More poetry for Mindfulness – Horses at Midnight without a Moon – by Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert

In the next few weeks we are migrating this blog over to our new website, so we have kept posts to a minimum. But as we head into our summer breaks  we are looking forward to taking time out, relaxing and working to ensure our energy levels are topped up for our autumn schedule.

To that end we thought we should address some of the issues we are facing at the moment, as human beings in a world that seems to present us with a new challenge, a new doubt or anxiety each day. David J Beauman, who blogs at the terrific The Dad Poet, posted a poem last week to offer some solace in these difficult times and we agree with him, this one is a poem to encourage mindfulness. We have written on the subject and posted poems previously and many people have enjoyed the opportunity to find words that support them after they have taken the first steps to mindfulness Take a breath, learn to be at peace with the world and enjoy those things immediately around you. It isn’t easy and it requires dedicated practice, something many of us find difficult in a world where the expectation is increasingly immediate gratification and instant fixes. But there is beauty in the smallest things and the most unlikely situations.

David J Beauman reads the poem here, with the full text available HERE and below :

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

From Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert. Copyright © 2012

To find out more about mindfulness at The Terrace, see our website HERE 

Honesty

Here we re-blog a piece posted by Dr Bill Wooten, in which he quotes David Whyte on honesty. It is a very powerful piece – those final lines “Honesty is not protection; honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where we are given no choice between gain or loss” are especially challenging. We are interested in knowing your thoughts on this philosophy, and how important you feel total honesty is, and how best to use it for positive discoveries….X David J Beauman

Dr Bill Wooten

“Honesty is reached by the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, our world, or our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are born to be afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed even by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are but one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation…

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