• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
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    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
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mlewisredford

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

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: event

so, how long is, a piece of string?

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, reflectionary

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

2018, 8*, anger, being, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, cause and effect, change, conditioned existence, doing, echo, enemy, event, existence, ghosts, identity, interaction, karma, knot, mind, others, practice, pre-existence, samsara, self-grasping, speech, talking to myself, tangle, thought, uncaused, untangling, web

                so, how long is a piece of string?

                always somehow, and ever somewhere,
                in a thousand different ways and
                a thousand different times, I set myself up,

                I set my self up
                to be the clever one, to be right in the end, and inevitably,
                like a thousand different echoes,

                someone comes and stands
                right in my way, or kneels in a ball behind me while someone else
                shoves me backwards

                so that I fall like a prat, and then someone else points
                and says ‘ha; ha’ in a thousand different ways; where
                do they all come from,

                do they just shimmer out of nowhere
                like ghosts just to frustrate me –whooo!–
                do they come out of nature,

                naturally unjust, naturally evil; are they just there
                existing from their own side, like a sharp bend in a long stretch of road
                {oh, come on,

                 no, they’d have to pre-exist in order to
                 come into existence, which would involve
                 a change in something which cannot change

                 because it is pre-existent, and therefore
                 causeless, so that it would have to stop being what it is
                 in order to be what it isn’t,

                 you know that, don’t you}; no, everything
                is conditioned, yes, and nothing stands
                independent by itself, so everything

                I have ever done or said or thought
                has been conditioned already, ok, but also,
                everything I have ever done or said

                or thought has also set up a
                whole web of further conditions
                which have had, or are nail-tapping waiting to have,

                an impact on other events
                and people; and yes, that’s ‘me’ in the corner …:
                the endless twists and turns I have made,

                and still making with every move and word and thought,
                which bind me in, tightly or loosely,
                to everything with which I interact –

                completely and utterly tangled:
                I hope I acted cleanly and carefully,
                but I’m afraid I didn’t – I’m … going to have to face my

                whole knot – a universally big ball,
                so much bigger than l’il ole me
                that it doesn’t seem to have much to do with me, but it does,
                it, all, does;

                and I’d better stop pulling and tugging away at it
                to get my own way and
                start untangling, and start untangling …

…I had a tangle of garden-wire to sort today; it had been wound round a dispenser but some of it had crossed over, become entangled, yanked, and a whole middle section had come away; then it had been worked on, to untangle it, but impatiently, and without thought, and so whole rolls of it had become furled over and through themselves, some bits were knotted, some bits were hanging out in great loops; being garden-wire, it kinked where it had been bent which also caught other strands as they came close to them in their tangle; and it had been cut for a quick solution, and so I had more than two ends that I could make any sense of; it took time untangling it, it took willing to give up on some progress I had already made on seeing that I’d started too far in, or too peripherally; it meant keeping hold of the thread I was starting with and turning the whole tangle around it, rather than working through the tangle, knowing that I was making problems for myself further down the line but I couldn’t worry about that yet; it meant having to abandon my initial thread sometimes to concentrate on further-on loops before I could return to it released; it meant I had to think ahead a bit to loosen the tangle in all the ways that it would, even if it meant unravelling the newly-wound initial thread I’d already sorted, a little; I had to take a rest every once in a while because I was concentrating too tightly …

                no, these enemies they’ve
                been ‘here’ all along, right in the
                back of my head, long forgotten,

                but from the time I crossed them
                in a thousand different ways
                and a thousand different times,

                they’ve been waiting, relentlessly,
                for a body and a circumstance to come together
                to respond:

                “there you go, mate, I owed you that”
                and inexorably I’d been setting myself up with just the right conditions
                to receive it

 

Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter VI, verse 47: Impelled by my actions – [drawn out by circumstance, incited by the heat of the moment, prompted by hearsay, provoked by trigger, instigated by design, mobilised by obligation, shoved by control, summoned by role] – those who cross or hurt me, those who do me wrong just appear, right in my way and do what they have to do. And because of their actions, they will end up fallen and consigned to the infernal realms … surely, isn’t it actually me who have destroyed and damned them, haven’t I just been the mirror to magnify back to them their harm?

and, yes, that is a reference to the REM song, losing … something

 

 

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

being & mind wormhole: …zzh-vvttP*–… … …
change wormhole: on facing the Have
doing & speech wormhole: ‘ouch’
echo wormhole: St. Erasmus in Bishop Islip’s Chapels, 1796
ghosts wormhole: what wounds have you got?
identity & others wormhole: there will be ovations
practice wormhole: ‘there, …’
samsara wormhole: glamour of saṃsāra
talking to myself wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
thought wormhole: horizon

 

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looking / ridiculous

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

2015, 6*, accountability, debate, echo, event, future, history, humanity, injustice, Paris, politicians, politics, rhetoric, Syria, terrorism, time, white elephants

                there is always always a whole
                history behind every event

                never more so as we
                step over rubble into the future

                which we build now; and so much
                of politics has become

                so deft at skipping the history
                to gainsay the outcome

                that it has become flat
                blunt and spade-like for holding, nothing

                to account; history is human
                hurt from any injustice and from any experience which persists despite

                the rhetoric (oh, you weren’t
                reaching for the shelves, were you!);

                responding to Paris by
                bombing Syria was on the table there-it-was

                a rhetorical knee-jerk
                blind to any history

                hoping for crowd-approval
                like the echoes of a playground brawl;

                politics should be sharp and uncomfortable,
                include all difference

                include whatever white elephants are in the room;
                spade (sic) politicians who

                will not respond to the white elephant
                who will not respond to the history

                are left with only the puff of rhetoric
                braying like farmyard animals, looking

                ridiculous; air strikes in Syria are ridiculous

 

there were a number of terrorist attacks in Paris during January 2015; there was debate in the UK about launching an attack on Syria as a response; the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbin, was courting views on the response – I wrote a poem

 

 

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

echo wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
history wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
Paris wormhole: Le Pont Royal, 1909
politics wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
time wormhole: lack of center

 

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passing

01 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

2015, 3*, being, event, life, passing, people, step

                the lifetime
                of events of
                passing people
                is in length of
                thigh and
                unavoidable
                step of place

 

 

 

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

being wormhole: Coleton Fishacre
life wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
passing wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
people wormhole: dream I // dream II

 

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the both passive and transitive / non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being

05 Thursday May 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2014, being, cognisance, conception, courage, creativity, depression, doing, emptiness, equanimity, event, flow, heart, heartbeat, hesitancy, honour, key, life, line, meaning, no big deal, nothing, openness, page, passive, pointlessness, presumption, sitting, striving, suffering, thought, time, transcendent, transitive, words, writing

 

 

 

                                the both passive and transitive
                non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being

                                anxiety across the open page unsure,
                perched on the open line

                                ‘what if I put pen to paper and nothing happens?’
                ‘what if there is nothing but empty page and feint line?’ does not trust

                                that I am alive and cognisant to the heart
                of every beat if I had but the courage to face it,

                                all down through the endless steps of line
                whether there are words on the line

                                that I write in flow, or hesitancy, or not
                and whether they make sense or not

                                and whether my sitting was transcendent
                or not, or not done at all

                                and whether I concave at the pointlessness of activity
                or create the key to all strife and striving, or fail, or get depressed

                                I will continue eventful to evenness
                affording honour to is, and ‘no big deal’ to what is not

 

 

 

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

being & doing & life & sitting wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
creativity & pointlessness wormhole: the writing’s on the wall
depression wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’ or, in the long run, de Chirico’s ‘The Red Tower’
emptiness wormhole: my / superpower
meaning & thought & time & writing wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
openness wormhole: dash
words wormhole: words tumble like / boulders – poewieview #25

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • 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
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • 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
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • William Carlos Williams
  • wormholes

recent leaks …

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  • paisley // implicitly
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Uncanny Tops

  • me
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  • 'in my car I pass...'
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  • like butterflies on / buddleia
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