Category Archives: Poetry and creative reflection

Be still

“Be still and know that I am God.”

–Psalm 46

Be still and feel what is most subtle, most intimate.

Be still, empty yourself, and discover the ungraspable openness that you are.

In silence and stillness, we may come in touch with an energetic reality that feels spacious, open, boundless, limitless, vast, uncontained, shapeless, empty, ineffable and immensely alive. It has been called formless presence, pure consciousness, primordial awareness, groundlessness, no-thing-ness, but no words can capture it.

Out of this germinal no-thing-ness, the apparently formed world appears, a gift from the formless, a perfume of formless energy or spirit, a waving of the great formless ocean. Go deep into any form—a sound, something seen, a tactile or somatic sensation, a taste, a fragrance—and you find this aliveness, this radiant no-thing-ness. If you see deeply enough, you may find the whole universe in each breath, each sound, each sensation, each momentary appearance, just as if you go deep into any wave, you find the entire ocean and nothing you can grasp…

God, as I mean it, is not some gendered deity up in the sky directing the show, punishing and rewarding us. God is not a thing at all. God is this presence that is infinitely subtle, closer than close, and yet also infinite and boundless—that sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God is the light of awareness, beholding everything with unconditional love…

God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from wholeness rather than fragmentation. To awaken is to dissolve into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is no body in any sense, there is only this ungraspable openness, in which there is no inside or outside.

Joan Tollifson, the ungraspable openness of being

Sometimes, Joan has a way of nailing precisely what I would wish to say. Like me, she occasionally finds herself unable to refuse the necessities of language; a thing poets encounter all the time. TS Eliot seems sometimes unable to help himself:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting…

(East Coker)

It is so simple really – all there is is sitting still, and the beautiful isness opens of itself in the stillness. And the heart opens, and cries out in silence, without words. But not to tell of this would be more than bearable. And sometimes only ancient words carry sufficient weight, sufficient links to the old, old mind we all share, back for generations to the days of Julian of Norwich (whom Joan quotes later in this essay), the days of Meister Eckhart and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing – back to Scripture itself, which after all was only written by people trying to find words for what is beyond words.

Sometimes I think being human consists as much in the ancient community of words as it does in our genome. Used rightly, words can draw us in, being us closer on what is after all a path walked alone. They can, at their best, open our eyes to what we had been missing, startle us and heal us – bring us home too what actually is, and is beyond all words, being here, now, always –

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well…

(TS Eliot, Little Gidding)

The annihilation of difference

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It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you, of you in me. . .
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

RS Thomas, from ‘Emerging’, Collected Poems 1945-1990

For most of my life – in fact since about the age of five – my life seems to have been centred on silence, stillness, the presence of something overwhelming but infinitely desirable, unnamable but closer somehow than my own breathing. Of course I didn’t even try, as a young child, to name it – or even really to try and think about it at all. It merely was.

Ever since then, I have been trying to find words. Words to tell others, certainly, but more than that, words to tell myself where I have been. (Words for this kind of thing are never in the present tense – they must refer to something remembered, to some trace in the mind left by the God behind whom the door has already closed.) And words, it seems, bring community. That is perhaps what they are for, after all. But communities own their words, own their people; or so they feel.

I have found myself, of course, borrowing words wholesale from others who have come this way before. But they are others’ words, however sublime they may be, however hallowed by time and tradition. In these late years all I can do is try to speak of what still leaps up in my heart at echoes, snatches of music, phrases from the Psalms, sunlight through high windows. I know RS Thomas’ hard-found annihilation of difference – it is what has haunted me all these years. It lies beneath my sitting every night and morning. It will be waiting for me, softly, after my last breath. I have no other name for it, since it is no thing. Dear, endless, it merely is.

Wolf Moon

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This afternoon the Wolf Moon rose over the tall trees behind the garden, butter-yellow and gleaming in the late daylight, seeming far brighter than the setting sun. Somehow it tugged at our hearts to see it there in the clear air, appearing to hang above the feathery treetops like a memory from another time.

There seems to be something atavistic in our being human that responds to “signs in the sky” – the moon especially – from some pre-scientific place we’ve long since forgotten to be consciously aware of. Wolves have been absent from England since around 1390, and yet the very phrase “Wolf Moon” resonates with some ancient yearning in us. The cold air itself seems to long for something lost.

To sit still by the window in the moonlight is one of the loveliest things at this time of year. In the 8th century CE the Chinese poet Li Bai wrote:

At the foot of my bed, moonlight
Yes, I suppose there is frost on the ground.
Lifting my head I gaze at the bright moon
Bowing my head, thinking of home.

We were already home, watching the moon rise; and yet something of Li Bai’s nostalgia touches me in moonlight. What is it I am longing for? Ah, but it is a sweet longing, though. I don’t expect something to fulfil it. I am at peace in the moonlight. I don’t want anything, and yet. And yet in the New Year’s rising away from the solstice there is a yearning, even when there is no moon. Perhaps as I said there is something in our merely being human that carries with it wordless memories from times we cannot remember, far back before people built cities or wrote history.

Somehow our practice, and whatever philosophy we derive from it, has to leave room for these times of strange resonance. Dear old Li Bai, the poet and traveller of the Tang dynasty, evidently knew all about this.

Liminal lands

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There are always liminal lands, out beyond the predictions of common sense or myth, where the mind encounters places strangely common to human experience. Jungians would call them archetypal, perhaps; they crop up, for instance – often in passing – in fantastic fiction. A few examples might be CS Lewis’ Narnia (the Shribble Marshes), Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea (Osskil), Michael Moorcock’s other London (Jerry Cornelius’ Notting Hill), the American Southwest of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger sequence.

But sometimes they exist in everyday time and space. Lucy Pollock (the emphasis is mine):

At the pumping station, far out on the liminal land through which the river flows, the dog and I turn for home. The fields now are lush with flowering grasses, but for weeks in the winter they will be submerged and this track will become a narrow causeway across the floodplain.

My rage abates. Of course we need science and biotechnology and billions of data points, as we seek to improve the lives of older people, our future selves. But side by side with the science we need a deep and abiding understanding of what it means to be human.

I have encountered such places myself. Much of my earlier writing had to do with them, and their strange coexistence between mind and place: the Wye Valley, the worked-out coal country along the River Browney, Western Park in Leicester. There have been darker places too, since then; like the high grounds above Kimmeridge Bay, home to PD James’ The Black Tower, or the post-UKAEA wasteland of Winfrith Heath. But yours will be different again, like Lucy Pollock’s: places between, times that do not quite align.

Contemplative practice has, in itself, nothing to do with such things. And yet the deep instincts – I’m tempted to call them mystical, even though the word has so many unhelpful connotations – that draw people to the contemplative life – as to the methodologies of psychonautics – are human instincts. Might it not be that these same instincts are themselves the door to this fundamental way of being human – to the liminal lands – since they are themselves in a way reflections of, or reflected in, the silent illumination of the contemplative condition itself?

Just what it is

Silence

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I have loved silence as much as or more than I have loved music – and of course music is only what it is by virtue of the silence that comes with it, both the kind you can write down, that is threaded all through it, and the kind that underlies it, an open ground beneath the whole structure of sound.

Contrary to our common imagination, our solar system, and the space beyond our heliosphere, is bathed and criss-crossed with unheard, magnetic sounds, that can can even be converted to audio waves that we can hear with our human ears. ClassicFM has some samples, and NASA too has shared some from much further away in the depths of interstellar space. But under these too is silence: a silence bright with starlight and seamed with barely imaginable gravitational waves.

The fertile stillness that silence is seems very close to the dark transparency that sometimes one can touch in contemplation. It seems to me that in contemplation perhaps all we are doing is stripping away the accretions of thought and habit, draining the mind’s default mode that tries to fill our resting moments with its lowest common denominator daydreams. All that we are, all we have come from, rests in the ground of being itself, and it may be that we can touch the edge of that ground itself in silence, in the resting place between breaths, or the quiet of sitting still.

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice