Commuting, with T.S. Eliot

Can commuting be a form of meditation?

Maybe not for everyone; but maybe for some of us!

My weekday commute is about 45 minutes.  I drive past the amazing Wrekin in Shropshire  (“the little mountain with many secrets” every day (you can see what it looks like here .

But more importantly, the commuting journey is a time when the brain is somehow set free to wander, think, create, remember, explore…perhaps with the help of music playing in the background. 

Perhaps this is an analogy for meditation?

.

T.S. Eliot wrote:

 “At the still point of the turning world

There the dance is

Neither movement from nor towards

There is only the dance

I can only say, there we have been but I cannot say where

Both a new world

And the old made explicit…

We shall not cease from exploring

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time…”

Image by Tomas Ratkevicius from Pixabay

How do you normally spend your commuting time?

Is it possible that there could be a bit of an “inner dance” during your commute?

Does commuting present opportunities for “exploring”, and enriching life, even though outwardly it may not always feel very pleasant?

How can we “know the place for the first time” by staying alert and curious about places we pass every working day of our lives?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

The Journey of Life, and Tennyson

“

Every river is like life’s journey, I think. 

Tennyson wrote a lovely, simple poem about this experience, with the lines

               “men may come and men may go

               But I go on for ever”

The river is always in movement, always changing.  “You can never step into the same river twice” said Heraclitus, and this was not just because the water is always changing, but also because we are always changing.

“To live is to change” wrote John Henry Newman, and whenever I wander alongside my local river in Shrewsbury, the Rae Brook, I feel the excitement, the bustle and the change of the river.

There is always energy there.  There is always life.  It has power to erode the banks yet the power is channelled around beautiful smooth meanders.  The change is a creative change – always being renewed, always being revitalised by new water, new movement, new life.

I know rivers can cause destruction and chaos.  They can be deadly and dangerous and take lives.

But for me life is good alongside the Rae Brook.  Life is good when it speaks to me, for itself and also as a metaphor.

Tennyson’s poem goes like this:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,

By twenty thorpes, a little town,

And half a hundred bridges.

.

Till last by Philip’s farm I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

.

I chatter over stony ways,

In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

I babble on the pebbles.

.

With many a curve my banks I fret

By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

.

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there a grayling,

.

And here and there a foamy flake

Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak

Above the golden gravel,

.

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots

That grow for happy lovers.

.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance

Against my sandy shallows.

.

I murmur under moon and stars

In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;

I loiter round my cresses;

.

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

Do you have a favourite river?  Where is it?  What is it like to visit it?

Does the metaphor of change and energy speak to you?

 Share your thoughts with me about Lif4Gd and rivers!

A Place of Significance…

A place

Of significance

.

Where kings

Have knelt

.

Paupers

Have prayed

.

Where life and death

Have been debated

.

And a poet

Still pleads from the grave

.

Where floods have arisen

And abated

.

And new creations

Continually rise up to heaven

.

A place

Passed over

.

By a million travellers

Intent on other things

.

While the pilgrim

Pauses

.

Stays

And prays.

.

Inspired by Shrewsbury Abbey

“The skies that knit our heartstrings right” … with A.E. Housman

Do you think that the places where people live affects their personalities?  Do the skies “knit our heartstrings right”? This post explores some ideas found in A.E.Housman’s poem “A Shropshire Lad” about place and personality…

In the first poem of “A Shropshire Lad”, Housman talks about

“…skies that knit their heartstrings right

…fields that bred them brave.”

skiesfields housman

A.E.Housman does not have such enthusiastic things to say about the city dwellers he had met in London:

 “In many an eye that measures me

The mortal sickness of a mind

Too unhappy to be kind

Undone with misery, all they can

Is to hate their fellow man

And till they drop they needs must still

Look at you and wish you ill.” (A Shropshire Lad, Poem XLI)

Now I know that this is very unfair to many city dwellers who are decent, sociable human beings…But having lived in both the suburbs of a city and in the country, it is striking how in general city dwellers don’t always tend to relate to each other in quite the same way as I’ve found people do in villages in country towns (having also lived in both of these).  I wonder what your people’s experiences have been?

Of course, Lif4Gd would have us all try a bit harder not to “hate” our fellow men, women and children, nor wish them ill.  In the UK, knife crime is sadly rife in London.  However we also have rough sleepers and drugs issues in Shrewsbury, where I live now.

When I lived in a village in Dorset, I wrote this, inspired by the closeness to the natural beauty that was all around, so different from my own upbringing in Wandsworth in the suburbs of London:

Shillingstone

The crows fly along invisible lines

               under a pink stupendous sky

                              in the peace of the village tonight.

Hambledon Hill stands so still,

               and Okeford Hill and Shillingstone Hill

And this is our home, where the Stour wanders

               under bridges, alongside meadows

                              and buzzards circle overhead.

Some Questions to Ponder

  1. Does it matter if you live in city or country?  Does it affect personality and character?  What’s your experience? 
  2. If we live in a city, how can we contribute to Lif4Gd locally?  Is it necessarily easier to live a Lif4Gd in the country?

I’d love to hear any thoughts readers have.

Best wishes,

Michael

Balance your being

How do you balance daily tasks, the demands of other people, work, leisure, and looking after yourself?  This post draws on ancient wisdom to explore a way of answering this tricky question: how do you balance your being for a Lif4Gd?

“Mindfulness” is a popular word today but its roots go back hundreds and thousands of years. I am reminded of this whenever I go past Shrewsbury Abbey, local to me, founded nearly a thousand years ago.  There is a beautiful window portraying St. Benedict over the entrance, and Benedictine monks knew a lot about mindfulness.

The St. Benedict window, Shrewsbury Abbey, courtesy of Frankie Hartland

Maintain

Equilibrium

.

As you balance

Your being

.

Though juggling

Balls of fire

.

Grateful

For those moments

.

Of tranquil

Transition

.

Gliding through

Blue skies of peace.

For me, life sometimes feels like “juggling balls of fire”; Lif4Gd requires though “blue skies of peace”. But how do we find them?

Benedictine monks balanced manual labour with times of meditation and prayer.  There were set times of “doing” and “being”.  There was a regular rhythm to each day, a deliberate intent to maintain equilibrium.  And of course they understood their life from a cosmic perspective.

I start every day with a time of silence.  It helps put life in perspective.  It creates a space for reading, thinking, prayer. 

How do you maintain equilibrium and balance in your life?

Some Questions to Ponder

  1. Have you consciously created balance and equilibrium in your life somehow?  What did you do?  What could you do?
  2. When you focus on “being” and not just “doing”, how do you understand that “being”?  What framework do you use to think about life?

Do leave a comment if this post has made you think. Lif4Gd was set up to be interactive, and enjoy hearing readers’ thoughts.

Best wishes,

Michael

Love, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Attingham Park

What, or who, do you love? 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s wonderful poem “How do I love thee” was written to a man she fell in love with in her late thirties.  This post is all about places we love, and people in love…

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

(from Sonnets from the Portuguese)

I love the way this poem is so extravagant in the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning lists all the different ways her love manifests itself.  But maybe love is uncountable: ultimately you can’t quantify love.

Nearby to where I live in Shrewsbury is Attingham Park, loved by generations of owners, many of them happily in love whilst living there.  Its grounds include a deer park, and who can fail to love these gentle animals?

Lif4Gd must surely contain love for someone or something. Maybe we should approach each day in love?

Approach each day

in love

.

Love every minute

that creeps into the room

.

Love every hour

that glides outside

.

Love every day

that offers you life

.

 Approach each day

with love.

Some Questions to Ponder

  1. What do you think of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s definition of love?  Accurate / sentimental / idealistic / something else…?
  2. Would you like to share in a comment something you love?

Do leave a comment if this post has made you want to share something with other readers.

Best wishes,

Michael

Shopping for Wonder with William Wordsworth


Life brings the craziest of juxtapositions.  I was stunned by wonder recently – and it turned out I was just a stone’s throw away from a local supermarket! This post explores what we shop for – for daily groceries, or for daily wonder.  And my inspiring writer is a different poem by William Wordsworth, called “Lines Written in Early Spring”:

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—

But the least motion which they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of something so unusual it makes us stop in our tracks and becomes a truly memorable event.  I think Wordsworth must have had this experience to make him write this poem.  He felt linked with the natural world and it made him think what a mess we often make of the earth!

For me, I had the experience of spotting a very unusual wild bird on the Rae Brook in Shrewsbury – and it turned out to be just behind a local supermarket! It was the ever-excitable dipper (see my previous post Long Live the Wilderness with Gerard Manley Hopkins).  And this encounter got me thinking about shopping, and what we shop for.

A dipper

A wiser man than me said “Man cannot live on bread alone”.  But we often forget this, and food shopping, and consuming food, can become a central purpose of life.  But is this Lif4Gd?

Maybe we should be “shopping” for wonder?!  On the look out every day to be mindful of those special moments of beauty or meaning that give an extra purpose, perhaps even transcendence, to life.

This morning, as I drove to work past a local hill called The Wrekin, dawn was breaking and both Jupiter and Venus were clearly visible brightly hanging in the sky.  What could be more wonderful?

Jupiter

And Venus

.

Lighting

The sky

.

As if

They knew

.

A brightness

Hidden

.

From human

Sight

.

And I drove

In the darkness

.

As if my road

Lay away

.

From heavenly

Beauty

.

As if I had

Forgotten

.

An ancient

Primaeval

.

Ancestral

duty…

.

Some Questions to Ponder

  1. How much of your time do you spend shopping?  Is this Lif4Gd? 
  2. Is it possible to “shop” for wonder and beauty, perhaps increasing our mindfulness of what is around us?  Could that make Lif4Gd?

Do leave a comment if any of this has got you thinking! This blog is intended to be interactive, and I find it inspiring to follow up comments and suggestions from readers.

Best wishes,

Michael