– says T S Eliot, famously, in lines 4 and 5 of ‘Burnt Norton’, the opening poem of his Four Quartets, in my view perhaps the most significant sequence of poems of the C20th.
I’m sure there are many ways of interpreting this, but for me, it’s about present-moment awareness. How are we going to live this moment? Can we bring wonder and delight to it, despite…? This is also what the Zen practice of mindfulness aims for: living in this moment as if it’s the only one we have – which in a real way it is. Often – is this true for you? – unless I pull myself back to NOW as I do when in more formal meditation, I can spend too many moments in hopes, fears or worries about the future, or regrets and nostalgia about the past.
I also notice that now, when we are living a project that is significant to both of us, TM and me, I am almost as busy, my days are as full, as when I was a single parent working every hour that I could find while still parenting, and in addition writing my first, and commissioned, book partly through the night. I am too old to do, do, do all the time. We live in this beautiful country, and we almost never lift our heads to enjoy it.
Except, that is, on a Thursday – market day in town. We met a friend for lunch yesterday. He is an academic and poet from Devon, and was passing through to where he spends part of his time. And a lot of that time, in the summer, he told us, is spent reading in a hammock.
I felt simultaneously such a sense of joy for him, and desolation for us, when he said that. We haven’t even taken our hammock out this year, let alone spent time reading in the daytime. Admittedly TM does much more of the hard graft in the garden than I do, hours every day, even in heat, but I do a lot of the prepping and processing of our harvest and, though I hate to admit this, I keep our domestic life ticking over.
And no, I’m barely managing to write. I have written elsewhere that I imagined I’d be able to write in the mornings and garden in the afternoons – but this has never really materialised as a practice. There is also a lot of bureaucracy to overcome here, and in a foreign language, which has been a curve ball; but it’s everything really, including feeling too hot to keep at it but still keeping at it despite not being fully well.
Not good enough, when you live in paradise. I have no lounging, dreaming, dwelling time (dwelling implying a conscious depth that simply ‘inhabiting’ doesn’t). If I don’t have that, I can’t write, and don’t feel whole.
Dragonfly moments
’And some time make the time’ says poet Seamus Heaney in ‘Postscript’, ‘…to drive out west / Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore’; and so, with a little urging from me, we did make the time. A little westwards, and not to the coast, but to the Ellez river as it passes through the hidden and stunning Chaos de Mardoul, where the great granite boulders are semi-submerged in water like huge grey mammals cooling themselves. This is one of the most magical spots I know.
I persuade TM and the dog simply to stop for ten minutes – just ten minutes (the dog has a tendency to whine when we stop, and TM simply strides on, full of purpose and aim. The dog did whine, but TM put up with breaking his stride, briefly.)
We sat on a clapper bridge, quite possibly prehistoric, and simply watched the amber water studded with skaters, water boatmen and bubbles, passing under our feet.
‘The waters before and the waters after
Now and forever flowing, follow each other.’
(The Zenrin)
I think I shall amend that:
‘The waters before and the waters after
Now and forever are each other.’
Watched all those moments that are really one extended moment, and all that water that Heraclitus told us would not be the same water if we stepped in it from one moment to another. But the river, the flow, is eternally present (we hope, in these days of climate change), and the experience of dwelling, really dwelling in the experience brings one back home to here, now, always, and to soul.
And watched the damselflies, and the dragonflies who are definitely prehistoric, whose ancestors date from the Late Carboniferous, which means that they have been around for about 300 million years. The damselflies serenely flitted from plant to plant; the dragonflies zipped around menacing each other.
The waters flowed. My breath and my mind both slowed.
Ten simple minutes. Amber, green, blue moments. They’ve stayed with me as a small but profound delight throughout the intervening days.
So here’s a prescription for you: and some time, (soon), make the time to head out simply to sit, to look, to be present, with no other aim. Tell me about it.
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