Online Sessions

If the mountain seems too big today
then climb a hill instead;
If morning brings you sadness
it’s okay to stay in bed.
If the day ahead feels heavy and your plans feel like a curse,
There’s no shame in rearranging,
don’t make yourself feel worse.
If a shower stings like needles
and a bath feels like you’ll drown;
If you haven’t washed your hair for days,
don’t throw away your crown!
A day is not a lifetime.
A rest is not defeat.
Don’t think of it as failure,
Just a quiet, kind retreat.
It’s okay to take a moment
From an anxious, fractured mind.
The world will not stop turning
While you get realigned!
The mountain will still be there
When you want to try again
You can climb it in your own time,
Just love yourself till then!

Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking past and future
old friends passing though with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.

The thick adobe walls are transparent to mountains,
The mountains move in;
I sit among mountains.
I, who am no more,
Having lost myself to let the world in,
This world of black and bronze mesas
Canyoned by rivers from the higher hills,
I am the hills,
I am the mountains and the dark trees thereon,
I am the storm,
I am the day and all revealed,
Blue without boundary,
Bright without limit
Selfless at this entrance to the universe.

Let me hear you.
Speak your heart
And empty out those dark corners

Words unspoken
Cannot bring joy.
Let them dance,
even if their steps first falter.

Trust what emerges
will be warmed by the sun,
will be sheltered by the wind
By my listening.

Let the words that have been furled
tighter and tighter inside
emerge and stretch and sway.
Watch them lighten

and feel your heart lift
as their weight eases
and they flow out into the world
like butterflies, to land or float away.

Let them go
and see your soul dance
to sweet silence
in the hallowed space that remains.

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed
an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

‘’This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter wind passes.
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on the fresh pastures of promise,
Where the wind will be kind
And blushed with beginning”