Can you hear that blackbird singing in the pouring rain? There – he’s risen to a rooftop and is romancing the sun from its hiding-place. The bird is scaling the grey walls between resurrection and ascension. Its song curves beneath the rain. Now I see it – this song is my consciousness. Wherever we [...]
Continue Reading...In Shakespeare’s (and Faulkner’s) immortal phrase ‘the sound and the fury’ of existence threaten always to overwhelm us. So it was for the disciples in the fishing-boat when the storm raged and the master slept. Convulsions and upheavals have the run of the world. Similarly when evil appears to hold sway – when forces of [...]
Continue Reading...In tragedy, in epic, in comedy, in poetry, the soul twists and turns, waiting for the gyration which will produce happiness. The soul is a great republic which needs its benign rulership. Plato wanted to ban poetry from his ideal republic. This wasn’t because it was disturbing or subversive but because it stood, in his [...]
Continue Reading...The poem says it all. Then any commentary comes to seem superfluous. But here it is, in the nature of a conversation. Even to talk about spirit, higher truth, inner being, is an unwieldy process. We seem to wake up to words, in the morning, instead of to being. A stream of words – and [...]
Continue Reading...The word of resurrection hurts the ears. Somehow at this time of year – before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox – no matter what religion you are, something strains in you, in the hour before dawn, to know if it is going to be allowed to walk the [...]
Continue Reading...The sun is such an immaculate metaphor. It stands for nothing but itself. But in terms of human life its patterning needs much interpretation. There is no such thing on earth as pure sunlight, only the objects that diffuse it. Likewise there are those phases of day and life that creep around the idea of [...]
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