The passing moment

There are certain experiences which cannot be shared, yet they number among the most exquisite moments of our lives. Fleeting and unexpected, they can lift us from a dark place, and remind us that sometimes the best company we can ever keep is our own.

I took a walk this afternoon by the Yarrow reservoir at Rivington. It’s a walk I know well, a circuit of about an hour from the village green, across meadows, along an avenue of chestnut trees, then up by the shimmering mirror of the reservoir. The sky was full of contrasts today, from a stormy grey, to a deep blue and then a luminous white, and the whole of it in flux, pressed into motion by a stiff wind. The sun was intermittent, warmish when it put in an appearance, but the day still requirde several layers of clothing to keep the heat in.

Under the sun, the colours were strong – the yellow heads of daffodils and the gorse almost aglow. The periods of sun were fleeting though, dogged at every turn by a sluggish overcast that rendered the land at once flat and cold, the colours muddy, the gorse and the daffodils winking out of notice – hopes raised, then dashed, then raised again. Walking alone, I kept an eye out for splashes of emotive light, or a pattern in the bark of a tree, or the curiously purposeful line of an old stone wall I might have walked past a thousand times, yet never noticed before.

The moments of pure light were too brief to capture properly with a camera. By the time I’d switched the thing on and focused, the land had breathed and the mood of it changed to something else entirely, but I persisted, fiddling with apertures and metering, and waiting patiently for the sun to come out from behind the clouds. There were few people about – I’m lucky having the flexibility in my working patterns to have these Friday afternoons to myself. I saw just one other walker out and about. We passed, heading in opposite directions, exchanged friendly nods and the north-country Owdo. Two men, each alone, each viewing the land in their own way, taking from it whatever jewels of imagination it offered them.

On solitary walks like this I can summon imaginary companions. At such times my pace slows, becomes meditative, and my conversations – not spoken aloud – can lead me into interesting depths of the psyche, or they can defuse knots of angst and stress. They’re not real, these imaginary entities, not spirits. I call them ghosts, but they’re more shadowy than that – daemonic in a way, or splintered parts of me I have lost along the way. But today was not one of those days. My Friday afternoon pace tends to be brisk, and I take the inclines at a rate that I can feel in the muscles, because I want to be stronger for the next time I tackle Ingleborough, later in the year. So I wasn’t trailing any ghosts today, nor expecting any moments of revelation.

It came as I was walking by the Yarrow. A period of muddy overcast lifted suddenly as the late afternoon sun was reflected in rippled cobalt waters, making starbursts through the still stark black branches of leafless birch and rowan. Then came a heavy shower, like glass rods through which the sun’s rays shone in cool shades of yellow and silver. I was arrested by it, transfixed by the light and the sparkling air, and mood of the moment. I didn’t even bother reaching for the camera, because I’ve been fiddling with cameras for forty years, and I know there are certain things a camera cannot capture.

Had anyone been with me, they would most likely not have seen or felt it quite the same way, and their presence would have subtly altered my relationship with reality, rendered me less sensitive to its moods so I might have missed that moment altogether. I alone saw it, I alone felt it, that moment, this afternoon, by the Yarrow reservoir. But it wasn’t me – it never is in such moments as that. I seem only to lend the universe my eyes so it might look upon itself and see its own beauty. I felt a shiver, knew I had experienced something good, something worth remembering. The moment passed, and I went on my way.

An hour later I was in town, among the cars and the shops, people buying stuff, people in cafes bent over their Smartphones, traffic wardens stealing up on haphazardly parked vehicles. I bought fresh valves for my leaky radiator and a length of hose to help drain the system down, tomorrow. But I’m glad I took a turn around the reservoir first.

Read Full Post »

The Way of the Soul Part 3 – Most Perfect Guru

The way of the soul is not without its pitfalls. It renders us vulnerable, not only to misguided avenues of thought, down which we might easily lose ourselves for years, but also to the pathological assumption that it is more likely someone else who can spoon-feed us the answers we are seeking. Indeed it seems preposterous to us that we might ourselves possess the ability to turn up that which we most need, at the time we need it, yet more often than not, I find, we do. As for time spent in misguided avenues of thought, it is never really wasted,  since all experience is potentially instructive.

Books are the main source of recorded thought on all things. From the mysterious Yi Jing of China’s Mythic Prehistory, to the work of latter day Transcendentalists and Romantics, there is a wealth of ideas now recorded for our perusal. The world of books becomes like an ocean for us to sail upon, to feel the tug of its tides and venture wherever we will. Of course books do not have all the answers, indeed I suspect the way of the soul is leading eventually to a wordless revelation of nature, but for our time “in being” books remain one of the pleasures of the solitary path of the soul. If we encounter one we do not engage with, we can always put it down. It may be that the book contains words that are not right for us, or that we are simply not ready to engage with them yet. We set it aside, we move on.

The other source of wisdom, more dangerous and less easy to disengage from, is the charismatic human being. With human beings things are not so simple, for when we gather into groups an uncertainty arises in our interrelationships, due to the fact we do not know what  others are thinking. Mind games commence, the complexity of which multiplies in proportion to the square of the number of beings involved. And amid all this complexity the simple fact remains, it is always the one to whom we surrender authority who will control the game, so we had better be sure in our choices. I was never any good at mind games, nor have I ever been comfortable trusting in the bona fides of others. It’s a misanthropic weakness perhaps but one to which many introverts are prone, and is the reason I walk a solitary path. It’s much easier for me, since the square of one is still one.

I have been following the trade winds of Tai Chi and Qigong for many years now, found myself a small, informal group with whom to practice, under the tutelage of a man who didn’t take himself at all seriously. He was not a guru, nor even a “sifu”, though he was more knowledgeable than many who style themselves as such. We laughed our way through the Chen Laoja, through the Yi Jin Jing, and the Shi Ba Shi – laughed for years. It was not what I had expected of such a group, thinking to find instead something more serene and straight faced, and a teacher more outwardly profound in his demeanour, a teacher I could indeed make into my guru. But it was not to be. Then the Goddess Shiva intervened, bringer of transformation through destruction, and we lost our training venue. The group is now scattered far and wide. I’ve been cast adrift too, searching for a new group to join, because I feel insufficiently self-motivated (translate as bone-idle) to maintain the practice  on my own.

My searches led me to a very beautiful old house on the edge of wild countryside, and to a group of photogenic beings with serene expressions and improbably white teeth, who I thought would suit me very well. It’s a kind of new age spiritual centre where they teach all manner of things, from meditation to organic gardening, and a kind of practical philosophy based upon Platonic discourse – indeed it strikes one as being every bit the contemporary mystery school. It was for a moment as if I had entered a dream and needed to pinch myself, that all was real. This place would suit me very well, I thought – very well indeed!

But before signing up, my intuition insisted I did a bit of background checking, and I began turning up the word “cult”. It seems that far from being a small, self-contained centre of peace and harmony, this little group is part of a much bigger, worldwide group who have been the subject of much controversy and bad press. There are accusations of brainwashing and abuse. This could all be the sour grapes of disgruntled former students of course,  but it makes one pause just long enough to reset one’s bearings. Any group so big it can court any amount of publicity in the national press sounds too big for my own liking. I feel chastened by the experience, that I could have been so entranced by the beguiling beauty of their online literature, while losing sight of my own intent, and purpose.

Without seeming immodest, I probably already know more about Tai Chi and Qigong than this group could ever teach me, yet I assume my knowledge is as nothing compared to what this oasis of the tinkling windchimes might possess. The path then becomes a kind of spiritual materialism, in which nothing satisfies us for very long. We are always looking for the next thing – the next book, the next method, the next guru.

But I am reminded that to seek knowledge of a spiritual nature, we are best guided by the one who knows us most intimately. We all know the voice of “the one”. It comes to us when we establish a uniquely personal relationship with that innate sense of the divine, with the Universe, with whatever name we want to give it. If we need knowledge, then it is right to seek it, either by reading up about a thing, or engaging the services of a teacher. But on the path of the soul we should remain mindful that it is always our own inner voice that guides us to our proper end, and that in the completeness of our being, we are each of us our own most perfect guru.

Read Full Post »