steps to the water

caroline sturgis tappan offers an approach to life and our place in it in her poem entitled "life". it could just as easily have been titled "remembering" for that is its essence. to remember to shine from inside without condition.


"life"
greatly to be
is enough for me,
is enough for thee.

why for work art thou striving,
why seek'st thou for aught?
to the soul that is living
all things shall be brought.

what thou art thou wilt do,
and thy work will be true.

but how can I be
without labor or love?
life comes not to me
as to calm gods above.
not only above
may spirit be found,
the sunshine of love
streams all around.

the sun does not say,
"i will not shine
unless every ray
falls on planet divine."

he shines upon dust
upon things mean and low,
his own inward thought
maketh him glow.

the dial, II, october 1840

love after love

"to love one must first forget all about love. make it your aim and look for direction. as we are we cannot possibly love." gurdjieff

narcissus stopped at the surface. he couldn't bring himself to break the skin of the pool of his knowing.



for a little while.

and yet there is a point at which you must break beneath the skin of that pool of knowing and immerse yourself in self-remembering:
as a door opens and a foot steps outside that door.
as dust rises from beneath the first purposeful stamp of that foot on the journey away from self love.

so there is:

love after love

the time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. eat.
you will love again the stranger who was your self.
give wine. give bread. give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
sit. feast on your life.

derek walcott

in peeling "your own image from the mirror" you experience the reality of another gurdjieff aphorism: "sincerity is the key to self-knowledge and to be sincere with oneself brings great suffering."
or as j.g. bennett said: "it is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering."

larger than life

i met paterson ewen in the late nineteen seventies while he was visiting peter robinson college at trent university. he brought some of his work with him - work gouged and hacked out of plywood almost as if he was digging to find what he somehow knew was inside there, tucked away inside the splintering fibres.

here's what the virtual museum has to say about this particular work by patterson:

"paterson ewen created this monumental work after seeing an iceberg for the first time. in addition to painting on a plywood surface, he gouges it away with power tools to create rough textures. to ewen, the literal physicality of the painting mirrors the iceberg’s formation, which occurs in a violent tearing away of ice masses from arctic shores. “it was amazing how the iceberg itself came about. the actual physical movement I make sometimes feels analogous to the way the things really happen.”"



patterson's digging and carving beneath the smooth wooden surface revealed riches and a truthfullness that though - raw and unpolished - resonated with some similar process that has accompanied my own efforts to access the truthfullness of myself. to somehow, gradually and painstakingly reveal little-by-little who and what is actually here. the spirit, behind the finished skin of my personality.