Starlings - Tom Langlands
Wings.
Shall you coo once more,
Sitting on coping stones
Above drooping peach leaves
Lit by a weary sun;
Bronze light lending warmth
To breast feathers, old bricks,
A hidden stone seat,
Where lovers once sat;
Silent now, just as alone,
Dove flutters, turns, flies away;
How I yearn to follow,
Beyond all walls.
Anne Micklethwaite.
OUT AND ABOUT
My friend and I, we drive around, As we drove up a wooded hill,
For adventure is our aim. Three fallow deer broke cover.
Journeying the hills and glens, Then they crossed in front of us,
On roads which have no name. Each one following the other.
One day when we were travelling, We saw a kestrel that fine day,
We saw an osprey on a wall. Hover high above the ground.
Then it rose up into the air, He dived into the grass below,
The most majestic sight of all. His prey had just been found.
A hare hopped out into the road, Alas, it’s late, we must go home,
It looked around with alarm. At the setting of the sun.
Seeing us, and in a hurry, But there will be another day,
It headed back onto the farm. Our adventure’s just begun.
We came across some guinea fowl,
Then pheasants, geese, and rabbits.
We also saw a herd of goats,
With the most peculiar habits.
John Newton
..............................
Being part of the Silence; an Epiphany with a Peregrine Falcon
It was the 27th February 2007, a lovely still late winter day of blue skies; in the morning I sat in a long meditation leaning against a flat rock above the sea, floating in dreamtime in the warm sunshine, and it was good to just be there. When I got up from my communion with all, relaxed and looking out over the rocks to the blue sky, suddenly out of nowhere a large Peregrine falcon came swooping low over the rim of the cliff about five metres away, coming straight at me, her eye fixed upon me, brushing the grass with her long wings. In a fraction of a second we were face to face, a mere few feet apart with her doing an amazing high speed stop in mid-air, shocked that I was not the lunch she expected, wings outstretched, tailed fanned out, every feather flexed to the full, a most dramatic encounter, literally electrifying! I felt sure she must hit me, but she turned at the last moment and vanished over the cliff edge on my right.
Ten minutes later I found her again, perched on the cliff top waiting for a better lunch to fly by. She was only twenty metres away from me, a fine sight and I stayed silent and unmoving watching her, but after a few minutes she possibly saw my bald head shining with the sunlight, or she just felt my presence, and was away again. The great birds are noble messengers according to the ancient traditions.
A few days later, in another sun bright noon time I returned to the place where I met the Peregrine Falcon. My purpose was to check the directions, following an interesting email exchange with my friend Cynthia Rose in Atlanta USA. She is half Native American and listens to the messengers of nature, and with the birds she always watches to see which direction they are coming from and where they are going to, because each direction has its own significance. The sun was warm and simply gorgeous, the light wind was cool and refreshing, today held nothing of winter, I loved it, two hours of bliss. And the meditation was extraordinary.
I had returned to exactly the place of our previous meeting, the Peregrine and I, and checked the directions; she flew towards me from the north, precisely from the north, across an inlet of the sea enabling her to swoop low beneath the rim of cliff where I was, and appear to me from nowhere at close to full speed. Five metres from my face this great long winged hunter of the cliffs and skies had appeared, her wingtips brushing the grass of the cliff edge, we were face to face for but a fraction of a heartbeat, hardly more than my arms stretch apart, and then she hurtled away, exactly towards the east. I stood with the noon sun throwing my shadow exactly north, and that is where she came from, and I stretched my right arm out to the east, and that is exactly where she went.
This is no accident, this is precision; so I leaned against the same smooth flat rock, and in meditation and asked my soul for the meanings of all of this. This is what my soul told me in my meditation, sitting in the bliss of the day; “the falcon was guided by angels to come with her message and they nudged her into seeing the top of your head as what she thought was prey, and she came like an arrow, like lightning, the last part of her dive was dipped below your line of sight as she swooped below the cliff rim, and crossed the bay still at full speed. She did not see you until the last moment as you stood up when she was crossing the bay, so the shock was absolutely mutual when she came over the rim and found you.”
She came to me from the direction of the house of wisdom and spiritual purpose, precisely from there, to tell me that my path comes from there, from a journey of wisdom with a spiritual purpose. My soul confirmed that this message is for me, and for me alone; how else could anyone interpret such a personal encounter with a totally wild creature, one which shuns even the sight of humans.
I asked my soul too about the message of the east, going precisely towards the house of enlightenment, is this where my path is leading me now? And my soul talked to me about the meaning of enlightenment. She said: “it is through the consciousness of the mind that you seek to become enlightened, and it is a fine state of being, it comes upon you when your mind accepts the divine truth, that love is the only way, and that indeed there is only love. This is another step along the path to becoming one with God again, and once taken there is no going back, this knowledge cannot become un-known again, and once known, each being will start the path to 'En-love-ment', to becoming love, and so all of you will one day come to perfect unity.”
She told me: “Your knowing is enlightened; you know absolutely that the path to love is the only way, that to become love is the way to God, you are there with that knowing, you are living that truth, that to become love is to become the divine that you are.”
She continued: “Enlightenment is but a step along the path to Enlovement, and your message brought by the Peregrine is about Enlovement which is the purpose of life, to bring yourself through into the realm of God, to become love in your heart, to live as love, to be love, and love is God, so when you are love, you are being your part of God, and this is God’s dream for you. You know this absolutely, it is who you are, you are becoming the love that God has dreamed for you to be.”
This is the message she brought me through that extraordinary moment beside the sea.
Bill Wigram
Pregnant Pause : Hazel Lowther
......part two of Donald Adamson's reflections
Edwin Morgan took up the challenge, responding to Tennyson with a poem of his own. I confess I prefer Morgan to Tennyson. His poem has wonderful sensual beauty, while all the time being aware of death, as a foe, as emnity, seeking to bring down all things animate, vital, creative. In its confidence there's defiance, an awareness of endings. It brought tears to my eyes when I first came across it. And still does. Every time.
At Eighty
Push the boat out, compañeros,
push the boat out, whatever the sea.
Who says we cannot guide ourselves
through the boiling reefs, black as they are,
the enemy of us all makes sure of it!
Mariners, keep good watch always
for that last passage of blue water
we have heard of and long to reach
(no matter if we cannot, no matter!)
in our eighty-year-old timbers
leaky and patched as they are but sweet
well seasoned with the scent of woods
long perished, serviceable still
in unarrested pungency
of salt and blistering sunlight. Out,
push it all out into the unknown!
Unknown is best, it beckons best,
like distant ships in mist, or bells
clanging ruthless from stormy buoys.
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