag me back for a whole day or week; it is a feeling and drag that could not even remotely occur to my cat who is made up of an altogether different physiology and psychology and sense of self – she has the aggregates of a cat, she suffers from a desperation around feeding that I, a rationalising human, need not suffer from; how these kleśas perceive and develop within me and my cat are wholly dependent on the psycho-physical aggregates which we respectively spent many lifetimes accumulating before; and here we both are, wandering about our lives and bumping into our respective walls, both of us also wilfully (well, actually, that’s only for me, as I have the human mind-aggregate) oblivious to the fact that it will all just end some time, the body/mind aggregates will fail and we shall die

Determination: I need to sharpen up my act, I need to sharpen up the realisation of what is going on here, I need to do more than simply run around after the next feed, however I might cleverly conceive of it being a human being; (‘… and may it increase infinitely’).

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Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 3; reflectionary

16 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in reflectionary

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arm in arm, requires chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 3

Transglomeration: Lounging about in bittersweet pleasure, abandoning myself to daydream and sleep rendering me inured to the sufferings inherent to the rounds of becoming in life, engenders laziness to grow within me, complete and thorough.

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 2ii – obstacles of the four lazinesses
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 3 which spring from languishing in rebirth and becoming through inertia, sleep and learnt-dependence

Wording: ālasya – lethargy, indolence, inactivity; caused by:

  1. (Berzin, ‘relishing’) a taste for worldly, ephemeral joys
  2. excessive craving for sleep/torpor (Berzin, ‘as a haven’)
  3. absence of disillusion with, insensible to, apathy towards, unconcerned with saṃsāra (Sharma, we remain in saṃsāra ‘like worms wriggling in a dirty drain’); (Matics, ‘an eagerness to be protected’); (Crosby & Skilton, ‘the longing to lean on others’); is this what Chögyam Trungpa called ‘nostalgia’ for saṃsāra?;

Personal Reflection:

  1. attachment to the good quote, the skyline scene, eating, (the need for recognition?), what things looked like at the moment of the inspiration;
  2. sleeping, anyway, but also the going-into-neutral zone of my life when it all becomes a little too overwhelming (or even when it isn’t overwhelming, but I don’t know what to do with the question of existence), wanting to zone-out into a film or television or music or comics, wanting to be able to hit the right perspective which will carry me through a situation in idle;
  3. thinking ‘it’ll be alright’ or ‘it doesn’t matter’ when giving in to self-indulgence;

Reflection: so this is exploring the lack of a mind of renunciation from saṃsāra, but also situating it within the Vow that a Bodhisattva has taken to liberate all beings from all suffering … and here I am, Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses and flip-flops thinking ‘sometime I oughta do something about all this’

Determination: to engage myself in mindful activity and engagement, like keeping my abdomen through all movements

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Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 2ii; reflectionary

13 Friday Mar 2020

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arm in arm, requires chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 2ii

Transglomeration: What is understood to frustrate effort?   The laziness of indolence, the laziness of being attached to unwholesome, un-virtuous habits and experience, and the laziness of allowing ourselves a lack of resolve and urgency leading us like sheep to the laziness of lacking confidence and low self-esteem.

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 2i vīrya – riding the understanding of karma to build benefit
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 2ii – despite the four lazinesses

Wordings:

  • lethargy, sloth, laziness, indolence, languidness, lack of élan, faintness
  • attachment to, weakness for, clinging to (bad actions)
  • despondency, disinclination, discouragement, despair, apathy, lack of resolve
  • result: self-reproach, low self-esteem, self-contempt, self-deprecation

Recognition: 1. ‘… can’t be bothered’, 2. ‘just a minute, I’ll just finish …’, 3. ‘can’t get no satisfaction’, 4. ‘it’s just not me’; like a recalcitrant school-child being unrelentingly urged by the class teacher through the stages of a self-fulfilling prophecy which holds many of us back; the reticence that keeps us on the swimming pool edge for ages and ages; the unwillingness to embrace the whole of life in case we get it wrong; the feeling the fear and building our whole identity around the not-trying (the lack of self-compassion that lets ourselves fail at first); the depression of saṃsāra

Reflection: can’t be sure if there are three (Tibetan) or four (Sanskrit) lazinesses; if there are three then the Tibetan has rolled the third (discouragement) and fourth (self-contempt) into one or the latter three (from the Sanskrit listing) are understood as iterations of laziness overall

Reflection: verse 2 is just business: a definition and a preliminary breakdown of what frustrates it; the rest of the chapter is the explanation of its resolve

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Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 2i; reflectionary

11 Wednesday Mar 2020

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arm in arm, requires chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VI– verse 2i

Transglomeration: What is effort, vigour, endeavour?   It is taking delight in what is virtuous, it is putting energy to what is beneficial.

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 1 without the wind of vīrya, nothing happens
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 2i vīrya – riding the understanding of karma to build benefit

Text-stitch: when in verse 1 it refers to there being no merit without effort, in verse 2i it makes the link in defining effort as delight in doing good, virtue, wholesomeness etc; merit can seem a bit boy-scouty, but working delightedly in benefit for self and others sounds … square-jawed heroic

Etymology: descriptors of effort: wholesome, enthusiastic, zestful, proper, delighting, joyful, endeavouring, courageous, vigorous, striving

Reflection: enthusiasm, excitement for goodness; not having done something good (‘what a good boy, Mark’), but delight in (the rightness) of so-doing; I do it because it is good, I am happy to do it because it is good; as with patience, it is not just the absence of laziness but the positive enthusiasm for virtue

Reflection: as Patrul Rinpoche points out, vīrya is a virtue of the mind which informs all other virtues (cf. of body and speech, vīrya is the cause of virtuous acts and word, acts and speech are not virtuous in themselves); this is a re-enforcement of the points made at the beginning of chapter 5 (all the Perfections are trainings of the mind), but it is a welcome reminder here: virtue is not defined by what you say or do, it is all about the mind first; because the practise of the Perfections is stepped (or, better, telescoped) then it should come as no surprise that virtue is first-of-all in the mind and that the engagement of the practice of vīrya begins once we have laid down clinging to good-acts or good-speech as an outer, quantifiable, objective form

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Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 1; reflectionary

10 Tuesday Mar 2020

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arm in arm, requires chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 1

Transglomeration: Then, having established patience, engage joyful effort in your practice; because working toward Awakening only comes about when grounded in engaged effort.   As there is no possibility of movement without the agency of wind, there is no generating merit without effort.

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

Metaphor: as there can be no movement without wind, there can be no development without vīrya; this abides by the analysis that everything happens only under causes and conditions (flavour from the previous chapter), but particularly re-establishes it here in relation to inner, spiritual happening; ‘wind’ is a specific example, here, of there needing to be an agent to make movement happen, and it is presented as a simile in the translations, but I wonder if it is to be understood much wider than ‘a puff of wind’ blowing some dried-up ‘leaf’ – nothing moves by itself, it needs to be moved by something other than it, anything which, itself, is moving and which was set in motion by something else, by something else, by something else etc; back to the verse, this is flagging that you can’t just ‘quiet’ yourself through spiritual development, you need to actually drive it too

Embroidery: this flags a gear-change in the practice of the Perfections: the first three Perfections are stopping miserliness, carelessness and anger respectively, effort is the start of making realisations happen; you can’t just give or discipline or calm your way to Enlightenment, you actually have to cultivate the realisations, you actually have to do the Work (as Gurdjieff (and others) worded it); there is not just purification, there is also accumulation; and, again, the Perfections are accumulative steps in development, they are not stand alone qualities, and so effort will incorporate whatever relinquishment you have achieved in giving, whatever discipline you have cultivated in your behaviour, whatever reserve you dwell in in your interactions, and it will project through your development of concentration into the realisations of relative and ultimate Bodhichitta

Translations: Matics emphasises the complementary translation of ‘vīrya’ as ‘heroic’ (Padmakara, ‘courageous’) rather than simply ‘effort’, emphasising also the need to ‘stand firm’; the next Perfection; you can’t just stop yourself from committing bad stuff, you need also to develop good stuff too; there needs to be a movement beyond one’s limited self, beyond one’s self-limits, despite oneself, otherwise there is no movement – one is stuck; this involves a bit of gritted teeth, but, as is to be seen (verse 2aa), it needs to be ‘joyous’ rather than just (‘self-defining-and-focussed’) effort

Reflection: the Perfections are causal stages so, to the extent that one has developed patience (of not reacting to conditions based on what one wants/doesn’t want and having bathed in the contemplation of the pervasiveness of cause and conditionality and also having developed compassionate sympathy with others caught in that same cause and conditionality), then one has the reserve to be able to focus one’s efforts more directly, more purposefully, according to the needs of the situation and the needs of others without all of one’s ‘me, me, me’ getting in the way; and because ‘me, me, me’ doesn’t get in the way so much, messing things up and making everything all gloopy and magnetised about itself, then there is the space to act more cleanly and effectively as a result

Resolve: I need to get shifting, I can’t just sit around having nice thoughts and being inspired by other peoples’ words and practices

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Four Noble Truths

30 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2019, 7*, Bodhichitta, doing, doors, eyes, fly, flying, food, Four Noble Truths, glass, ignorance, liberation, light, sound, suffering, thinking

Four Noble Truths

                and here comes the fly
                brandishing eye-bulbs in seventeen directions

                unaware of in or out
                looking for light or food to go

                finds one truth against the glass and
                findsssszzz the second against the glass

                in seventeen different directions
                at once – in to the room straight

                by my head: do I duck and swat
                (hideous temptation that shudder reminds me

                 no), do I guide it’s flight with foolscap sheet
                (and look at those bodies hung en-wrapped in cornered webs

                 no), the door remains open,
                it has but to fly through, the remaining

                two truths unfound and all unrealised; may the
                supreme and precious jewel

                Bodhichitta take birth
                where it has not yet done so

                where it has taken birth
                may it not decrease but may it increase

                infinitely

 

what more fitting way to conclude this meditating-occupation than the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths (there is suffering in life, suffering is caused by grasping, grasping can be loosed, by letting it all go) for liberation and Bodhichitta to extend that liberation universally …

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Bodhichitta wormhole: none and all
doing & sound wormhole: ‘and is there homage …’
doors wormhole: ‘from the cathedral window two stories / high …’
eyes wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
glass & light wormhole: ‘not sure …’
thinking wormhole: despite all / depiction

 

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‘and is there homage …’

20 Monday Jan 2020

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2019, 6*, being, doing, equipoise, fields, geranium, immanence, leaves, mantra, rain, river, sitting, sound, Tara, trees, words

                and is there homage to the
                Venerable Arya Tara who sits whole

                within the river crucible one
                and severally to behold; her

                laughter of TUTTARE always
                through those trees, her huge knee

                bent graceful in a thousand diminutive equipoises,
                her right leg stretching out and out

                over rolling fields and far away;
                does she hum with

                proximate mass, does she remain
                when words have stopped –

                no, shh, listen to the fluvial rains,
blink, look at the geranium leaves

 

this is the running couplet to here today and …

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being & trees wormhole: here today and …
leaves wormhole: looking hard enough
rain & sound wormhole: travel // when I die
river wormhole: nowhere / that can be seen
sitting wormhole: poessay XI – piquant love
Tara wormhole: Tara mantras
words wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I took my camera into the fields

 

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here today and …

05 Sunday Jan 2020

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'scape, 2019, 7*, being, Blake, breeze, clouds, creation, field, hedge, stillness, Totnes, tractors, trees, valley

                and are those clouds
                bent double in-Newton musculature

                poised in-dreadful calliper
                wide across the vale; no,

                no: the tractor makes field up
                in-possible way, and the breeze

                in-forms the trees constant
                even when still; and lo

                there is in-fill between hedge
                and row, here today and …

 

“…till we have built …”

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being & valley wormhole: ‘not sure …’
breeze & clouds wormhole: ‘from the cathedral window two stories / high …’
field wormhole: 10/22 by William Carlos Williams
hedge wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Valley
stillness wormhole: eyes like petals
trees wormhole: looking hard enough

 

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    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
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    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
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  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 8; reflectionary
  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 7; reflectionary
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