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.