where it has taken birth / may it not decrease …

Tags

2017, 7*, austerity, being, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, conscience, conscientiousness, death, doing, effort, fall, gravity, illusion, inspiration, karma, Lucifer, mind, now, practice, self-cherishing, Shantideva, superhero, talking to myself, time, virtue

                where it has taken birth
                may it not decrease … there are

                tiny filaments here and there
                from time to time
                connecting the flexing muscle
                further corridors within the firing mind

                it’s not a whole package
                nicely taped up in cardboard
                and delivered with a smile, a signature
                and a how-might-I-do-better survey

                it … won’t happen like that;
                here’s where if anywhere
                the austerity takes place
                here’s where if anywhere I develop

                gaunt lines of virtue
                in my cheek, after the inspiration
                has gone:
                just keep on keeping on; if I try super-heroically –

                ag-grandiosely – there is nothing
                to let ‘not decrease’,
                if it does not burn it is not fire;
                I am either serious or not

                and if not, I should;
                go back
                calm down and create new filaments
                quietly and accordingly

                anything ethical
                should be conducted … only,
                not become an eater of conscience
                like Lucifer’s hapless fool

                simply bargaining
                with illusion is the loss of its finding … out,
                the gravity of the flailing fall
                exponential

                to each and every action
                where it will take a long time to gain ground; death
                affords time to practise
                now, all the time now, not

                later, not I-did-have-it-but-
                now-I’ve-lost-it … NOW

 

right-angled out of chapter IV of Shantideva’s Bodhisattvacharyavatara … or in

 

 

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

being & doing & talking to myself wormhole: six paramitas
death wormhole: ‘never look up’?
mind wormhole: moment
practice wormhole: just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …
superhero wormhole: passersby
time wormhole: the bench

 

moment

Tags

2012, 7*, compassion, detachment, life, love, mind, moment, realisation, relief, settling, sitting, talking to myself, time, true nature

       I become better and better at sitting
       the more I realise I cannot settle
       even for a moment

       and when I realise just how much I cannot settle
       even for a moment,
       how the whole of my life is wound round

       and weaved through all of my time
       all of the time that I cannot settle
       even for a moment,

       what a relief –
       all this building all of this plotting all of these clever ripostes –
       I can detach from them all

       just for a moment

                 –o–

       may I dwell in this my true and only nature
       and may no one no one
       be missed out

 

 

 

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

compassion wormhole: reaching branch
life & time wormhole: cut while you’re ahead/cut while you’re a thread – poewieview #35
love wormhole: 35 years ago …
mind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – On Doing Nothing
realisation wormhole: fresh destiny
settling wormhole: and smile / like a bud
sitting wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – A Sign of the Times
talking to myself wormhole: let it all go

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – On Doing Nothing

Tags

'scape, 1967, 4*, awareness, bees, bench, blackbird, blue, body, breeze, calf, clouds, colour, contemplation, cottage, cows, cuckoo, daffodil, doing, echo, education, foxgloves, garden, green, grey, knowledge, leaf, leisure, life, Michael J Redford, mind, morning, movement, nature, non-doing, now, puzzle, rhythm, shadow, sky, smell, sociology, Spring, summer, sun, the Boats of Vallisneria, time, trees, wood, woodland, work

 

On Doing Nothing

I wish I had more time in which to do nothing, but then I don’t suppose for one moment that I am alone in this wish.   I must however confess to liking hard work – a certain amount that is.   I like the resultant effects produced on body and mind of digging the garden or pitching bales of hay and sheaves of corn amid the shimmering heat of the summer sun.   The sweat oozing forth and leaving the inner body clean; the muscles toned up and aching with effort, the very rhythm of the work itself (I sincerely hope I can say the same twenty years from now).   Then at the close of a long day, an hour’s soak in the bath, an easy chair and a pint of beer, mundane items perhaps, yet nevertheless most satisfying.   The sweat has been replaced by the energy infusing rays of the sun that now emanate from the body with such a glow that you feel sure that those close to you must feel its radiant effect.   The mind is also cleansed, refreshed with the knowledge and satisfaction of a job well done.   On the other hand if total automation were to arrive tomorrow, I would not be alarmed at the prospect of so much leisure.   The future in this respect is viewed with some concern by the sociologist whose biggest headache is to educate the masses into finding something to do with their spare time.   This I should imagine, is one of the outcomes of our present way of life, the pace of which has accelerated to such a degree that one rarely has time to step off the whirling carousel to take stock of one’s surroundings and turn the eye inward upon the self.   How little we know of ourselves and our immediate surroundings.   There is enough untapped learning in my small garden alone to last me all my years without venturing further afield.   Even so, I don’t spend all my spare time digging, hoeing, planting and studying in the garden, for one can never come to the end of the toil produced when one steals a little piece of nature and imposes upon it the conformities of human requirements.   More often than not I am sitting, standing or leaning somewhere in the garden staring at a dead leaf sailing slowly across a sky-blue puddle, or a daffodil petal trembling in the breeze, or entering with the fuzzy humble bee into the heart of a foxglove.   I am not looking to learn, just looking, appreciating the colour and the movement, the scent and the touch, unfettered by a too enquiring mind, seeing the thing as a whole.   Study by all means, study deeply, specialise if you wish, but not all the time; come to the surface occasionally, sit back and view things as a whole.   Specialists we must have; the probing minds and microscopes of the entomologist, histologist, ichthyologists and all the other ‘ologists’ have benefitted us greatly and made us more aware and appreciative of the wonders and complexities of nature, but there is still, and always will be, room for the botanist who is like the manipulator of a jig-saw puzzle, fitting all the detailed parts together to form a complete and beautiful picture.

I find I am very contented when doing nothing and experience no sense of guilt if branded idle and time wasting.   If there is nothing of great import to attend to and I am in an idle mood, then I take advantage of the circumstances and indulge in idleness without shame.   Some months ago I made a garden seat of some timber taken from an ancient cottage close by that was being demolished.   Upon this seat, the wood of which must be some six hundred years old, I have spent many hours in idleness, fingering its rough grey armrests, unaware of time or responsibility; thinking not of tomorrow or yesterday, but experiencing with all the senses the eternal ‘now’; being aware of the warmth of the sun and the movement of the passing breeze; hearing the distinct low of a cow bereft of her calf, or listen to an echo mocking the cuckoo in the woods below.   I gaze at the coloured mass before me drinking in the riot of perfumes; look at the green pastures and the distant trees and see the blue shadows within.   The picture is complete, touching upon all the senses to produce a harmony that is deeply satisfying.   There is nothing out of place, no harsh discords, no roaring traffic or industrial smells.   Even the little cottage at the end of the lane, tree bound and heavy with thatch, gives the impression that it has grown naturally from the soil upon which it stands.   The senses and emotions are not funnelled into a microcosm but are given free range and allowed to accept all that comes within their range, creating in the mind an awareness and realisation of a complete and perfect whole.

One cannot be accused of day-dreaming under such conditions (though surely a little day-dreaming is not harmful) for no conscious thoughts are involved.   I have on occasions been surprised at the lightning passage of time during these moments, when the ‘moment’ has in fact turned out to be all of three hours.   This essay, which would normally have been written in a morning, has taken all day for this very reason.   Being a fine spring morning with but a few puffs of broken cloud adorning the sky, I took pen and paper into the garden, but despite my earnest intentions, I soon fell prey to the magnetism of a blackbird singing in the copse behind the piggery and my attention was lifted from the paper.

I walked through the piggery, crossed the brook and shouldered my way through the cow parsley towards the wood.   I didn’t meet anyone on my perambulation, I didn’t want to.   In fact I would have been most annoyed if I had.   I was perfectly happy in my immediate world of the ‘Now’; it was too lovely a world to let slip by unnoticed, or to be dimmed by the oppressive shadow of chores that had to be done.   Now, as I sit writing, the clock on the mantle shelf is striking eleven thirty p.m. but I am not at all alarmed at working until such a late hour even though I do have to rise early to milk the cows tomorrow morning.   At least I shall have the memory of a beautiful spring day during which I was alive and conscious, and will not be left empty handed as most of us too often are when we let the days of the living present slip through the sensory fingers to the dead past.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

awareness wormhole: while walking
bench wormhole: up on the hill
blackbird wormhole: fine
blue & breeze & green wormhole: Elektra
clouds & mind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment
doing & grey wormhole: my seat // now
echo & morning & shadow & time wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] by Mark L. Redford – moment
education & knowledge wormhole: listen willya
garden wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
life wormhole: Doctor Strange II – … things are the same again
sky wormhole: El Palacio, 1946
smell wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
Spring wormhole: first Spring storm
sun & trees wormhole: one day / in 1956
wood wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] by Mark L. Redford – the soft canticle of the gourds:
work wormhole: ashramas

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment

Tags

1967, 3*, air, answers, beauty, being, bells, black, breath, breeze, brown, bull, cause and effect, childhood, clarity, clouds, cows, curtains, dancing, dawn, dew, doing, dusk, earth, east, Einstein, elm, energy, evening, field, freedom, grass, green, grey, heat, hedge, hills, horizon, identity, Jupiter, leaves, life, light, logic, meadow, mind, moment, months, moon, morning, mother, mouse, nature, night, nightjar, noise, openness, order, owl, questions, quiet, rabbit, rebirth, scarlet, September, silence, silhouette, silver, sky, slow, space, stars, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, truth, ultimate reality, uncle, universe, valley, velvet, white, wind, wings, woodland, words

A Precious Moment

As after the heat of a summer’s day the face glows in the mildness of evening, so the face of the countryside glows in the mildness of early autumn.   The summer months have infused the merest suggestion of brown in the deepening green of the foliage and the face of the earth gives up its warmth to the stars above to see them dance.   It was into this calm that I walked one late September’s eve.   The evening star cast her unblinking eye across the heavenly dome to Jupiter in the darkening east and the nightjar echoed its song above the empty fields.   I stood at the end of the stack-yard and returned the disinterested gaze of a cow in the field beyond.

It is during these slow hours when the pace of the day has declined, that the smaller noises of the land become apparent.   The bull, who was tethered a full two hundred yards away in the next field could be heard to rattle his chain and blow down his nose at a particularly juicy clump of grass he has found.   Behind me in the ‘maternity’ box, a freshly calved heifer mooed huskily yet very softly as its offspring raised its head suddenly at a strange sound.   Perhaps it was the sound of ancient timbers creaking under the weight of centuries, or that of the leaves above whispering to the bowed stems in the hay meadow below.   Or maybe it was the very silence that enshrouded these small sounds that attracted its attention, for silence is so startling in its rarity and its beauty.   Dusk gave way to night and I became aware of the immense depths of space, the dizzy height of the mackerel sky, and although it was the clouds that moved, it seemed they were stationary against the clear black silhouettes of the elms and that it was the motion of the gibbous moon behind the clouds that alternately blackened and silver-plated the night.   Even at the tender and romantic age of sixteen I was aware of this quietude, and in one enlightened moment jotted down these few words on an old envelope:

         Soft, soft, the bell that tolls the evensong
         Across full summer’s empty fields serene.
         And slowly draws the scarlet cloak, the hem’s
         Black velvet, diamond specked, communes me with
         The white barn owl, who with his noiseless wings
         Doth glide and swoop upon the luckless mouse.
         Selene set within the lap of dusk
         Transmutes the living green to silver plate,
         Enshrouds my world with immobility.
         And with a quietude that frees the mind
         Of bondage from the peering eyes of day,
         I fain become the earth, the sky, the all.

But it wasn’t until my late teens that I realised there are two times during the twenty four hour cycle when such a quietude exists. One is just before the dusk and the other just before dawn.   Although both seem to be divisions between day and night, the prelude to dawn seems to me to be the more startling and more satisfying to experience.   In the evening the mind is released into a reverie bound by personal conscious thought, but during the morning pause one experiences a freedom and profundity of thought that is rarely to be found in any other part of time.

It is barely half past five in the morning when I start milking, but often I arrive at the cowshed half an hour before in order to experience this precious moment.   Although at this hour the ‘Stone that puts the stars to flight’ has yet to be flung, I can sense the great spaciousness of the valley before me.   Again the trees move softly and the long grass in the hay meadow sifts the breath of night, and I wait.   I wait for that incorporeal beauty that is the union of soul and nature.   It begins where the breezes end and the rustling leaves are stilled.   A serene stillness envelopes the woods and meadows and even I am not conscious of breathing.   I am drawn into the quietude and become part of it; become part of the very earth on which I stand; part of the universe through which I move.   I have become part of each blade of grass in the valley before me, part of every hill.   I feel myself part of the earth, feel its very movement through space.   Unfortunately mere words can no longer be the conveyance of the emotions involved (and I use the word ‘emotions’ for want of a better noun) for they become so expansive and so personal.   No longer can mere words impress the reader’s soul with such profundity of emotion that this experience releases within me.   Each must go his own way, search alone and experience it first hand and with an open mind.

A thought is born and from that thought comes two more.   The two are made four and the four made eight, a self-multiplying chain reaction of thoughts has been set in motion that flows with great haste through the mind; in fact a torrent of thoughts in one brief second, and yet each one is startlingly clear and leads the mind one step nearer the truth.   The heavenly dome is vast above the valley and the stars, thrown into their mythological patterns by the great cosmic hand, impress their presence on the mind with unusual brilliance and time is no more.   Now the mental hosts are converging, and step by step I am racing towards that vertex which is the ultimate truth.   The questions are being answered at an ever increasing rate, the startling, brutal logic disclosing the result of a preceding reaction which itself, reveals a cause.   So through to the highest plane the mind soars upon an ever accelerating reversal of the law of causation. But the pace is too much.   The mind flags and begins to flounder.   At this juncture the mind can be likened to a water skier who, while the pace is kept up skims along the surface in the sun, but immediately he slows down he begins to sink, until at length he finds himself floundering with no forward movement.   Now the mind has become weak and cannot comprehend the unfathomable thought.   But I have brushed the grey curtain; I have seen a light faint though it may be and both my physical and spiritual selves have been revitalised and my cup runneth over.

For most of our lives we are lost beings out of tune with life around us.   Only during such precious moments as these do we fit into the great harmonious chord; all things round and above have their special place in it, from the fat brown rabbit throbbing in the cornfields to the fleecy pieces of golden cloud that sail upon the pale green skies of dusk.   Worries, anxieties, tensions, all are reduced to their proper size in relation to life, and as the imperceptible ‘Left hand of dawn’ lifts the veil on the eastern horizon, we are cleansed and reborn with the stripling day.

It is only during such periods that nature can be reduced to anything approaching order, and that there is an order I am in no doubt.   Einstein’s inquiring mind was working on the universal equation when the workings of that very same equation stilled his physical being; perhaps now he has solved it, we in this life never shall.   The perpetual motion of nature is the perfect machine and we are part of that machine.   It is complete within itself, recreating its own new parts from the debris of the old.   No energy is wasted or lost, just charged in form.   Nature permits us a marginal tolerance within which we may make one or two adjustments to suit our needs and requirements, but beyond this we dare not go for we merely create more problems than we solve.

         So does she pass, the gentle night,
         Slow seeps the dawn upon the scene.
         Dew sparkling in the first light of
         The new day shows where she has been.
         The eyes of day now open on
         The dewy sward and gossamer
         Bows low beneath its pearly load,
         And hedgerows faintly scent the air
         With green along the unused road.
         And I am born once more and see
         The day as I once first beheld –
         A child within his mother’s arms,
         Another, within its mother’s arms.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

air & field & morning wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
beauty wormhole: the policies came to nothing
being wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
black & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
breath wormhole: inbreath
breeze wormhole: and that’s where I are
brown wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
childhood wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: reaching branch
evening & silhouette wormhole: tired
green & space & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
grey & horizon wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
hedge & hills & life & light wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
identity wormhole: with endless love
leaves & mother wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
moon wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
night & silence & sky wormhole: a crack of lightning / in the dark of night
openness wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
silver wormhole: Jon
thought & time wormhole: inbreath
white wormhole: mauve
words wormhole: bloogying

 

a crack of lightning / in the dark of night

Tags

2016, 7*, arc, architecture, axle, beach, belly, Bodhichitta, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, buoyancy, centre, choice, connection, dark, emptiness, eyes, gesture, high, lightning, mind, mouth, night, opening, pattern, phantom, pillars, porticos, posture, samsara, shadow, shallow, shame, Shantideva, show, silence, sky, speech, true nature, twilight, uncaused, universe, waves, world

                                a crack of lightning
                                in the dark of night

                                the world casts eyes
                                downwards bullied

                                by the dirty phantoms
                                of obligèd choice with

                                pillars and porticos
                                deep and high across

                                the silent sky like an
                                end of age crepuscule

                                gathering ténèbres,
                                all while the mind revolves,

                                empty to the universe about,
                                empty at the centre of

                                the mighty axle of
                                uncaused leave to turn,

                                when through the merest
                                gesture of pouvoir, an

                                imperturbable shift of
                                posture, a disclosure, is

                                opened and cracks
                                across the sky – the

                                phantoms cannot dully
                                sustain their buoyant

                                suspension – they arc
                                and connect in frantic

                                pattern showing
                                everything like bellies

                                of incestual shame and
                                mouths too small to think

                                to talk; “no more” they
                                wail, leaning into their

                                true nature like shallow
                                waves on a long beach

 

from Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Shantideva, chapter one, verse five

 

 

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

beach wormhole: development
Bodhichitta wormhole: – sigh! –
emptiness wormhole: the policies came to nothing
eyes wormhole: 1964
mind & sky wormhole: reaching branch
mouth wormhole: too late:
night wormhole: work
posture wormhole: impressionism
samsara wormhole: my // shell – poewieview #19
shadow wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
silence & speech wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
waves wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
world wormhole: words tumble like / boulders – poewieview #25

 

reaching branch

Tags

2016, allowing, architecture, branches, change, clouds, coffee shop, compassion, feet, identity, landscape, mind, others, passing, people, reaching, Shrewsbury, sky, walking, watching, windows, writing

                           the landscapes
                           that conceive the mind

                           shift like
                           architecture of deep-belly clouds

                           watching all
                           the occasions of feet pass

                           in the window
                           of the same coffee shops to which I return

                           allowing each
                           lace and ripple bulb and disperse over

                           reaching branch

 

 

 

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

branches wormhole: furl-reach
change wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
clouds & identity & windows wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
coffee shop wormhole: the coffee shop opportunity
compassion wormhole: constant hummm
feet wormhole: Hurst Green
mind wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
others wormhole: and that’s where I are
passing & people wormhole: 1964
sky wormhole: tired
walking wormhole: tripping up to / London town
writing wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion

 

‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27

Tags

1971, 2016, Andy Warhol, Bowie, identity, mind, openness, thought

                                                      on second thought
                                                      I’ll keep my mind
                                                      with open tunings

 

I’ve never ‘got’ Andy Warhol, and I still don’t, 1971

Read the collected movements in David Bowie: Movements in Suite Major

 

 

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

Bowie wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
identity & mind wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
openness wormhole: balancing // with a whole lot of deft
thought wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

 

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 – Introduction

Tags

1967, being, consciousness, countryside, dark, experience, farm, flower, garden, identity, kiss, knowledge, life, light, living, London, mind, now, pattern, petals, plants, pond, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, uncle, unconscious, vallisneria, water, writing

 

INTRODUCTION

The Boats of Vallisneria.   Not the fishing fleet of some remote principality or the landing forces of an invading alien.   Vallisneria is an aquatic plant, the roots of which grow in the soil at the bottom of shallow waters.   The pistillate flower is found at the top of a long stalk which grows up through the water towards the light of day.   Upon reaching the surface, the petals unfold in sheer abandonment to expose the stigmas that await the procreative advances of its male counterpart which is the staminate floret that grows below the surface in a large bract.   When ripe, it emerges and floats to the top where three small petals unfold and curl back to produce the three tiny boats that keep the stamens afloat where, through the movement of the water, the stamens gently kiss the stigmas of the awaiting flower in that final act of consummation.

But this small volume does not concern itself with the morphology or physiology of vallisneria or that of any other flower, in fact there is no direct connection between the title of this book and its contents.   Suffice it to say that the mind is a pond, but a pond of such depth that the sediment of our experiences lays in the bottom in utter darkness.   Every so often a thought is born and speeds hastily from the soil in which it grows to the light of consciousness.   After a brief spell of blossoming the flower returns to the depths taking with it a little food that is the knowledge of the eternal ‘now’.

I am a farm labourer, not because I was born to it (for I am a Londoner by birth) but because I desired from an early age a completion of my being that I knew I could not attain in the artifices of town life.   But soon I fear I shall be leaving the farming life, not through desire or choice, but through the evolvement of that particular pattern that is laid down for each and every one of us, the unalterable pattern that we must all follow no matter how limitless our own personal bounds of freedom.   I shall however, still be living in the countryside and will retain the sense of fulfilment this way of life has afforded me until the end of my days, no matter where I go or what I do in the years to come.

It was while gazing vacantly at a pool one evening two years ago that I first beheld the boats of vallisneria and thought of them as random thoughts released from the depths of the mind for brief spells in the light of consciousness, and it was then that I decided to capture these thoughts and to the best of my ability place them on paper.   This small book then, is a collection of thoughts, a collection of the reflections of a farm labourer who has reaped more than corn from his own particular way of life.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

1967 & mind & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
being & identity wormhole: zero
garden & life & London & writing wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
knowledge wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
light wormhole: like ink – poewieview #23
living wormhole: balancing // with a whole lot of deft
thought wormhole: between thoughts
water wormhole: aghh – we’ve been infected / it’s spreading through the system / we’re losing our files … / it’s taken out the processor … / I, I can’t open with this program anymore … / it’s scanning me – / I’ve got to buy a Virus Protection Program / from it …

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents

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'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