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.