DIARY 109 - Becoming attuned to mysterious things

I returned recently from the retreat at Padmaloka called 'Entering the Mythic Realm', and now feel well engaged with the less logical, and therefore intangible aspects of my self in devotional mode. After some years of feeling not quite as open hearted in my connections Puja and Prostration Practice as I would have liked, I think I finally discovered some ways around my resistences and reservations. It's not easy to fully convey the effect of this retreat upon me by just literally describing what we did in words. I'll probable attempt to write more specifically about changes in my devotional practice later. I took along a note book and wrote in it most days. The deeper my engagement with the retreat went, the more my desire to put it all down on paper diminished. I found that I could only get a clearer sense of how my unconscious depths were responding by writing in a semi-automatic fashion, sometimes it came out as poetry, sometimes as prose. So here are a few selected highlights.

In the fertile valley, I feel impoverished.

At the foot of a mountain, I lack height.

I look at the barreness of reality,

I look, and I look, and in that looking,

I gaze empty headed, and empty eyed,

seeing only the prickliness in a peach.

27/06/09

Given time, a hand is useful.

Locked digits, aged and worn,

loosen with the lubrication of action.

Given time, a heart also races.

28/06/09

Wise men at the door,

begging - as usual,

not for gold, silver or rubies

but just to come in.

29/06/09

The months fly on like geese from a field,

noisily, then out of hearing.

30/06/09

Where nothing is,

is my reflection.

That is where the problem is,

is in my reflection,

and in this response is the is,

is that it?

or am I making is

a more complicated thing than it is?

04/07/09

Given time and space

nothing happens

more frequently

than one would imagine.

05/07/09