Author Archives: GracefulRock

A Hard One to Take?

The paradoxical relationship between the positive and the negative – it’s elemental in the Universe. Two sides of one coin; Ying & Yang. If someone can make you happy, they can also frustrate you. Those to whose feelings you’re immune to, wouldn’t be able to elate you either. This is ineluctable, coz it’s structural.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour…

Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine

William Blake “Auguries of Innocence”

Be Patient (and be gentle with the strangeness)

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms
and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The Guest House

On second reading this Rumi item feels a tad too heavy in rendering, not up to “the lightest touch” notch David Whyte once identified in good poetry. But it made me pay a revisit, so that’s something. 

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes 
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. 

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Free Will

It took a while

But it becomes rather clear now –

You couldn’t have done otherwise

I couldn’t have done otherwise;

It would have to take an entirely different universe for the otherwise to happen.

Aligning with

A line by a favourite poet:

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”

A Cosmic Joke

I was dead serious

It’s you who were deeply casual

And managed to flip it

What a cosmic joke;

I faked freedom

To be a Free Woman

You imposed responsibility

In your pursuit to be a Better Man

Neither enterprise was real

It’s a cosmic joke;

Am a sucker for beauty

You crave the same stuff

But worked yourself, unwittingly, into wanting

Something more acceptable and recognisable, more imaginable and foreseeable

And perhaps more commendable and even conceptually noble in your universe

What a cosmic joke!

We’re So Stupid

They say coronavirus

Is bad news wrapped in protein;

Then we’re

Scandal nourished at the cellular level

A cracking tale

Crippled by small-mindedness

Shrunk for need of oxygen in imagination;

If Covid-19 kills us all

I’d still repeat on my deathbed:

You’re stupid, I’m stupider, we’re stupidest.

On Being Certain

Had a certain aha moment on Bowen this evening.

We keep telling ourselves stories, we keep trying to convince ourselves, we’re OK (finally) and we’re getting on with it, because we’re driven to preserve a sense of integrity about ourselves. We need to know we’re heading towards somewhere. Or we just need to know. Otherwise it’d be despair.