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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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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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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Some form of spirituality, it seems to me, is the basis of all our lives, whether we choose to accept this fact or not. I begin to wonder also whether wandering away for a time from the tradition of our birth may be a natural part of spiritual growth, that it is OK if that happens. It is a thing not just confined to Christianity, which is the basis of my tradition for this life. In fact I have heard Hindu parents complaining that their young people are just not as interested these days. I would imagine that there are some Moslem parents who say the same thing. Going walkabout may be vital and perhaps the opportunity God-given.

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