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It’s a good measure of the gap between intention and manifestation to blog. I committed two days ago to post daily, and already I’ve missed a day. Except the day didn’t notice, but went about its business unconcerned. It’s the kind of experience that can be disheartening, if ego drives the show. Fortunately, moon has no ego, nor does winter, nor do a Thursday or Friday. Look at them more than at yourself, and just keep moving, whispers my guide.
One must have a mind of winter, says W C Williams in his poem “The Snow Man”. Does that mean to freeze up? Not exactly.
Williams goes on:
One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;/And have been cold a long time/To behold the junipers shagged with ice,/The spruces rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun; and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind.
I can identify with an experience — call it “mine” — and that immerses me more fully in it. Fine if it’s pleasurable, painful if it isn’t. If I’m truly cold, isn’t that a misery? But beyond immersion is perspective, and unlike experience, that’s up to me. What am I, if not my attention and intention? I can use the cold (or any human experience) to perceive in two different ways, as another William (and potential Druid), William Blake, rhymes:
“This life’s dim windows of the soul/Distorts the heaven from pole to pole/And leads you to believe a lie/When you see with, not through, the eye”.
When I flow with something else, I’m following its path, rather than my own. My course runs along channels that may be alien to me, constraining, counter to my nature. But flow through, and nothing slows down the manifestation. In fact, nothing measures or moderates its speed or slowness at all. All the joy is in the flow itself, at a pace that’s right for that manifestation. It’s the pace of the concert version of the song, unrepeatable, because it’s individual, one-time-only, meant for that audience, that time and place.
And to keep with the Law of Threes, here’s Rilke for our third bard:
We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most
intimate. From images that are full, the spirit
plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled;
there are no lakes till eternity.
/|\ /|\ /|\
A Druid Way 