I dwell in Possibility (by Emily Dickinson)

 

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

 

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

 

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –

 

 

On License [13/03/22]

 

This anniversary of mine isn’t a joyous one

 

Practicing resilience I’ve had a few victories though

Sometimes I feel tired and long to rest, just rest

 

Milestones carry no meaning

No-one is ever cured of cancer

No matter the passing of time

One is always on license

 

What could be more life-affirming than this ongoing

Meditation on death and impermanence?

 

Perhaps there is cause to rejoice after all

 

Troubling Times and Visible Helpers (by Cosmic Egg)

 

In these troubling times my heart and dreams are filled with fear and dread. What did Hafez say? “Fear is the cheapest room in the house…”

Praise to poet and philosopher David Whyte whose presence in my life, via his poetry and ongoing Three Sunday Series, continues to be a wellspring of nourishment and sanity in my life.

David Whyte

Putin's Long Tables Explained: Why He Puts Some Leaders, Including Germany’s Scholz, At An Extreme Distance (forbes.com)

 

Excerpt from THERE IS NO TABLE LONG ENOUGH

.

May we take the time, while we confront

this fear now, on the outside

with necessary and courageous physical action,

to preempt any future evil by bringing

every hidden edge into the light, by bringing

our inner troubles into the conversation,

where heads are allowed to lean close

to one another at a table shortened

to the point of mutual understanding.

 

There is no table long enough

to keep us from our own unspoken darkness

but, thanks be to God, and every power

beyond us, there is no table long enough

to hold the riches of darkness transformed,

to hold the wine raised and the bread

consumed, to hold every item of our shared bounty,

brought from every field of our endeavour,

in a promised future, that despite ourselves,

will always be destined to forgiveness.

 

-David Whyte

©2022 Many Rivers Press

Praise also to the little robin whose daily feeding on porridge oats in my yard flowerbox has lifted my heart since January. Not too frightened of the blackbirds, who came first and chased him away, he’s now a regular and content customer – a constant reminder that life goes on no matter what and there’s always an opportunity to make a small difference to someone.

robin - Bing images

 

‘Life is to plow.’ A reflection on struggle, success and the impermanence of both (An Aeon video, 6 mins)

 

‘Just like the bad things, the beautiful things are temporary too.’

Roberto Olivera was raised in poverty in southern California, where he worked the tomato fields alongside his mother and abusive stepfather, migrant workers from Mexico. Now in his 60s, financially successful and with a family of his own, Olivera has grown to understand the meaning behind his mother’s frequent refrain: ‘La vida es sufrir’ (‘Life is suffering’). With an understated melancholy, Field Song pairs Olivera’s poignant reflections with views of southern California’s agricultural landscapes, presenting hardship as both temporary and timeless.

 

Director: Brad Bischoff

Producer: Alex Hidalgo

Director of Photography: Casey Bohrnell

4 December 2017

‘Life is to plow.’ A reflection on struggle, success and the impermanence of both | Aeon Videos

 

 

MY COURAGEOUS LIFE (by David Whyte)

 

has gone ahead

and is looking back,

calling me on.

 

My courageous life

has seen everything

I have been

and everything

I have not

and has

forgiven me,

day after day.

 

My courageous life

still wants

my company:

wants me to

understand

my life as witness

and thus

bequeath me

the way ahead.

 

My courageous life

has the patience

to keep teaching me,

how to invent

my own

disappearance,

and how

once gone,

to reappear again.

 

My courageous life

wants to stop

being ahead of me

so that it can lie

down and rest

deep inside the body

it has been

calling on.

 

My courageous life

wants to be

my foundation,

showing me

day after day

even against my will

 

how to undo myself,

how to surpass myself,

how to laugh as I go

in the face

of danger,

how to invite

the right kind

of perilous

love,

 

how to find

a way

to die

of generosity.

…

 

My Courageous Life

A new adaption of ‘Second Life’

in Pilgrim

Poems by David Whyte

© Many Rivers Press and David Whyte

The Fox of Bloody Women Island (a Psyche film, 10 mins)

 

A boatbuilder above the Arctic Circle works hard at his epicurean life

Ulf Bjørnar Mikalsen has got it pretty good. His name means ‘Wolf Man Who Fights the Bear Son of the Fox’. He plunges naked into freezing water every morning to prepare his body for the day. His work – handcrafting traditional Nordland boats – earns him half what youngsters make at the nearby grocery store, but brings him deep pleasure and satisfaction. Though his home in the village of Kjerringøy in Norway – 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle – doesn’t see the Sun for three months of the year, it’s a place that gives him something of a spiritual experience, perhaps because living there entails such a close and engaged relationship with nature.

The short documentary The Fox of Bloody Women Island is, simply put, a film about a happy man, or at least a very satisfied one. But it’s also a film that allows us to share in Mikalsen’s pleasures by evoking some of what brings them about for him. Balance seems to be at the centre of Mikalsen’s way of living, whether he’s filling a boat with round stones for ballast with his son Bjorn, playing music with his wife Ingvild, or cooking roast reindeer in the oven. Boatbuilding is his key pursuit, the work that he loves, but his approach to it is far from myopic. Along with his daily naked dips, he practises yoga and enjoys all the ways that making boats connects him with the rhythms and caprices of his environment.

The filmmakers Vern Cummins and Jamie Gallant explore this ethos – and the sense of connection and harmony it brings to Mikalsen’s life – by moving fluidly and gracefully between his various activities. Allowing the sounds of one moment to carry over and underscore something in the next, or using a sequence of shots to draw out the different contours of Mikalsen’s days, they immerse us in Mikalsen’s world with its mix of meaning-filled physical labour, play and good cheer amid the strikingly beautiful land and seascapes of Norway’s far north. And, running through it all, both in Mikalsen’s own demeanour and in the film itself, is a gentle, self-aware humour, a kind of tonic to the frequent self-seriousness of those who fetishise the ‘traditional’.

In the end, we might see Mikalsen as offering a thoroughly non-didactic suggestion that one good approach to the good life is to do your thing seriously – without taking yourself too seriously. For anyone who is intrigued, perhaps he might take on an apprentice?

Written by Kellen Quinn

Directors: Vern Cummins & Jamie Gallant

The Fox of Bloody Women Island | Psyche Films

 

 

Summoning the Recluse (a Psyche film, 11 mins)

 

China’s young people who trade parties for peace at a mountainside hermitage

Summoning the Recluse opens on a traditional Chinese landscape painting of a remote village surrounded by trees, rivers and misty mountains. Small, thatch-roofed homes blend into the vista, evoking the humble, contemplative lifestyle of the Buddha’s Middle Way. While a somewhat realistic and plausible image, the scene likely didn’t reflect the lived experience of its artist. Landscapes of this kind were painted by Chinese scholar-elites, responding to the societal strains of their time by idealising nature and extolling the spiritual teachings of the ancient past. The pull to withdraw into the natural world for its beauty and simplicity is a centuries-old undercurrent of Chinese society – and in the age of steady urbanisation, social media, mass commerce and, in general, breakneck-paced change, it’s no surprise that it persists today.

The Beijing-based director Ellen Xu’s Summoning the Recluse (2016) follows a band of urban millennials who’ve left their busy lives behind to seek inner peace at a mountain hermitage. The group gets by with sparse resources and few modern distractions. Much of their time is spent working the land, meditating and catching up on ancient Chinese philosophy, which was missing from their Westernised school curriculums. It’s all quite a departure from the cliché of the hermit as an old man with a white beard living in solitude. For some, the stay will be a temporary spiritual refresh, but at least one resident has no plan to leave.

While each interviewee expresses a sense of freedom and inner calm as they immerse themselves in nature and away from societal expectations, a tension between modern convenience and fully embracing a return to nature percolates throughout the film. While one young man says their setup is ‘not primitive enough’ due to small conveniences such as lighters and matches, in another scene, a young woman eagerly poses for a cliffside qigong-inspired photo-op, snapped by a fellow ‘hermit’. The questions emerge: is the group truly embracing a return-to-nature lifestyle, or just touring it? And can inner quiet exist alongside connection and modern convenience?

Through interviews and unobtrusive filmmaking, Xu finds that, like most of us who struggle with the pros and cons of technology, the young hermits are still striving to find this balance. Indeed, the same young man who believes they‘ve embraced too much convenience still thinks it acceptable to ask for outside help in the case of illness, and finds the fates of truly hermetic monks who die alone in caves, entirely cut off from the outside world, to be ‘very tragic’. With these practicalities, the millennial hermits appear to recognise the fantasy of nature as it’s presented in the opening landscape painting. As per their own set of rules, and inspired by spiritual teachings, they seem to seek the Buddha’s Middle Way in modern life, carving their own path within themselves. And in documenting their story, the film clears room for contemplation in each of us sharing the ideal of inner tranquility in the digital age.

Summoning the recluse | Psyche Films