Donna Ashworth

The poet Donna Ashworth hopes (in her own words) to “provide words that can be used everyday, as well as in those moments life hits hardest”. This particular poem made me think about the goodness of neutrality – the ordinary moments that may not be spectacular but are also not particularly difficult. Easy to overlook – but how wonderful it is in this moment to… not have toothache, for example, or to breathe freely without having a blocked nose! I’ve been glad at particularly difficult times where it felt hard to connect with something really good, to be able to relish the absence of particular challenges that would have made whatever was going on, harder still.

And the biggest one of all is of course the simple fact of aliveness. How very lucky indeed, to have another day of life!

PS if you’d like to wake up more to the wonderfulness of life, there is a new Mindfulness level 1 course starting before long, as well as a shorter course more focused on daily life, called the Wonder of the Everyday…

Photo by Jamez Picard on Unsplash

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner – what is it?

if not the intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

As with most of Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings, I’m left beautifully mystified and beguiled by this poem. Something in me recognises and resonates with the longing he describes and knows it as my own – stars, sky, outer space and inner homecoming are all mixed together in a pile of metaphors and feeling. I want to fall into the poem and fly freely there a night-bird amongst birds, wild in the air and wholly unseparate.
Rilke’s poems are often velvety dark and full of enigma and this is why I love them and this is why I feel reluctant to engage any analytics or thinking mind curiosity for this one. How is it to completely let go off making something of it and to just feel the impact of the words? Would you like to read it again with this orientation? Maybe you could imagine walking slowly into the poem as if it were a mountain lake (poet John Keat’s advice not mine!) and then just be there ‘letting it get amongst you’ as one Mystical Poetry course participant said the other day…………… How was that? What gift did the poem give you?

I love this by Hafiz (rendered by Daniel Ladinsky):

‘A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your parched, holy mouth.’

And this by Grace Cavalieri, host and producer:

‘Reading great poetry is like finding a breath on the page that’s your own.’

What do these two quotes offer you in how you might receive the poems in our Wonder Words blog?

Ps. Would you like to take part in a day long retreat dedicated to receiving poems like this? We have one coming up in November (book here) and one just before the new year which hasn’t been advertised yet.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

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I make my way back—

to the hickory floor beneath tired feet,
to the smell of sautéing garlic and onions,
to the soothing sound of end-of-summer
showers. Another season, another day,
slowing slipping away.

I close my eyes and listen
to the song that speaks about
how fast it all goes. And god,
how I want to be here for it. All
of it.

I need a thousand more years,
a thousand more ways to say thank you
for the wonder
of even this one
ordinary moment.

I will make my way back—

to the ground that holds me,
to the something
that stands still and tall inside
my own skin.

I promise to keep making my way back.

by Julia Fehrenbacher

I love how Julia Fehrenbacher captures both the ordinary moment in the kitchen as well as the expansive place of gratitude she’s taken to when pausing for an instant. It really captures the magic of mindfulness in daily life for me, how becoming present in any ordinary moment has the potential of opening the door to the preciousness of life that is so easily overlooked.

And it’s not about never losing that perspective, but about making our way back there again and again. It’s so worth it, for living our one wild and precious life as fully as possible…

PS if you’d like to bring more mindful awareness into your everyday life, there is a course The Wonder of the Everyday, as well as the Mindfulness level 1 – Being Present course to practice this alongside others, online or in person.

Photo by Harry Grout on Unsplash

Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.

Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.

by Rebecca del Rio

I don’t think I feel disillusioned, but my being gratefully drinks in this prescription to ‘come new to this day’, to ‘leave behind the stories of my life’. I have just arrived on Holy Isle for the Mindfulness for Life retreat, and the words of this poem somehow feel close to the invitation I feel from the island. They come from a book of poetry with the title Prescription For The Disillusioned by the American born Catalonian poet Rebecca del Rio, and I wonder what moved her to write them down in this way…

Landing on this island-off-an-island, there is a palpable sense of leaving behind what normally clouds my mind or weighs me down, and to look around with fresh or even astonished eyes. And while this may be easier to sense after a complicated journey of different modes of transport to mark the transition away from daily life, the principle applies just as much to each day, each meditation, each moment. What if we could remember more often to come new to the moment and to ‘live the life that chooses you’, rather than chasing after the chimeras of our preferences?

I really love that possibility, ‘live the life that chooses you’. I may not be so in touch with choosing the more difficult elements of my life: the unwanted pains in my body, the heartaches, the conundrums and losses, but  as they’re here, it’s clear that these are part of the life that chooses me. And I can choose to live it as gracefully as I can, to receive its sometimes capricious gifts and turn up for it fully – for as Rob Nairn said about the body: “We don’t have a spare one in the cupboard”. The one wild and precious life that chooses me, and you – let’s live it!

PS. If you’d like to give yourself the gift of a retreat to immerse yourself more fully in practice, there are many to choose from – and if you’re struggling to afford it, why not ask for some support?

Photo by 鷐 白 on Unsplash

by Brad Aaron Modlin

A couple of days ago I spent a whole day next to the beautiful River Monnow not far from where I live, in the most blissful solitude. These days solitude is something I long for more of, so sitting there by the river I felt myself melting and drinking it all in. When I first set off on my mini retreat I noticed anxiety at play in my chest – Will everything go ok back home? Where am I going? What will I encounter? So, for the first half hour my mind, body and heart were still staccatoing tightly at a high frequency. I found my spot on a tangled mat of roots inches from the flowing water, underneath weeping boughs of alder, and sat. And sat. And sat. And time stood still. I could have remained there indefinitely. The river gurgled and rushed, the sun sparkled and ran dapples across it, a grey wagtail bobbed by and then a kingfisher. Before long I noticed the anxiety had evaporated and I sank into a deep melody of being, staccato tightness gone.

Later I sat underneath a grand oak on a little ledge above the river. Again, I entered a flow allowing my awareness to rest into just being, enveloped in the solace of nature, vitalised by a gentle awe – I just loved the river. At some point a cockerel crowed from a distant farm, its voice carried free into the summer air. There was something about the sound of the cockerel crowing and of really being there to let myself experience it. I realised that over the past bunch of years I had not let this sound into awareness, even if I had supposedly heard it. My mind has been too preoccupied with a thousand and one things. It was as if every cockerel crow I had ever heard was held in a dream within this present one. And the bittersweet thrumming present touched deep into my veins and ran through me to flood my heart. I long to always hear a cockerel crowing in this way, free of the crush of inner and outer ‘stuff.’

In this moving poem I wonder whether Brad Aaron Modlin, a contemporary poet who teaches at the University of Nebraska, Kearney (find out more here), is saying something a bit like what I am trying to convey about my day by the river. There is something about the timeless span of the poem and its precious life lessons, reaching from now to that fourth-grade day and back. And there was something similar in that crow of the cockerel – as if all existence – both the beginning and end of it, had no beginning or end when encapsulated in a moment. It is something about living life mindfully, with humility and with feeling. It is about letting yourself be called towards what has meaning and soul for you. It is about allowing life to teach you of itself – the hard lessons and the good. It is about risking the significance of the moment and following through towards this and letting it be the way you live. And maybe it is about not getting lost in academics, technology, and stuff. And yet it is about getting lost – because we all do, and so finally it is about finding ourselves and each other and the world within an encompassing embrace of presence.

Ps. It’s not long until our next Mindfulness meets Mystical Poetry course begins on the 12th September. Sign up to enjoy the plethora of gifts that being with poetry mindfully has to offer towards living fully and with heart.

Photo by Jack B on Unsplash