Life Irrepressible

 

This  poem captures the struggles of flowers like this brilliantly, and also the struggles of lichens which I have referred to before. It's from a book called Campfire of the Heart, by Noel Davies. Wish I'd written it.

Life irrepressible

green shoots on charred lives

tears that break a drought

a tree rooted in a sheer rock face

grass, its will to thrive

breaking through new bitumen

weeds along the path

that continue to flourish

in the cracks

long after you and I

have passed by

Some fell upon stony ground

Poppy seeds, smaller than grains of sand, lodge in cracks and stay in their tomb until the spring rains wash away the stone of their dormancy and they rise in glorious colour.

Seaweed-eating sheep at the top of the world

These are some of the seaweed-eating sheep of North Rondaldsay mentioned in the last posting. Flocks are owned by islanders, kept for their wool and meat. They are restricted to the beach area by a thirteen kilometer stone wall (dyke), built around the whole island, where they graze on the abundant seaweed washed ashore in storms; this apparently gives the flesh a characteristic taste. Only at lambing time are the ewes brought into the fields to graze on richer feed.
The sheep are thought to have been on the island for thousands of years and are a pure strain of the ancient Neolithic Soay variety. They are quite small and have a wild playful look about them, a bit like goats, and coarse wool in a range of colours. The ewes all lamb within a few days of each other (these were due to lamb within a few weeks), a sign of their close genetic ties and unbroken line of descent. The images show their squat little bodies and skinny legs and the wonderful shades of their wool - they look as ancient and at home as the granite lichen-covered rocks.
Many animal owners on Orkney islands and on Shetland keep their stock inside great barns from about November until March, but the North Ron farmers I spoke to were disdainful of this practice. The seaweed-eating sheep stay in the wild all year round, as apparently do the beautiful Aberdeen Angus cattle that are also kept on the island. The conditions, I gather are a bit tempered by the Gulf Stream.

It is an interesting experience to follow sheep tracks in the sand and glimpse sheep in the shallows and amongst the rock pools, as if they are going surfing, and to see them scampering away along a sandy beach, and clambering like goats up rocky cliffs.
The third image shows their field at the top of a cliff, with the vast North Sea stretching away forever in the background.
 

Ask the Sheer Silence

I asked the wind,
whose breath hovered over the first waters,
how to pray
and it sang a  sparkling, starlit song.

My soul trembled
when I questioned the quaking earth,
And the stone rolled away from my heart.

Volcanoes and cascading waterfalls
poured forth hidden treasure
from within.

Leaves aflame with splendour
danced and leapt their reply
when I questioned the burning bush,
and I was consumed.

A pillar of cloud at dawn
danced too, and swirled its answer:
An eddying joyous unknowing.

I asked the sheer silence
how to pray,
and it answered,
in silence.

Gabby Dean 2010

The image is of seaweed-eating sheep on the beach on North Ronaldsay. Why this image?  The blending of the sea and sky and sand and water colour wash of shades... It is impossible not to hear the sheer silence, impossible not to pray in this place.  

The dark blooms and sings

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry from Farming: a Handbook

The image is of black cockatoos swarming and screaming in early autumn, Perth 2010, excited at the prospect of the coming cooler weather.

The Place of Dangerous Clarity

Beware

when you pass through a gate of quiet

and enter into a place of stillness.

Know you are at risk,

that you never re-emerge unscathed. Never!

You may return fierce and hungry for justice, a passionate lover, a

surprise to yourself, a risk taker, seen as a trouble maker. You may

emerge a seeker

seeking ever to open to each moment's invitation.

You may be invited to be generous with what you most cling

to, bold in ways you have never been,

dared to take that step you feared the most,

speak out your truth and have it prized or criticised,

live your life the way you have always wanted to

and never dared, say yes to being you.

Know that place of stillness grows an inner trust

and becomes in time a place of dangerous clarity.

Beware!

Noel Davis

Campfire of the Heart

Photos were taken at the top of jagged cliffs near the Tomb of Eagles, a chambered cairn, on South Ronaldsay, Orkney. Breathtaking views, and giving a vivid picture of life and death on the edge of the world.  Edge places are, for me, places of dangerous clarity, but I suspect I haven't made more than the most elementary steps into that danger or that clarity. 

A Marvellous Hidden Smile

Your smile lights the clouds and drenches all the earth
with warmth and love and laughter.
I was with you at the beginning of the world
And delighted in you as you delighted in me.
Let me delight today in the wisdom I find in all of creation
Even those I don't expect.
Let me delight today the warmth and love and laughter in all creation.
Gabrielle Dean 2011

(A marvellous hidden smile is an expression Esther De Waal has used about God, to counter ideas of a solemn disapproving God. John O'Donohue says that 'prayer should be a wild dance of the heart')




These images were taken on the way from Inverness to Fort William. A constant delight in Scotland is the way the sun will alight on one mountain among the many stacked in front and behind, bathing it in gold and silver and leaving the others in darkness. As if that very mountain, at that very time has been chosen to 'shine as a light in the world to the glory of God'. Or that very mountain has decided that very day to stand in the Light.

Everything I know I learnt from bees

Keep busy and you will find treasure in hidden places
Look for beauty and you will drink the nectar of life
Take what you need and given what you have in return
Dance to show others where to find the treasure, the beauty and the nectar.
Gabrielle Dean 2009

"We are the bees of the invisible." Rainer Maria Rilke

Christmas Ball Plant

 

These perfect spheres start from almost-invisible, but perfectly spherical specks, and grow to become so heavy that they lose their shape and fall back into the pool. After that they join other drops and form rivulets, streams and rivers and eventually merge with the great ocean. Forming and unforming, becoming whole and losing wholeness, dying and rising.

At the edges of the world

Another image of an edge, this time of the edge of a sheer and very tall cliffs near the Tomb of Eagles on South Ronaldsay. I clamboured all over the rocks (not something I would try on a day of high winds!), and sat for a long time being bombarded by worried sea gulls that nested in the cliffs.
I love the freedom of this gull's flight, defying gravity, playing on the updraughts, touching the  heavens with its wings.
















 When you see the gulls' 'home', you can imagine the temptation to leap out into the ether (where else is there to go?)




















And it reminds me of the poem High Flight, by Pilot Gillespie Magee

O, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the sky on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of  - and wheeled and soared and swung
High in sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew -
And while with silent mind I've trod
The untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Heaven at the top of the world

This is where I spent a few days of heaven.  North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island of Orkney was shrouded in mist when I arrived. We'd been held up for over four hours at Kirkwall Airport, waiting for the fog to lift there. The little six-seater plane uses those old things called eyes and compasses to navigate, and on North Ron, landing can present a problem if the pilot can't find the airport! As it is it seems to barely skim the road and dry-stone walls that thread everywhere throughout the Scottish countryside, a testament to a gruelling life on the land.

The Bird Observatory guesthouse sits atop a cliff but following an easy path to the beach I saw the world stretching out before me into the vast nothingness of the ocean. I stood for ages gulping in the salt-saturated air, drinking in the muted wash of sand-ocean-sky -  seemingly  indistinguishable but actually showing water-colour clarity to eyes attuned to subtlety -  after weeks in a land of such delicacy of shades  your whole view of nature softens and melts.

I walked for miles and miles along the beach, surprising red-legged water birds that feasted on the bounty of sea creatures in the sand and seaweed, and seals bobbing curiously along a safe distance from the strange two legged animal on their territory. 

The mist increased at one stage to make the way even more obscure and the colours even more mute, and at times there was no break between sky and sea, between heaven and earth.  The two were one, and I was there!

There is some place in my inner landscape that responds to such solitude, such oneness of land, sea and sky. It's to do with seeing edges dissolve, categories melt, and with seeing myself so clearly as a part of everything. Not the major, integral, important part that my ego tells me I am, more the place where I know my ego can disappear and I can enter into the all-ness of the moment.

Mystical Response

I have been reading so much about the mystical 'way' of responding to God or encountering God through beauty, that this little formula for a mystical 'limbering up' or practice came to me yesterday.

Gaze at the stars and marvel at their beauty;
Ask the darkness to enfold you, and feel its velvet embrace;
Let your heart dance to the flames and sparks of a fire:
know that the warmth you feel is from the dance and from the fire.
Do these steps again and again, until you are the dance and the fire;
Do them again and again until you are the stars and the embrace
And the beauty.

St Augustine said something a little bit along these lines, but in more length and greater detail and much more gloriously:
Question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air amply spread around everywhere; question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars, question the sun making the day glorious with its bright beams; question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays;
question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on land, that fly about in the air; their souls hidden, their bodies evident; the visible bodies needing to be controlled, the invisible souls controlling them. Question these things. 
They all answer you, 'Here we are, look; we are beautiful.'  Their beauty is their confession.

That's a wonderful confession!

The image is of water patterns in the sand on a beach on North Ronaldsay, Orkney April 2010.

Parallel Universes

On Good Friday at the service to mark the Hour of Jesus' death - a very sombre service - we noticed that a little mouse was coming out from underneath the black cloth draped over the cross and nibbling on the bread that had been left, with the wine, at the foot of the cross for the vigil.  The bread consisted of pieces of big flatbreads. At one point the mouse was pulling on a half circle about five times its size, at other times nibbling smaller morsels.

When we were invited to bring to the cross those things which we wanted to die to, I could imagine the mouse cowering in the black cloth, listening to the thunderous treads on the wooden floor and feeling it shake.

It didn't take away from the solemnity and meaning of the moment;  (as George Bernard Shaw said: 'Life  does not  cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.)

At the Maundy Thursday vigil, the mouse was also present, watched closely and with great interest by the rector's cat. This cat is pleasantly plump, being supplied with dry food by at least one parishioner, so she didn't pursue the hunt on this occasion.

Altogether a frightening time in the mouse universe and I heard the mouse praying after the service and record its prayer of petition and thanks herewith.

O Invisible Source of all Life,
You spread a table for me in the presence of my enemies,
and though the ground shook and the thunder roared,
I thank you now for this time of peace when I may feast on your goodness.
I thank you too for deliverance from the snare of the hunter - the fish-breathing she-lion;
I thank you for the woman who fills the lion with good things
That she may not have need of me.
I ask that your bounty be made freely to me all the days of my life,
Not just for three days in April.
I ask that the cup be filled to the top, that I may also drink of that.
I give you thanks for thy feast that fills the hungry with good things;
I thank you too for fullness of wife (and young). Amen

The attached image, called "Fullness of Wife", is of a bandicoot with a very large pouch, (feasting on pieces of bread and a chicken bone so that I could get up close to her with the camera). Regular visitors to my garden here in Perth, these bandicoots eat almost anything - dry cat food is a particular favourite. The baby in her pouch would be almost ready to emerge and fend for itself (if it doesn't fall victim to cats)

Becoming

Emerging from the darkness - the protection of a womb, a cocoon, a pouch, a pod - into the light. We make the journey, not just once but every day if we're lucky and we're open to newness. There's something about the emerging of each flower on a grevillea spike that speaks to me of the journey of becoming - starting first from a little furry bud, then arching out those audacious stigmas.

This is a little poem I wrote a few years ago, if something this tiny can be called a poem:

Open to joy
I come each day
to a landscape full of wonder.
(July 2007) 

Those who carry the vessels of the Lord

Those who carry the vessels 

of the Lord

are those who undertake,

in reliance on their way of living,

to draw the souls of their neighbours

to the everlasting holy places.

Gregory the Great

Easter Rising

He rises clothed in the young colours of dawn
John O'Donohue

The young colours of another dawn, a year ago in Orkney. A boat anchored in the bay, waiting to 'cast its nets on the other side', the black shadow of a rook in the shape of a cross.

Simple Enjoyment

Thomas Aquinas said that 'Contemplation is the simple enjoyment of the truth'. I am reading about reclaiming the mystical way, and this elegant line resonated for me. It is like an icon that I can keep on looking into and discovering more. And enjoying.


More and more I am aware of the inadequacy of language to express my experience of soul, God, mystery, the Divine Imagining. And yet I love language and can't resist trying to frame my experiences in it.  But maybe it's one reason I've become so obsessed with photography, as each image is an icon, each image holds a truth, many truths. The truths I find will be partly informed by my context when I took the photos, but that won't stop others from finding their truths. Maybe that's what's so amazing about icons - so much truth to be found.

The book I am reading is Both Alike to Thee - Reclaiming the Mystical Way by Melvyn Matthews. Reclaiming it for the Church, for us, but also reclaiming mysticism from trendy, New Agey shallowness.

The images this time are of silent prayers at St Paul's, Beaconsfield, WA, and sycamore branches (with rooks flying overhead) at dawn in Orkney in April 2010.

Lichen, reindeer and me

Beauty shines forth in so many places and things. But I wonder who else sees beauty in lichen, apart from lichenologists and reindeer, that is? And me.

Dogged, with teeth-gritting determination, ekeing nourishment from barren cracks and crevices and bringing life and colour to wintry ledges, lichen are the mininmalists of plant music, the extreme athletes of extremophiles, to mix a few metaphors.  These qualities alone fill me with wonder, but it's the variety and patterns of lichens that paint the thousand words I feel. Colonies of tiny white discs with little indentations in the middle - a little like corpuscles - flatten themselves against rock surfaces, others tuft and crackle from a central point and form knobs and cups on the ends of brittle death-grey stalks, still others radiate like pressed flowers of gold and ocre.


Lichen clings to gravestones and ancient standing stones - in the midst of death there is life, to rephrase the Book of Common Prayer - and their grey-green wisps tuft dryly on fence-posts, like bristles on a witch's nose.  On more sheltered ledges and crannies, varieties of species nestle, forming little garden communities - if octopuses had gardens on land, I'm sure they'd be lichen gardens, as the sea creatures would feel right at home amongst the coralescent textures that spike forth.










Their communities celebrate the struggle for survival - to survive they need nourishment and they can live alone, but they thrive in the company of others. And while belonging is positive, it isn't necessarily easy. There's tension at the edges of our spaces - a bristling neighbour, a spiky friend, a flat and sullen acquaintance - but together we survive and thrive, we shine forth and 'spike forth', like lichen.

All of the images were taken on Orkney last April. The standing stone is at the Ring of Brodgar on the 'mainland' (main island), while the octopus' gardens are on North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island of the group.

Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl 

of great price, the one field that had 

treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it.

(The beginning of 'The Bright Field', by R.S. Thomas, quoted in the previous post)

The image was taken at Loch Lomond, on a sparkling day in April last year, just as the Iceland volcano stopped flights to and from Europe and delayed my return to Australia for a week. How sad.

Turning Aside

 

Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after 

an imagined past. It is turning 

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

From 'The Bright Field', R.S. Thomas

These images greeted me a year ago on Orkney. The sun seemed to laugh the day into life, painting the clouds with ocre and purple and dusting the sky with gold leaf and indigo.

'You make the gateways of the morning and evening shout for joy.' Psalm 65:8

Trinity

I took the image 'Trinity' or 'Clouds of Glory' that is in the previous post on a Sunday morning in March, when Cyclone Carlo was poised off the coast of Western Australia. We are desperate for rain, and hoped Carlo would bring us some - not destructive winds or floods the eastern states have had, just a day of soft, soaking rain, the kind we used to have.

The morning was quite dark, the clouds rather menacing, but such a magnificent display that I had to break out the new camera that was sitting beside me, asking to be used.  I took a number of shots from slightly different angles and was pleased I had captured the shapes and shades and angles of the clouds.

It was not until I got home and uploaded the photos onto the computer that I noticed that one of them had caught the three waterbirds heading east into the rising sun, their wings forming three crosses on the turbulent clouds.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words

It’s not the technology or negotiating the instructions: anyone who starts a blog must know that the hardest part is deciding what to call it. What element of my identity do I want to highlight? Do I want to be wildly original so that readers will be intrigued to visit?  Or is it just a place for me to dwell in cyberspace, and for the few who may stumble across it?

My first thought for a title was ‘Fearfully and Wonderfully Made’, a fragment of the beautiful and evocative Psalm 139. It seems such an affirmation of the human person, an awed sense of wonder at ourselves and whatever made us, for everything is fearfully and wonderfully made, with an intricacy that astounds and takes my breath away. The psalm continues: 'You have searched me, O Lord, and know me' - to be so thoroughly known by whatever I conceive that to be: whether I call it God or the Ultimate Mystery, or whatever, being known means being utterly accepted and loved.

My second idea was a favourite line from a poem, but which poem, how to choose? e.e. cummings‘ ‘leaping greenly spirit’ seemed apt for how I view the world:

"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes."

Then there’s my passion for photography, which is a major reason for setting up a blog, and I thought of some of the titles I have given my photos. The one I have attached I called on one occasion ‘Trinity’, for the three water birds heading into the eastern risen sun; another time I called it ‘Clouds of Glory’* to draw attention to the spectacular cloud formation that looks like great balloons of water waiting to burst upon the parched Perth summer soil.  But that does sound a bit pretentious to be the name for my space, and one wouldn’t want to sound pretentious, would one?

Naming the blog is a glimpse at how I see myself and a chance to name some quality that I feel reflects me. It’s probably lucky then, that many of my postings will be photos – each one will save me a thousand words. Now there’s a good name…….

Gabrielle, April 2011

*From a verse of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:  

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,  

Hath had elsewhere its setting,  

And cometh from afar:  

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come  

From God, who is our home.