Cowies

I took my neighbour's dog for a walk just now. The air was so cold I pulled my Buff up over my nose, and immediately felt like a Baddie in an old Western.

In the old ones it was always very clear who was a Goodie and who was a Baddie. The Goodies had white hats and the Baddies had black ones. The Baddies also had spotted kerchiefs which they pulled up over their noses in a vain attempt at disguise. Rather like my Buff.

When I was a little girl, the boys played at Cowies (Cowboys and Indians - not at all PC). Nobody wanted to be an Indian. Well, the Cowboys were the goodies, weren't they? And the Cowboys always won.

I began to see a little more clearly what is at the heart of the gun ownership debate which is raging so fiercely in the US. The members of the NRA, and many others besides, need to have legal guns because, well, they're all Goodies, aren't they? Good Guys, they would say. Bad Guys can get guns any way, and do, but Good Guys have to go into a gun shop and do it legally. Or online or at a gun show and no questions asked. But that's OK because they are the Good Guys. They need their semi-automatic assault rifles to defend themselves, their church-going families, their well-scrubbed white children.

Of course, innocent people, women and children get killed in the cities every day, by the Bad Guys. But generally no-one pays much attention. Well, how shall we say it? They're....well, they're black kids.

But every now and then some poor, sad grazed white youth goes berserk and kills a classroom full of his own kind, and all hell breaks loose. And everyone goes out and buys another gun to defend his family.

The problem is, until this poor crazed young man went out and did this deed everyone thought he was a Good Guy. One of Us. So of course he was entitled to the legally purchased firearms he was carrying. Just like me. Until he shot my kids.

Unless we were brought up in criminal households, where wrong can be taught as right, we all think we're the good guys. But we aren't. There's no such thing. We may be guys (and gals) who try to be good, but who knows how we may be driven - by fear, mental torture, desperation, insanity - to do what the bad guys do?

So I agree. Guns should be legally sold to the good guys. Only there aren't any.

A new beginning for 'A New Beginning'?

It looks like I've been away for a while. Time to start again.

Not today. Today is a day for practical work, cleaning, clearing, starting afresh. But the thoughts are beginning to stir....

The beautiful 'new' Leonardo: Salvator Mundi

Unafraid of What Is Difficult

Vase with Daisies, by Vincent van Gogh

Don't be confused by the nature of solitude, when something inside you wants to break free of your loneliness. This very wish, when you use it as a tool for understanding, can illumine your solitude and expand it to include all that is. Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. It is clear, however, that here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living things in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves at any cost and despite all opposition.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rome, May 14, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

With acknowledgement of and thanks to the wonderful blog A Year with Rilke: http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/

Finger-holds

Clawing, grasping for finger-holds on the rocky slope.

'Footpath', the sign said. 'Footpath to Dunadd Fort'.

Near to the top, a footprint.

A coronation stone.

Predictably, we tried it for size.

Am I Queen of Scotland now?

A bit....A bit....

This Kingdom is mine, and I am its, long since.

Summer Pruning

A second spring is here.


This rock, blasted by summer storms
Has sprung again in bud and leaf and frond.


The sap, the blood, is strong.


The blossom may be gone, the cherry torn,
But where the cherry ripped a vista breaks.


Nature has pruned her land.

Never Yet Spoken

Sketch, by Auguste Rodin

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

Rainer Maria Rilke

From the Book of Hours I, 12

All this singing, one song

 

All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun's light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it's still one light. ~Rumi

Remembering

 

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is--
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

Book of Images ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Since I've Learned to Be Silent

 

L'Estaque, by Paul Cézanne

Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. I am thinking of a summer on the Baltic when I was a child: how talkative I was to sea and forest; how, filled with an unaccustomed exuberance, I tried to leap over all limits with the hasty excitement of my words. And how, as I had to take my leave on a morning in September, I saw that we never give utterance to what is final and most blessed, and that all my rhapsodic Table d'hote conversations did not approach either my inchoate feelings or the ocean's eternal self-revelation.

Rainer Maria Rilke ~ Early Journals

Walking With Grief

 

Do not hurry

as you walk with grief;

it does not help the journey.

Walk slowly, pausing often:

do not hurry

as you walk with grief.

Be not disturbed

by memories that come unbidden.

Swiftly forgive;

and let Christ speak for you

unspoken words.

Unfinished conversation

will be resolved in Him.

Be not disturbed.

Be gentle with the one

who walks with grief.

If it is you,

be gentle with yourself.

Swiftly forgive;

walk slowly,

pausing often.

Take time, be gentle

as you walk with grief.

 

George McDonald

Puddle thinking

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
 
This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
(Douglas Adams)

On a dark night

On a dark night
When Love burned bright
Consuming all my care,
While my house slept,
Unseen, I crept
Along the secret stair.


O blessed chance!
No human glance
My secret steps detected.
While my house slept,
I silent crept
In shadow well protected.


That blessed night
Concealed from sight,
Unseeing I did go,
No light to guide
But that inside
My eager heart aglow,


A guide as bright
As noonday light,
Which brought me where he dwelt,
Where none but he
Could wait for me
And make his presence felt.


Sweeter that night
Than morning light,
For Love did loving meet,
I knew him well,
And we could dwell
In ecstasy complete.


I gave him there
My thought, my care,
So did my spirit flower.
Love lay at rest
Upon my breast
That cedar-scented hour.


When morning air
Ruffled his hair
From off the ramparts blowing,
I felt his hand,
A quiet command
Tranquillity bestowing.


Then face to face
With Love's own grace,
My fears no more parading,
I left them there
With all my care
Among the lilies fading.


St. John of the Cross, trans. Kathleen Jones

Over-packing

I am an over-packer. Preparing for even the shortest trip, I swing into 'What if?' mode. What if it rains? What if there's a heatwave? What if I spill wine down my best trousers? What if I suddenly get invited to a wedding and need a hat?....You get the drift, and it becomes exponentially sillier.


I am the same intellectually. Art, ideas, books, music...grab everything that appeals.


Or maybe it's just greed. Better go to the buffet of life and cram as many different things onto my plate as possible. Just in case. 


It's not just greed, though. It's curiosity. And the need to know and discover, and keep the old grey cells busy.


Is it also, though, mental noise? Something to jam the true and clear radio signal I really need to be listening to?


I'm going away for a few days of quiet and reflection. And already I'm over-packing.

Quotes

"Spirituality teaches us how to get naked ahead of time, so God can make love to us as we really are"  ~ Richard Rohr

“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.” ~ Anais Nin

 

“Close the language-door

and open the love-window.

The moon won't use the door,

only the window.” ~ Rumi

Travel

 

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

Laughter and Love

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

Hillaire Belloc

Live the Questions

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don't dig for answers that can't be given you yet: you live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Worpswede, July 16, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

Journey of the Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

T.S. Eliot