Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Poem: "Beannacht" (written and recited by John O'Donohue)
For Josie, my mother
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
💖
Irish hills, folk music and David Whyte’s poetry form a fleeting, meditative moment (A Psyche Film)
‘I thank you … for the way my ears open even before my eyes,
as if to remember the way everything began with an original, vibrant note.’
You could easily mistake David Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems for
prayers. His words marvel at everyday sublimity and express gratitude to some
unseen ‘you’. But scrutinise his words and you’ll find language that, while
steeped in his Irish-Catholic upbringing, doesn’t express a creed. Rather, it
conveys what he refers to as ‘the conversational nature of reality’ – a sense
that there’s a distinct intimacy and presence beyond oneself in each fleeting
moment, if you’re willing to contemplate it. His ‘you’ is ubiquitous – no leap
of faith required.
If these ‘conversations’ are often drowned out by daily
distractions and planning, the US-based filmmaker Andrew Hinton builds a scene
where they cry out for attention in this short film, which adapts two of
Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems – ‘Blessing for Sound’ and ‘Blessing for the Light’.
Whyte, born in England to an Irish mother, possesses what he calls a ‘movable
frontier’ of an accent, which here errs towards his setting – an Irish
landscape of rolling green hills, barren trees and unswimmable oceans tugged by
fierce winds. The only human presence is Whyte and the stone walls carving up
the countryside.
‘The art of blessing, the art of calling in the invisible
help of the divine, is ever present to the Celtic mind,’ writes the musician
and composer Owen Ó Súilleabháin in Emergence Magazine, reflecting on his score
for the short film. It incorporates one of the oldest recordings of traditional
Irish music in existence – a 1905 wax cylinder recording of a song called ‘Cé
Phort Láirge’ (Waterford Quay). You needn’t understand the words to know that
it’s a mournful cry, captured on a fragile medium.
These three elements – words, music and landscape – bring
Whyte’s philosophy into vivid form, collapsing past and present, and interior
and exterior worlds, into a moment. The result is a work that offers a fleeting
invitation to, in Whyte’s words, ‘[stand] in the ground of your life fully’.
Director: Andrew Hinton
Producer: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Poet: David Whyte
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
On Gratitude (by David Whyte)
Gratitude is
not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from
paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives
within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown
after the event, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that
shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
Gratitude is the
understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and
mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath
of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living,
participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously part of
something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or
despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the
color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny
hue of a winter landscape.
To see the full
miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity
for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be
fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends
and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives
beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a
someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation
without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our
natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without
us, that we are participants and witnesses all at once.
Thankfulness finds
its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and
witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making
our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted,
this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.
Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences.
Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.
From Consolations: The Solace,
Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words © 2014
Many Rivers Press.