Tag: philosophy

I lie on my back and watch the clouds, squinting at the glare – blue sneaks through and the sun catches me.

Clouds like thoughts passing

Like thoughts there are layers – the lower layers of cloud pass more quickly, trotting past while the larger, mature clouds above seem to sit and ponder. Yet when I close my eyes for a few moments and open them again, the scene has changed beyond recognition. A blue sky with scraps of wool and tiny swirls of white, lies above me – where did all those clouds go? Where did all those thoughts go?

And now it’s hot. I sit up and see a tangle of butterflies hovering and flitting over a lavender bush nearby.

They drop and twirl
    float and catch
       those butterflies like my thoughts
          drawn by the sweetness of a spire of lavender

then distracted by another,
     lifted by the breeze,
          spinning in the light.    

All this air around us

All this space that we don’t account for because we experience it as having no colour, no solidity.

We walk through,

We see through;

Without that air, that space, we’d be locked in, locked up, trapped and dead.

I feel so gloriously grateful for this space between, that I cannot touch, cannot see, cannot smell, yet it gives me life.

What about the space where thoughts appear? The great sky of awareness?

The thoughts flit, ponder, twirl and hover, or like clouds, bring heaviness or rain. Sometimes they wounds us,but they do all pass. Like the butterflies and the lavender bush and the bugs landing on my arms they give colour and weight and interest but it’s all the space in between and around that lets me see them. It is the space that allows me to respond.

Quiet for the mind is like sky to the clouds – Give it plenty – glorious, rolling miles of it, tonnes of cubic metres of it.

Give those thoughts space to roll and skitter, 
    thunder and threaten, 
        gather and scatter, or 
             disappear leaving a fresh brightness.  

They are always gathering and scattering, 
     heavy clouds passing, blue sky piercing 
        and behind them all is always 

Awareness, clear and wide, beautiful and boundless.

Lie on the grass. Look up. Watch the clouds pass. See all the space between and know that it is not the space that is ‘in between’ but us, the clouds, the butterflies, the lavender bush that intersperse this space. The space was there before us, will be there after us, encompasses all.

Mary Oliver, I bow to your poem of the One World.

Poem of the One World, by Mary Oliver (from ‘A Thousand Mornings’)

This morning
The beautiful white heron
Was floating along above the water

And then into the sky of this
The one world
We all belong to

Where everything
Sooner or later
Is part of everything else.

Which thought made me feel
For a little while
Quite beautiful myself.