Noticing

…Christmas

Seems a good time, Advent, to bring something spiritual to the Substack table. A little feast of thoughts and ideas. Some sweetmeats to delight in, nibble on and digest. Advent, the beautiful period of waiting, reflection and anticipation. A time to stop and think ‘what’s it all about.’ The approaching end of a tumultuous year in which we’ve witnessed great change, ugly turmoil and global human desperation. Where’s the joy? It’s still there.

I started a new book called Come into the Silence. It’s a study book based on Thomas Merton teachings and wisdom, to use over a 30 day period with an intention of opening a spiritual gate. This has been a motivation for me over perhaps the last 24 years. The pursuit of silence, God’s original language, the nurture of my soul and the building of spiritual muscle. Possibly the most neglected muscle in our bodies, in our times. The first two days in the book have both stirred up a fairly deep response, unexpectedly. I’ve read quite a bit of Merton in the past - my early teacher on the spiritual journey I’m making. Always valuable, always provokes something from you. Like shucking an oyster from the shell, his words and wisdom are tools sharp enough to prise open, dig into places hidden, they have the power to reveal and loosen.

As I’ve aged I keep thinking that surely I must nearly ‘be there’, wherever ‘there’ is and of course I’m not. There is no there. This is a life long pilgrimage and the many travellers who have walked with me have all contributed to lighting the way. The Bible, James Finley and Richard Rohr, St.Francis, St.Therese of Avila, St. Catherine of Sienna, Rumi, Krishnamurti, Osho, Thich Nhat Hahn, Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira, Jo, Liz and Penny, Judy, Mell and Sharon. Eddie, Judith, June. It feels such a privilege to have access to their brilliance, each one has been instrumental in shaping this ‘thing with feathers’ called my faith. Now here I am, once again, almost back at the beginning with Merton. Have I come full circle? The answer is no, the path is winding, deviates often, with corners and steepness, with hard climbs, slippery downhills and the occasional clear straight road. Sometimes an ‘old friend’ is just around the bend, as with Thomas Merton, my companion again for this particular moment of now. My own position has changed and who my fellow sojourners meet is both the same and different. Their wisdoms resonate in a fresh way, find a place to nestle and grow in the seed bed of my heart.

I read this morning:

‘We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul. . . .’

The word ‘froth’ impacted upon me - it feels a lot like so much of what life is made up of…. The word ‘waste’ was also framed around watching ourselves living rather than actually living…think about it. In contemplation of the passages for today I looked at our Christmas tree, a thing of beauty and huge delight. Without any added celebrity, it was more than enough, but tradition has us dress things up and so it takes on a very different personality. It’s gay, in the original sense of the word. That’s ok. It’s ready to celebrate and party. No less lovely, but I found myself looking and seeing the only elements that really matter. The tree itself and half a dozen decorations. There are many beautiful things on our tree and I love them, but the 4 decorations our children made at primary school, my mother’s ancient pink glass bell and two little paper angels our granddaughters produced a year or two ago, are the star cast in a theatre of froth.

It moves me to tears. These tender, fragile things contain such a deep energy of the humans who held them, made them, gifted them. They will turn to dust…eventually, but for the moment, in this present now, they signify love, relationship, connection. They are here and so am I. All that matters in the grand scheme of things. So much of life is spent on the ‘dressing’. Even as I applied my face for the world this morning, something I enjoy and experiment with daily, I could see that a great deal of my time has been spent on the ‘froth’. It’s so habitual to my nature now that finding what’s real can be a challenge. I’m so glad you’re here. Reading. Listening….

I know there will be those out there who may feel that this is ‘over thinking’. I would counter that with how much synthetic material makes up the content of life today? The programmes we watch, the clothes we wear, the political dogma, the food we ingest, the medications, all processed in a way that removes the fundamentals, the absolute real and delivers something recognisably inauthentic. I am as guilty as the next of buying in to it.

As an example, Chris van Tulleken, a TV medic, has produced a mass of research on the processed food industry and the subtlety of it’s inveigling. The research and thought that goes into the sounds our food makes, through chemical modification, food sounds are artificially ramped up in the product to ensure that the first bite is irresistible. Just enough crunch which dissolves into the softness of nothing, meaning we don’t have to bother to chew. We become lazy about chewing, our jaws and teeth become weaker as a result. We actively seek the easy option because all of our sensory needs are being met with the least effort from us. Dissolve and swallow. We become ‘ultra processed people’, the name of van Tulleken’s book. Such attention is applied by the manufacturers to every sensory detail in the food processing industry, millions of pounds is spent on researching the element that will hook us into wanting more and we wonder why obesity has become such a problem and on such a scale.

So, too, with the clothing industry. Natural fibres: wool, cotton, silk, linen, are becoming almost beyond the average purse. Manufacturers are encouraged to use waste plastic in the production of our clothing especially when produced in poorer countries where the human cost is horribly exploited - child labour, poor wages and our dumped waste contribute to this sad tale. Change and development are a necessary part of our evolution, but are we getting rid of the baby with the bath water? We seem to have dispensed with the original genius of the natural and supplanted it with the unnatural. Even sweet, young faces are being tweaked, plumped and filled with toxic matter, through a discontent with what’s actually there and a misguided belief that they can improve on it.

I am by no means finished with the frills and furbelows, but I know there is a fundamental longing inside me for the authentic that can’t be ignored. My meditations drive this further. Not just a search for the real self, for God, for silence, but for the genuine, the veritable and true. We can’t go back and neither should we, but I so wish I could dump some of the synthetic and really live with true colour, (see the Robin). Return to a palette that isn’t fake, hyper and visually disturbing. To strip out those chemical imitations which are so uber shiny, adding a veneer of unnecessary gloss, scratch it and it’s gone. Perhaps Christmas, the Christmas story and Advent are the perfect time to explore and relish what really matters. Enjoy the frivolous, but underpin it with enough genuine substance to guarantee we meet, masks off, and love each other beyond the eggnog and tinsel. Wishing you enough, till the next time and leaving you with a Mary Oliver poem that fully captures my own spirit. Where ‘fancy’ is something real. Enjoy.

A

This World

by Mary Oliver

Original Language English

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we're not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.