Monthly Archives: February 2025

My Daughter

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(how I love you)

You join up the dots of the stars my love

With your patterned impassionate being

Reflecting below what’s mirrored above

Rich-sequined your fabric of feeling

Casually spendthrift the joy that you’ve sewn

Causally spindrift, engagingly freed

Harvesting concepts, organically grown

Wittily warm anthropological creed

The gilded arpeggio of moonlight

Which butterfly soft-wings your thinking

Fritillary froth-daffled the insight

Of your Mesopotamian a-musing

disarmingly charmingly, conspiring

In a furnace of creative inquiring

A Winter’s Tale

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I find this poem from Dylan Thomas immensely comforting. It speaks with hope and glory of death and of his vision of rebirth.

Thomas wrote intensely about life of unity, relationality and process. In his introduction to Thomas’ Collected poems John Goodby puts it like this:

“According to the ‘process’ view of the world, we are not merely born to die, or even know that we are dying as we live; conception itself is a death, ‘the golden shot’ of semen ‘Storms in the freezing tomb’ of the womb. The embryo dies in being born into the world, and elbows other beings into the grave; but their deaths are, conversely, ‘entrances’ into the life of decay and re-entry into the natural cycle. Thomas horrifyingly compresses what is ordinarily drawn out, as if in some time-lapse film, while continually contracting and expanding a poem’s scale of reference from the microscopic to the cosmic. Fusing zygotes ‘unwrinkle in the stars’, ‘clocking tides’ pulse in the blood, manifesting the amoral ‘force’ which surges through the universe, and to which everything must submit. Linear time is yet another illusion; for Thomas it is as relative as anything else, and he finds equivalence between conception, gestation, adolescence and death in poems such as ‘From love’s first fever’. From cosmic flux to quantum foam, the only certainty is that there is no certainty: even energy is matter, matter energy, and time and space are spacetime”

We are together in no time

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Imagine

.. that there is no time. Rather perhaps, there is only all time. A rich and fertile landscape of meaning and sunlit connection.

This is the glorious loving immensity from which we cower within our fortress. Behind walls which we have fashioned from our insecurities, in our solitary confinement away from from all that is. Looking out from our our lonely turrets we see a long avenue which we call “the past”, and in the other direction a hazy road named “future”.  Both of these vistas appear to fragment at distance. The past appearing as a river with many tributaries dissolving into mists,  the future fanning into possibilities that shiver with terror, excitement and danger.

Imagine

.. that you step outside the walls that we have built. There are no roads, no journey, no loneliness and nothing to fear. All is now in the embrace of every present. Every way, always.

Loss and separation? These do not exist. All of our mothers, daughters and sons are here with us. And all of theirs withall. Here, close within my heart. And I am with them. It is separation and loneliness and fear that seem odd, from this perspective outside the prison that our body’s ego has made.

A new question arises within me.

Since I am part and also a-part, what is this boundary that distinguishes but also enjoins? This division that falls away on blessed occasion so that we are at home with each other. If that is the question, here is a prayer. Let these moments gather and coalesce so that I feel our ocean rather than the raindrop within which most often I have lived.

Dialogue, Love and Joy

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The great existentialist philosopher – Martin Buber – speaks about dialogue and distinguishes it from love. I have included some quotes at the end of this note from his 1929 essay “Zwiesprache” (Dialogue) below, together with a short note about Buber and Jesus.

Here is my thought

Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two stranges glance at each other in passing. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; that is, become as fully aware of and in sympathy with your neighbour as you are with yourself. This perhaps also applies to Jesus’ second injunction about how we should love God (with all our heart).

Are these two commandments a call to dialogue?; so that we become fully aware of, and turned toward our neighbour. This is something one could then practice, something similar to mindfulness. I have always wondered how you could just conjour up “love” as a feeling, an affect. There are so many of us now who do NOT love ourselves. How then can we ‘love another as ourself”?

Whereas perhaps we can more easily practice becoming fully aware of our neighbour. That might indeed be the road to love; a Love which is the joy that I believe underlies all creation.

As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.

Buber quotes

Three types of dialogue. In his 1929 essay Buber describes dialogue as genuine meeting with full awareness. He developed this later (I and Thou,1937) into a whole philosophy of relation; where all meaning is contained in the relationship between (zwischen) people and the “other”. Here is the first quote:

“There is genuine dialogue – no matter whether spoken or silent – where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need for objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources.”

Dialogue and love. In the second quote he distinguishes between dialogue and love:

“I know no one in any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct relation. Dialogic is not be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and company in with the other, the love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer”

Buber, Zionism and Jesus. Buber was an intellectual Hasidic Jew. He was a lifelong Zionist, but who strongly disagreed with how the new state was constituted. He thus refused to become the first president of Israel. He “favored a binational state that encompassed and honored both Jewish and Arab ethnicities, and centred on mutual love and respect. He believed that Jesus was the greatest of all Jews and that his message was the flower of judaism. He describes Jesus thus:

“from my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother”

T

Little Gidding

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The final part of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, which brings us through the pain of death to the place where “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well… when the fire and the rose are one”.

It seems to me that all is already well. It is our ego which traps and deceives us into loneliness. When that is done with, then so is our separation from all-that-is and each other.

This I believe, having experienced this in flashes. If we set aside our cynicism, have we not all? In the moments when boundary disappears between our trapped self and nature, God and each other. The french call this “le petit mort”, for instance…

The Dry Salvages

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This penultimate poem in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets points to meaning, that lies in “the intersection of timeless with time”. Most of us only glimpse this in fragments of epiphany. These are what Eliot calls “the moment in and out of time” such as “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts”. These are the same flashes of insight to which Martin Buber refers in his 1937 book “Ich und Du” (I and Thou), where boundary dissolves and we feel joined to each other, nature or spirit.