‘the practice …’

Tags

2017, 6*, arm in arm, being, blossom, Bodhisattva Vow, colour, compassion, finding, growth, identity, journey, others, practice, requires chewing, root, Sangha, sharing, true nature, weaving, writing

                the practice
                of writing

                to weave
                myself between

                the threads, to
                thread myself

                between the
                fibres to form

                tiny root hairs
                to form the root

                to reach deep
                and to reach

                high and wide
                to glory in the

                synthesis of
                all the light

                to be found
                to be found

                colourful and
                blossoming to

                my own true
                nature; and that

                others, sibling
                to my reach

                and wonder,
                might find the

                growth to
                journey too

 

lookit: `found this one in my notes; possibly four years old; forgotten I’d had it; found stuck like a leaf between BCA I,3; not sure if it reminds me of the quote, top left of the web page, that I put there to remind myself … sure, on reflection, it does; how can I not: offer it up, and out

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being wormhole: sweet chestnut
blossom wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pageant of the trees
compassion wormhole: eyes like petals
identity wormhole: under the blue and blue sky
others wormhole: silence
practice wormhole: so, how long is, a piece of string?
writing wormhole: ‘not sure …’

 

Advertisement

A Solitude by Denise Levertov

Tags

1961, 7*, air, anxiety, being, blindness, breeze, children, Denise Levertov, doors, exit, face, hands, image, journey, joy, light, movement, nowhere, passing, people, presence, quiet, right, seeing, shame, smile, solitude, sound, speech, stairs, staring, station, stranger, streets, sunlight, thought, train, water, way, world

                                A Solitude

                A blind man. I can stare at him
                ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
                No, he is in a great solitude.

                O, strange joy,
                to gaze my fill at a stranger’s face.
                No, my thirst is greater than before.

                In this world he is speaking
                almost aloud. His lips move.
                Anxiety plays about them. And now joy

                of some sort trembles into a smile.
                A breeze I can’t feel
                crosses that face as if it crossed water.

                The train moves uptown, pulls in and
                pulls out of the local stops. Within its loud
                jarring movement a quiet,

                the quiet of people not speaking,
                some of them eyeing the blind man,
                only a moment though, not thirsty like me,

                and within that quiet his
                different quiet, not quiet at all, a tumult
                of images, but what are his images,

                he is blind? He doesn’t care
                that he looks strange, showing
                his thoughts on his face like designs of light

                flickering on water, for hedoesn’t know
                what look is.
                I see he has never seen.

                And now he rises, he stands at the door ready,
                knowing his station is next. Was he counting?
                No, that was not his need.

                When he gets out I get out.
                ‘Can I help you towards the exit?’
                ‘Oh, alright.’ An indifference.

                But instantly, even as he speaks,
                even as I hear indifference, his hand
                goes out, waiting for me to take it,

                and now we hold hands like children.
                His hand is warm and not sweaty,
                the grip firm, it feels good.

                And when we have passed through the turnstile,
                he going first, his hand at once
                waits for mine again.

                ‘Here are the steps. And here we turn
                to the right. More stairs now.’ We go
                up into sunlight. He feels that,

                the soft air. ‘A nice day,
                isn’t it?’ says the blind man. Solitude
                walks with me, walks

                beside me, he is not with me, he continues
                his thoughts alone. But his hand and mine
                know one another,

                it’s as if my hand were gone forth
                on its own journey. I see him
                across the street, the blind man,

                and now he says he can find his way. He knows
                where he is going, it is nowhere, it is filled
                with presences. He says, I am.

 

how to be in another’s head about being in another’s head: this is a wonderful example of Whalen’s ‘graph of the mind’ – the reach and score of effervent; there is a wonderful clarity and excise about these words such that the encounter is ours as much as just reported; thank you Denise Levertov, as she touches her throat lightly to feel the vibrations as she listens

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air wormhole: THE DESOLATE FIELD by William Carlos Williams
anxiety wormhole: anxiety
being & water wormhole: `whappn’d!
breeze & hands wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
doors wormhole: letting them go
light wormhole: I don’t need to go out / onto the balcony to see behind me / to know what’s going on
passing wormhole: SPRING STRAINS by William Carlos Williams
people wormhole: tram
quiet wormhole: new blue porsche
seeing wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
smile wormhole: SUMMER SONG by William Carlos Williams
streets wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
thought wormhole: presence
train wormhole: all the low clouds keeping pace / through the train window, / always arriving, whether fast or / slow, but never actually moving
world wormhole: scintillating to mind’s content

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George

Tags

2018, 7*, branches, breeze, brother, child, clouds, cuckoo, dust, earth, echo, Essex, green, hands, home, journey, land, lark, life, meadow, mind, pink, poem, retirement, scythe, shirt, Shropshire, silence, smell, speech, stone, time, wind, woodland, writing

                                old George

                long retired from land, unable to
                keep soil from his boots, continues
                working, earth and life, picking up

                branches and stones; the blades
                cut clean, men in the meadows
                sway to the rhythm of scythes,

                stems fall graceful to swathe and
                green aroma, the diminishing island
                cut to the last, magnified by

                silence, a lark high above the
                dust; the breezes will dry the
                stalks to rustle and the distant

                woods will echo – cuckoo; it is
                then the child places the building
                block on the nursery floor when

                there will be no time, day after
                day, save for forks of pitch and
                hands that burn pink and stalk

                of shirt and sweat, constant under
                minds of approaching storm cloud
                before the last journey home; old

                George had removed his jacket
                picking out fluff from the corners
                of a pocket, “…used to be my brother’s;

                lived in Shropshire … didn’t
                find no pound notes in it, just fluff,
                a few hay seeds,” flung them

                to the Essex wind – scattered
                poems and stacked essays,
                typed up and waiting to behold

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

branches wormhole: presence
breeze wormhole: chuckling
child wormhole: next unexpected step
clouds wormhole: that
echo wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay
green wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
hands & life & retirement wormhole: beguiled / desire
mind & writing wormhole: scintillating to mind’s content
pink & stone wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
silence & speech wormhole: new blue porsche
smell & time wormhole: LOVE SONG by William Carlos Williams
wind wormhole: TREES by William Carlos Williams

 

SUMMER SONG by William Carlos Williams

Tags

1917, 5*, blue, colour, dew, irony, journey, moon, morning, question, shirt, sky, smile, song, summer, tie, wandering, William Carlos Williams

                                SUMMER SONG

                Wanderer moon
                smiling a
                faintly ironical smile
                at this
                brilliant, dew-moistened
                summer morning,–
                a detached
                sleepily indifferent
                smile, a
                wanderer’s smile,–
                if I should
                buy a shirt
                your color and
                put on a necktie
                sky-blue
                where would they carry me?

 

from Al Que Quiere, 1917

the trajectory of a turn of quip of humour going absolutely nowhere far, with dew

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blue wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
moon wormhole: sufficiently away
morning wormhole: letting them go
sky wormhole: transferring
smile wormhole: skeins of candy pink and lilac
William Carlos Williams wormhole: EL HOMBRE by William Carlos Williams

 

all // are // none

Tags

2017, 8*, arrival, being, billow, Buddhas, creation, desert, doing, end, everything, gargantuan, journey, light, love, mountains, night, quote, reaching, samsara, start, suffering, true nature, tuning, waft, waiting, waves

                                all

                that Enlightened beings do
                is be, but without
                flinch, reach or

                conjuration; a wave-
                length with neither
                start nor end which

                tunes the few to their
                own true nature
                with neither start

                nor end, the basis
                both from and to
                which they might

                both journey and
                arrive; external light
                that caps the peaks

                of mountainous
                night lost in waft
                and billow;

                                are

                they on the edge of
                everything gargantuan
                and frightening in all

                their detailed beneficence,
                are they everything that
                gives me the nod and

                wink waiting for me
                to get it, are they in
                amongst us suffering

                the arrows that we
                sling all about in outrageous
                discontent, are they

                la porte etroite or the
                desert of love, are they
                always there for us,

                are they never there;
                they are none of these,
                they are all of these

                that we make them
                to be – light neither
                emanating nor pervading

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being wormhole: all the low clouds keeping pace / through the train window, / always arriving, whether fast or / slow, but never actually moving
doing wormhole: I
light wormhole: so / do I keep on writing now I’ve retired, or … / Rumplestiltskin
love wormhole: ‘oh my girls and muse …’
night wormhole: transferring
samsara wormhole: inner / hegemony
waiting wormhole: Bexhill 140215
waves wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call

 

and I lose sight of her into memory

Tags

2013, 5*, air, girl, hair, hazel, hill, journey, memory, muse, passing, phone, sight, step, talking, walking

                                the girl
                walks ahead down the hill
                each step gaited and strapped
                                left then right
                hazelnut hair lapping and sweeping –
                                she journeys
                far further than each advance against
                                              the air

                                as I pass
                she is talking into a phone
                                and I lose sight of her into memory

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air wormhole: the quiet whale
girl wormhole: stone
hair wormhole: garden
muse wormhole: neither nude nor / descending a staircase
passing wormhole: free
talking wormhole: mother and daughter
walking wormhole: every step I take

 

The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

Tags

1967, Africa, afternoon, air, Apollo, autumn, awakening, beans, bees, beginning, birth, blue, book, bracken, bronze, caterpillar, child, colour, cottage, crickets, dark, death, digging, earth, emerald, end, eyes, face, field, flowers, forest, garden, generation, gold, gorse, grass, hazel, hedgehog, hill, hive, honeysuckle, horse, house martin, ivy, January, journey, joy, lambs, land, lawn, leaves, life, March, memory, migration, mind, moorhen, moorland, morning, mother, nemesia, Norway, oak, plough, poetry, purple, reading, redwing, sadness, seasons, seeds, silence, sitting, sky, skyline, sleep, smell, sound, spiders, starlings, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, thistles, thought, time, transition, trees, uncle, valley, web, wheat, winter, woodlark, work

 

Chapter 1

The Wandering Mind

Autumn Thoughts

I sat in the garden one autumn afternoon reading an old poet.   The sky was unblemished, clear and pure as the face of a child and starlings were deep in conversation close by.   I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared.   After this exertion and a good meal, I felt no pang of conscience as I turned my back upon the many other chores that cried for attention and took my book into the garden and relaxed in the warm soporific scent of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass.   After an indeterminable period my thoughts were lifted from the page upon my knee and I drifted across the valley to the hill opposite.   There the grade was steep, too steep for tractor or any other mechanical tool.   A horse therefore was leaning from a plough, moving slowly, almost imperceptively towards the skyline.   The cottage in which I then lived was very old and the hills opposite even older; no doubt at one time they were covered with forest, but many men must have witnessed that same scene before me, many men and many generations.   To them it was a common sight, but to me it was a rare and beautiful sight that spanned the centuries. The scene was timeless.

I felt my head nod forward quite suddenly and I came awake.   The book fell onto the grass and the starlings flew off more in indignation than fright.   In the silence that followed, there filtered through the warmth of the valley the faint jingle of the traces, and as the plough turned upon the headland, a spark of sunlight leapt from the polished harness; it was an impish child of Apollo that danced upon the horse’s back one moment, then without warning, leapt the great expanse of the valley and entered my eye within the same split second.   I realised then that here was a beginning; here, before the old year was done, was another just starting.   Here the earth was being opened up to let in winter’s icy fingers so that she might the better prepare the seed bed for next year’s crop.   Then as the mind’s awareness expanded, I felt that this was not the only beginning taking place, there were many more throughout the changing land.

Visitors were arriving, flowers were blooming, animals were being born.   All about me, as I sat half asleep in the quietude, a great movement of life was in progress, and I thought of another great movement of life that had occurred the previous autumn.   It was an invasion of our fields by the linyphiids or gossamer spiders.   We were drilling wheat at the time and as I crouched low on the footboard of the drill to clear a coulter that had clogged up, I beheld a silken counterpane of gossamer stretched between the faint ridges of the harrowed earth.   The effect, if the eye was held low enough, was that of a thin layer of water shimmering in the early morning sun sending off sparks of individual colour selected at random from all parts of the spectrum.   So taken was I with this scene that all thoughts of clearing the coulters left me as we rattled and jogged across the field, and when harvesting the same field this year, there, as a reminder of that small moment, was a strip bare of swaying gold a hundred yards long and twenty inches wide.

I retrieved the book and placed it on the seat beside me.   The starlings had returned and were even noisier than before and the bees were hurrying to and fro among the nemesia in the hope of collecting and storing that little extra for the months ahead.   Soon they will end their toil; soon they would maim and expel the unfortunate drones and retire to the centre of the hive with the queen in their midst.   The day was magnificent, more like mid-summer than autumn, small wonder indeed that the careless cricket continued to ‘sing’ unaware of the imminent peril of winter.   Many small lives will be lost in the approaching days of darkness yet, through it all, just enough will be saved.   Beneath the apparent calm of autumn is a restlessness; and urgency sweeps through the fields and woodlands as the wiser creatures prepare for flight or lay in stores for sustenance through the long twilight of winter yet to come.

Autumn is a season of transition, a season of intense activity; of flowers flowering and flowers dying, of drilling wheat and cutting beans.   Autumn is a time of birth and death; a time of awakening and a time of going to sleep.   It is a time for the young and a time for the old, a time of both joy and sadness.

This is the time of thistle-down upon the air and goose-grass burrs upon the stockings; when the gorse and broom crackle and pop beneath a March-blue sky and scatter their tiny seeds among the dry stems of the sapless grass.   Now the moors are stained a deeper purple, bracken becomes bronzed and the tree tops dipped in old gold.   In the derries the young caterpillar of the Purple Emperor wraps itself in dead oak leaves and sleeps until the great awakening.   When gossamer fills the air and hazel nuts turn brown the young swallows start on that amazing flight to the shores of Africa, a journey undertaken by their parents a year before who, curiously enough, do not show their offspring the way, but follow on some days later.   How many thousand autumns have witnessed this exodus?   Yet to what blocks of logic and fact can we in all our wisdom attribute this common thing.   The redwing and fieldfare arrive from Norway urging on the lingering house martin.   The woodlark sings, the ivy flowers and the honeysuckle blooms again.   And as the somnolent hedgehog rolls himself in his blanket of leaves, the last brood of moorhen is hatched.   Something sleeps, something awakes; something dies, something is born.

There is no real beginning or end to the year.   Even on the first of January the lambs are growing; leaves are forming within the bud and the young wheat carpets the bare fields with emerald.   But for those whose minds cannot accept the existence of that which has no beginning and no end, then let the division between the years be drawn through autumn, for the onset of winter is really the beginning of the year, not the end.   The young year is born into a cold and sometimes frightening world just as the infant child is released from the warm security of the mother’s womb, and like the child, the infant year begins its life before it is born.   It begins in the womb of autumn.   It is here then (if anywhere) that one thing ends and another begins.   It is here In Sese Vertiture Annus.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & garden & life & mind & thought & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
afternoon wormhole: “walking …”
air & sound & time wormhole: constant hummm
autumn & gold & sky & smell & trees & work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
blue & reading wormhole: between thoughts
child & sleep wormhole: 1968
death & eyes wormhole: too late:
field & skyline wormhole: impressionism
leaves wormhole: work
morning wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
mother wormhole: and that’s where I are
oak wormhole: dog bark
poetry wormhole: after all?
purple wormhole: 1967
silence wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
sitting wormhole: zero
winter wormhole: 1963

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents

Tags

'scape, 1967, autumn, breathing, candle, contents, cottage, cows, gold, gourds, home, introduction, journey, lawn, letter, memory, mind, moment, non-doing, people, piano, pigs, rain, safety, sky, smell, snow, the Boats of Vallisneria, time, trees, uncle, valley, walking, work

The Boats of Vallisneria

by Michael J. Redford

 

—~~~\___ “O” ___/~~~—

 

Contents

Introduction

The Wandering Mind
Autumn Thoughts
A Bowl of Gourds
A Precious Moment
On Doing Nothing

People
Olly
Simon upon the Downs
Safe Home

Walking
A Sign of the Times
Snow
Follow your Nose
The Agricultural Show

Working
A letter of Two Parts
Making Hay
With Cows
With Pigs

Out of Doors
Trees
Sky
Rain
The Valley

Around the Country Cottage
An Old Piano
Candlelight
The English Lawn

Memories
Going Back
Distant Journeys
The Breath of Memory
The Golden Hour

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & uncle wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
autumn wormhole: dog bark
breathing wormhole: too late:
gold wormhole: bookmark
mind wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
people wormhole: impressionism
piano & smell wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
rain wormhole: between thoughts
sky wormhole: constant hummm
snow wormhole: stacked
time wormhole: Hurst Green
trees wormhole: Le Pont Royal, 1909
valley wormhole: Desolation Angels
walking wormhole: nothing to say
work wormhole: dry rot

 

dream career // groggy

Tags

2012, career, compromise, dream, identity, journey, naked, obsession, pride, professional development, realisation, talking to myself, teaching, voices, waking

 

 

 

                                                      dream career

                                                      so there I was
                                                      naked except
                                                      for my pants
                                                      in the room
                                                      had to make it
                                                      round the room

                                                      I figured to go
                                                      right round
                                                      the room – do
                                                      it properly –
                                                      started off fine
                                                      became more

                                                      and more difficult
                                                      pants caught
                                                      on something
                                                      maybe the door
                                                      but I pushed on
                                                      turned the

                                                      support post at
                                                      far end of the room
                                                      pants were getting
                                                      tighter and tighter
                                                      ‘but I can push on’
                                                      stretched thinner

                                                      and thinner ‘but
                                                      I am strong’ going
                                                      to cut and then
                                                      I suddenly realised
                                                      how ridiculous:
                                                      the room, the

                                                      journey, my nakedness
                                                      my pants – would
                                                      my pants slice
                                                      off my legs –
                                                      so I stopped
                                                      and woke up, groggy

 

as the great majority of my readers are from America, I’d better point out that ‘pants’ means ‘underwear’ – the last vestige before total nudity (believe me, it ain’t pretty!); I am in the last throws of my career (I know, it’s been lingering on since obituary, and maybe shouldn’t’ve) and soon to enter the Last Rites; I was having a natter with Waywardspirit and we both agreed that it was about time; but I was nevertheless indulging in a little guilt ‘n’ defeat when I came across a dream I had before, even, my ‘obituary’ and it makes me feel better; and wiser …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career & teaching wormhole: and that’s where I are
compromise wormhole: working / for a living
dream wormhole: let the dreams / become the ghosts they / always were
identity wormhole: the start of adolescence
realisation wormhole: b / r / e / a / t / h / i / n / g
talking to myself wormhole: true nature
voices wormhole: becoming

 

a little bit of love / and muffle

Tags

2013, attention, growth, identity, journey, letting go, life, poem, self-love, smile, talking to myself, taste, writing

 

 

 

                           write down the awkward things
                           or the bland things or the numbly
                           unconnected things and then

                           probe into their distaste
                           with just a little bit of love
                           and muffle and complete

                           the poem, the journey made and tasted
                           the inhibition breached and all
                           gathered together into smile

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

attention wormhole: bookmark
identity & life & talking to myself wormhole: quite … / … yet – poewieview #12
letting go wormhole: and then just stop
smile & writing wormhole: really