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Letters to Biddy

~ a weekly reflection as a letter to Biddy Early, 19th Century Irish healer from Ennis, County Clare

Letters to Biddy

Tag Archives: pilgrim

Unearthed stones

05 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by Moira Were AM in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Biddy Early, camino, David Whyte, Finisterre, Kura Yerlo, pilgrim, The Burren, weasel words

Dear Biddy,

In the introduction to an anthology (The infinite Dirt) I am just published in (very happy to be able to write that) the editors wrote that they had arranged the poems in a way that in a single sitting the reader would be able “to unearth the stones in the pattern we have laid.” And indeed that was true as the a beautiful pattern emerged from the pages that had previously been hidden and the invitation to look once again at other stones in my life making pathways and summoning me to walk in new ways over stones and with a pebble in my shoe as well.

This time last year I had finished a week on The Burren and learnt more about taking baby steps and appreciating the landscape at one with all the elements. With wind and rain and good company, with a lilt in voices around me and an Air in my heart I was blessed by every stone. That landscape that you would have known so well Biddy, blessed and caressed me, held me and pushed me to new places. I am so grateful for those days. Invisible offerings from the visible continue to take hold and unfold.

In the boardroom this week I invoked the phrase from Spanish poet Antonio Machado – ‘se hace camino al andar,’ or ‘you make the way as you go’ – as we set about our work for the future with new leadership, new budget, new plans. I love bringing poetry into decision-making spaces and it is a challenge I am setting myself to do more often, partly inspired by David Whyte’s work mine host in Ireland last year. Poetic language is fresh and wild, leaving spin doctors reeling as they can’t contain the emotive power of poetry that cuts through familiar phrases or weasel words.

Zebra Finch Men's Group - Kura Yerlo

Zebra Finch Men’s Group – Kura Yerlo

The gift of well-chosen words to support your own steps as well as your fellow travellers is one to receive with deep thanks, especially on the days when there are no words adequate to mark the moment. Silence has its place too. In my past week there have been two contrasting moments of endings marked – one with silence and one with words. An Aboriginal elder asked a group of us to be silent for a minute to mark those who had passed through the space we were in. With dignity and the sounds of the waves in the distance, we stood in the soft winter rain in a circle and joined our breaths with the universal one and soaked up the memories and allowed the air to get into our lungs. From there I went with a few others to paint stones. The second moment was a series of stories of past conquests and a public betrayal of peers over champagne and shiraz. The room full of ghosts invoked to score points and to stamp the past passport of all of those gathered to close a chapter. Stories filled both spaces and what was left said and unsaid in both said more than what was unsaid and said.

The patterns emerging from the stones laid and the path I walk contain the stories of those path and yet it is still my path, the one I make by walking it. I have friends walking the camino right now, and for me everyday is the walk of the pilgrim and I travel in great company.

 

 

FINISTERRE

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water, going where shadows go,
no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you brought
and light their illumined corners, and to read
them as they drifted through the western light;
to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;
to promise what you needed to promise all along,
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water’s edge, not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.

(c) David Whyte 

 

 

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Litany

28 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by Moira Were AM in Uncategorized

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Biddy Early, Farmers Market, feast, litany, Mary Oliver, pilgrim, slow food

Dear Biddy,

There is a saying in the Slow Food movement that says: Shake the hand that feeds you. It is an invitation to connect with the producers of food in your local region and something I am lucky enough to do every weekend at the Willunga Farmers Market. It is a place that feeds my soul. A cornucopia of Mother Earth’s love harvested and transformed by the work of human hands. It is a weekly blessing in my life.

I am fed in so many other ways too. Connections and conversations rooted in history matched alongside seeds recently scattered on the surface, both landing on the fertility of the space we create together under the canopy of the great southern sky.

This week I have shook many hands that feed me – producers of ideas, distributors of passion, builders of nests, weavers of webs and makers of mulch and muck – all feeding me in their own way. In a logistics chain love dispensing network sometimes you are a supplier and other times a distributor. The karma returns has the capacity to skip a generation too – paying back and paying forward can happen simultaneously. Offspring wear the consequences of being from the same stock.

I will not clean the house while there is love to be made and poems to be read and conversations to be had.

The Slow Food movement links the pleasure of good food with commitment to community and environment, and each time I sit at a table or tablet I am fed one way or another and am in good company.   I prefer real-time table moments to virtual tablet ones but they both serve to nourish me. When I give thanks it seems to be an endless litany. I am grateful for being fed and I am having a feast.

Cape Town Labyrinth

Cape Town Labyrinth

Litany of A Pilgrim

By the ancients                                I am fed

By the babes                                    I am fed

By millennial tweets                         I am fed

By sister sadness                              I am fed

By sister surprise                              I am fed

By invitations                                   I am fed

By salted caramel tarts                     I am fed

By Lucia’s minestrone                       I am fed

By Billy Bragg                                   I am fed

By Bruce Springsteen                       I am fed

By facebook posts                            I am fed

By gentle touch                               I am fed

By mischievous laughter                  I am fed

By Mary Oliver                                 I am fed

By travelling companions                 I am fed

I am fed                                          I am fed

(c) Moira Deslandes, 2014

 

 

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Toss and Turn

31 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Moira Were AM in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

acupunture, Biddy Early, David Whyte, pilgrim, worldwork

glitterDear Biddy,

Did you have visitors asking you to interpret their dreams? Maybe people came to you for a potion to help with insomnia so that they could sleep soundly without being disturbed by a banchee? Tossing and turning is usually associated with being worried and maybe you are being woken up for a reason, your inner self giving you a little push or shove to wake you up?

Dream work is food for the soul revealing and inviting me to make true what the unconscious mind has already created. Tossing and turning most nights these past couple of weeks and waking up to find fragments of my dreams floating up for me to grasp a thread or two. Investigating meaning around these glimpses of my inner life (with assistance of a skilled practitioner in worldwork and acupuncture) I seem to be launching into a new phase.

Time to toss and turn – like a salad I am tossing ingredients in my bowl and creating something to get my teeth into and like turning over the compost to get all the microbes turning rubbish into nourishment – I am feeling challenged and excited about what is ahead. With a blow of a breath, perhaps the cosmic energy was blowing a kiss, I am experiencing an initiation and this tells me I have accepted the invitation, although I am still not completely sure to what!  I do know that it is both molecular and galactic.

The pilgrim tosses and turns. Tossing a coat off with a change in the weather, turning an ankle when footing is unstable or stumbling over cobblestones. Tossing in an extra pair of shoes, a few band aids, some remedial herbal treatment to address an aching foot is all part of a pilgrim’s kit. So too is the taking a turn to lead or to follow, share a prayer or light the lamp.

With a cosmic breath, being despatched into an unknown; I am setting out on an unknown course.

My pilgrim’s kit is fully equipped and my journey, while invisible to me, is set. My responsibility is to toss and turn along the way to wander in freedom.

I am travelling in the knowledge and instruction from poet, David Whyte in his poem Everything is Waiting for You. It is nearly a year since I set out on my pilgrimage that took me to a landscape that inspires him and the opportunity to sojourn for a few days in his company.  The photo of David lying on the ledge of the pool (the same one that appears in the headline for this blog) unites the poet and landscape, a holy communion.

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

— David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You
©2003 Many Rivers Press

Poet's Rest

Poet’s Rest

 

 

 

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Freedom of Movement

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by Moira Were AM in Uncategorized

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Tags

Biddy Early, borders, Burma, passport, pilgrim, refugee camps, Songkran, Thailand

Dear Biddy,

The freedom to move between borders is a privilege and I am deeply grateful for my Australian passport. It has magical properties and seems to transcend language, culture and most importantly gives me access to foreign lands. The capacity to traverse these physical borders is an expression of stable democracy in my country, our historical ties, our foreign policies and trade arrangements, our military agreements and I hope in part the friendly disposition of its citizens.

Burmese refugee camp Thailand - 5 generations of being stateless.

Burmese refugee camp Thailand – 5 generations of being stateless.

So what to say of the internal passport we might hold and issue to ourselves? The one that gives us courage to go deeper into our spiritual landscape, the one that navigates us through challenging terrain, the one that stops us going into new territories?

My passport is issued for ten years and will expire in a few weeks. On this passport I have travelled to Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. I have learnt about myself as much as any of the places I have visited. Each journey more important than the destination, and each return a ritual of coming home to myself.

The plight of the pilgrim is a mix of being settled and unsettled; on the move and being still. The extreme pilgrimage I have spoken of before (TEDx Adelaide) does not respect borders – it is a vocation that recognises the borders are real to the journey to the interior. Travelling and poetry push me to the limits of my internal borders – helping me to see with an inner eye the faces and places I find myself in. Seeking the poetic in a dusty, headache inducing polluted air space is harder than in a luscious tropical oasis and so it is true for the inner life, finding the poetry when the body and soul is crowded by fear, anxiety or greed is harder then when blessings and gratitude appear on every corner. Yet it is in the dust and dry times the blessings abound it is just that you need to administer the occasional eye drops!

Lent is coming to an end and I am entering into Holy Week while in Mae Sot Thailand where the Songkran festival begins on Sunday. It is a water festival, where one of the rituals to start to New Year is to throw water on everyone. Everything is cleaned and cleansed, and although I can only see the outward signs of this relentless drenching, I am sure that those who treat it as a spiritual exercise are also doing some internal cleaning up as well.

Early start to Songkran at Minmahaw School.

Early start to Songkran at Minmahaw School.

This lent I have done a tiny little twitter poem each day as my discipline and it has proven to be a useful reflective practice. They can all be found in one place and are tiny little insights and memories of the last few weeks pilgrimage. The internal spring clean is not seasonal and I find I need to be constantly alert to the potential to be seduced by the dry and the hot. As the humble Nazerene’s ride into town on a donkey facing the Empire is remembered this weekend, and the water is thrown to make new the year ahead, I am touched by the universal desire for wholeness, new beginnings and the recognition that after the heat comes new life.

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