In their stillness

Every year I choose a word to guide me on my way. Last January I chose Pilgrimage and set out to undertake "a long journey especially one undertaken as a quest, or for a votive purpose, to pay homage."

As an agnostic, sitting on the fence as to what it's all about, I am still drawn to the idea of devotion. To what? I'm not sure I can describe it in words.....a grounding and reverence for nature, for people, for beauty? If I would pay homage to anything at all then that's what it might be....

In July I was 60 and it felt like a turning point. If I live until I am 90 then this is the beginning of the third age, the last part of my life. I am the older generation in my family, both parents are gone now. My Mother died at only 33, so I am probably also paying homage to the opportunity to simply be alive at all! The Pilgrimage was a way to celebrate the freedom of still being here on this planet and in one piece....

These wanderings have taken me to Italy, Greece, Austria, the Wild Atlantic Way, with next stop Sweden. In between I have been sitting very still and absorbing it all. A bit cut off socially, working hard in my day job and also developing new projects as part of my photography passion, I have spent a lot of time in the company of birds.

Birds tend to flit and twitch nervously but sometimes they seem to just meditate. I imagine them sitting for portraits, "Just turn your head a little to the left......" I say, and they sometimes listen in a moment of pause...

Since moving my workspace even closer to them, I know their characters, their songs, and these moments of stillness we share in the closing months of this Pilgrimage route.

And then as is their nature, they simply take flight....




See more birds here in the Gallery

I loved this further reading too on How to be alone from Brain Pickings

In stillness

They excel in stillness. Sitting and watching. Waiting and listening. On the corner, on a chair outside the front door, at the gate to the garden.

Once I asked a Native American for a clue to the future. Am on on the right path I asked her?

She was supposed to be a seer of sorts and looked harshly into my eyes. Tell me about your life she said. So I told her about teaching and leading, about the emancipation of women and the poor, about trying to pass on knowledge and skills. She remained impassive.

I longed for some kind of reaction and so she said, "Yes, you are on your right path."

That wasn't what I wanted to hear. No. I wanted her to guide me, coax me, to soothe me onto some new path. I wanted her to have another answer. Like that I wasn't on the right path at all, like that I was on the complete waste of time path!! I wanted to be rescued, found, understood. Maybe I just needed a big cry and a hug!!

But now I know, that I only have to be still; that questions are the nub of the whole thing; that there is no one answer and that we are all in the same leaky old boat. 

And when I saw them, each one in such stillness, they left me wondering even more about striving and waste of time ambition.



There are more photos of Greek elders here 

Sentinels

There are times, when in the stillness, we stand like sentinals on what is left of our tangled wilderness...... 

The stillness of a meditating Hare

It's 10 years ago, our first night in the new house and I can't sleep for excitement.

It is such a quiet spot and all I can hear is the sound of the endless silence ringing in my ears. I can't stop myself listening and trying to hear something I can recognise. But in no time I am hearing things that are not there at all.

Almost dawn, still tossing and turning I jump up to see my new surroundings in the morning light. The tall summer grasses are waving in unison, the Comeragh Mountains to the west are slightly misted over and just beneath my window a doe Hare and three leverets are sitting on the gravel path, utterly peaceful and unaware of my gaze.

The stillness of a meditating Hare was something I had never seen. Usually they are loping through the fields, and they can run very fast with their long hind legs. Now I often observe them staring into space for long periods especially in the evening or early morning.

Whenever I get close, as with this youngster nibbling in the garden, I am reminded of my first night here. How in the early misty morning, the Hare family introduced me to the meditative stillness that would soon become home. The way that Mother Nature again made her presence felt in my life, and that moment when I began to re-learn how to stare into space........