Posts on Contemplative themes
"To be a contemplative is to learn to trust deep time and to learn how to rest there and not be wrapped up in chronological time. Because what you’ve learned, especially by my age, is that all of it passes away. The things that you’re so impassioned about when you’re 22 or 42 don’t even mean anything anymore, and yet, you got so angry about it or so invested in it. So, this word “contemplation,” it’s a different form of consciousness. It’s a different form of time."
Richard Rohr
Mystery
Today some portraits, illuminating the mystery of endings. Leaves, lives, moments. Mysteries, Yes Truly, we live with mysteries too marvellous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stone are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two […]
Summer walk with a Cherokee
An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life… “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. “One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, […]
The wild and the blue
We mostly operate on auto pilot. While driving the car we go off into day dreams and don’t even know where we are sometimes. How is it we can’t remember what we were doing this time last year, or even last week? Auto pilot is our normality. We are always more aware on special days; when babies […]
Would you?
Would you be mad for that little speck of rainbow in the deep rain filled sky? Or this bush, with its brazen head of golden curls? And would you love how he made a fence from sawn up trees, lining them up on the ditch like children, posing for family snaps? And would you be […]
Once in a pinkish moon
This morning, the beauty of another day. Small things, coffee, toast, silence. And how amazing is fruit? Having choice? Banana or blueberry? Egg or beans……..? The sun in the east, the full moon setting in the west. The faintest pastel pink in the sky at the horizon. The same view but on a new […]
Mulling
It’s a time of the year for mulling things over. Today, in a lull, between rain storms, I stand on the shore in Annestown and feel the power of the sea overwhelm the questions I have queuing up from 2015. Like fragments of flotsam and jetsam they end up in flithers on the […]
Tiny dewy rainbows
Today I’m re-posting these tiny dewy rainbows from 2012. Would you like to join me in a moment of reflection? While we both take a slow deep breath? And while we continue to breathe, here are some explorations of contemplative photography practice And while I was breathing deeply I won Silver in the Blog Awards […]
There is human time and there is wild time
There is human time and there is wild time……. Clarissa Linkola Estes This morning it’s wild time. A slow motion sunrise, where nature’s spinners have draped everything in layers of lace. Barely present. Fragile and momentary. Later when the day fully arrives, dew drops are blow dried from the faces of leaves. Webs disappear […]
Those dark elements
You are on your knees in a lavender patch, following the music of bees. In the distance a harvester is droning, and the evening sun highlights wings and petals. You are obsessing about the need for a soft bed and a warm hearth as the autumn sets in; for a safe […]
