At the Centre of the Compass

For a small bird, who gave up his life that mine might begin.

From time to time, across my life, as I have described it, there have been very big questions. And most of those questions have been ones centred on my spiritual tradition.

Each of us is born into a spiritual tradition in one way or another.  While many of us have never seen the inside of a temple or church or mosque, yet the societies in which we live draw their structures and mores from a tradition. Western society in general is based upon a Christian ethic with laws founded in ancient Rome.

I was been born into Christianity. I experienced it in the womb, as my mother carried me to church, and I overheard the priest whenever she went. His words ( there were no women priests in  New Zealand in the 1950’s as far as I am aware), would have carried through the walls of the womb and down the umbilical cord to me. Since her experience of the service she attended would have impacted upon her emotions and hence the chemicals circulating in her bloodstream, the Christian tradition was literally in my blood. It was fed to me for the time I was carried by her, and no doubt reinforced when she took me, newly born, along on a Sunday.

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Morena:

A number of you asked to see  our  South African wedding ceremony, so it is posted here.

Heather found the ceremony out in the  (Internet) wild were inspired to adapt parts of it. The individual texts were brought to the ceremony by each ofthe peoplewho read them.

We wrote our wedding vows apart from each other , then incorporated them into the ceremony. They thus represent what each of us felt towards each other and the journey we were about to undertake.

Having had the joy and honour of its use, we would like to re-release it into the wild for the use of anyone who may want to use/adapt copy it.

It goes with our blessings.

whano, whano

Hara mai te toki

Haumi e, hui e

tai ki e.

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Macrocarpas, Waipapa Point

Of late my photographs have come as stories I write to myself (but then they always have). Of late those stories take some time to walk in the door, often trailing the image by weeks or even months. I will make the photograph, usually from a non-place, what Miyamoto Musashi refers to in his book The Book of Five Rings as the Void, that place where one lets go, where one photographs from intuition, where one allows all the years of training and practice to work from the subconscious, so that one is clear to respond to whatever presents itself, to whatever speaks. To be able to do that, it is important to put in the time, to practice until the mechanical aspects become unconscious, so that the soul is free to listen to whatever is asking to be heard.

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Pukaki 1

I wonder how many of us spend time exploring ourselves and why we do things. I wonder how many of us spend time looking at our own journey and the direction our life has taken.

I think things begin to change when we look beneath the surface and especially when we realise that in a way we are icebergs drifting on the Ocean of the Infinite, with most of who we really are below the waterline. We like to think we are who we experience, that the daytime, when we are consumed by living, defining and achieving our goals is reality.

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Jesus Christ at Saltwater Creek

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. ~J.R.R. Tolkien

Faith… must be enforced by reason…. When faith becomes blind it dies. ~Mahatma Gandhi

Just north of Christchurch, perhaps 20 minutes or so out of town, is a place called Saltwater Creek. It is called that, because, after some reason, it has significance. State Highway 1 crosses on a bend in the river. As you pass, there is a small picnic area, perhaps a few houses, and the remains of what appears to have been a service station and automobile repair facility. Nobody appears to stop there, and in fact it’s perfectly understandable. There is very little reason to do so. But, after some reason I’m still attempting to understand, it has been sitting there in the background for most of my life. For the last 48 years or so, and one guise or another, I’ve driven through Saltwater Creek. Curiously, in all those years, I’ve never stopped, to stretch look around or consider my response to that place.

Until last week.

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Icarus at the crossroads-2

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.”

– Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

It isn’t easy being Libran.

I think that there may be some things for which we Librans have an instinctive loathing or perhaps fear. One of those would have to be the crossroad. We get to a crossroad and we must  make a decision. We must choose.  This of course throws most Librans into a spin, for making a choice implies committing oneself to a particular course of action and living with the consequences. They may work out well. Or they may not. We may have made the ” right” choice or we may have added up two plus two and given ourselves an answer of five. We will set out, confident we’ve made the best possible choice, only to find out later on that it was not the right one. And then we are faced with either being told we are wrong or, worse still, sitting there in the darkness, telling ourselves we were wrong, that we should have taken an altogether different route, made another,  in hindsight, wiser choice. Perhaps the fear lies not so much in the act of choosing but rather in the consequences of the choice and the possibility of a future self-beat-up.

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Kia ora tatou:

Icarus chasing his own shadow

The day I received this e-mail for a good friend who chooses to remain unnamed. Well, at least I think he does. From time to time I receive e-mails like this, and I simply cannot let them lie. On the one hand I feel an obligation to provide a considered response to what has obviously required a considerable amount of effort. On the other hand, I suspect, the e-mail is pushing my buttons and demanding a response of me.

This is a longish response, so you may want to curl up with a coffee and some time…

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Kia ora tatou:

As a number of you know, my life journey has continued to evolve, particularly over the last few years, as I have made my way to a place where I can be of maximum service. To do so has meant making some scary decisions, investing in an uncertain future. Now it has reached another crossroads. After a period of travelling and learning, of stumbling and falling, then getting up again, I have now come to a new awareness of who I am and what I would seek to achieve in the time remaining to me. These things are not set in concrete. They continue to shift.

Welcome to Life.

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Years ago, when I was a boy, I used to devour the western novels of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. I used to imagine what it must be like to ride day after day across the Great Plains of the United States, where there was nothing on the horizon. Later, when I studied American history, I read how some of the early pioneers, travelling across the grasslands in their Conestoga wagons who, when faced by the vast emptiness, had gone mad and committed suicide. I wondered what such emptiness could be like, what sort of experience it would be like to drive for hours across roads where, for 360°, there were no features, no mountains, no…nothing. how would I feel? Would I love it? Would the space cause me to rejoice or would it terrify me?

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As I were a shepherd on a lemon sea..and then the dream shifted.

I had a vision. In that state I saw myself lying, a dragon atop my Eggs of Memory. I saw suns, stars and moons. I grew beyond. I saw the universe expanding, slowly, consistently. And I saw that for all its change, it was a single entity. It was a moment of revelation. Time appears to move but remains still. It expands but just is. It is mobile and immobile congruently.

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