I wanted to include in the Gallery these two pictures by my dear friend, the painter Ian Stirling.
The tone, the inner quality and weight of purpose they both have belong uniquely to him.
He is the man…
I wanted to include in the Gallery these two pictures by my dear friend, the painter Ian Stirling.
The tone, the inner quality and weight of purpose they both have belong uniquely to him.
He is the man…
What are we if not set apart,
Divided?
Born fractured by birth
Into this place of limit and misapprehension,
Seemingly doomed before we begin.
But our salvation is the element of precognition,
Glowing seeds of foreknowledge,
Eons old, we all still carry within us,
That just sit awaiting triggers,
Resonance.
Dormant in our soul
Every single moment we live and breathe.
Whilst, all the while,
And at a very necessary distance
From any individual orbit,
Seemingly indifferent to the apparent cruelties of life,
Beyond all oxygen of hope
And the dark suffocation of loss and despair,
There are the most exquisite patterns at work here,
Huge beyond our imagining.
Patterns, however intricate, that fit.
And between them gaps, potentials,
Knowing rhythms, inevitabilities
That lock together and spin,
Lock and spin endlessly
To make this our tempting, transitory life
And all our chances possible.
The truth is, in the face of such fractal grandeur,
The needs of any one of us are not many.
Ultimately the challenge is simply
One of love and generosity
That brings all things together again.
Just to be open and joyful in your heart,
To have grace and compassion,
To trust that what people call God
Can be found in the spaces in between.
A busy city,
Far from home.
Onrushing,
The teeming crowd,
A tsunami of sorts.
And as you walk on into the melee,
As it comes to you,
For the briefest, sweetest of moments
To catch the eye,
To share a smile,
To touch the soul of a stranger
You may never see again.
This is as it should be.
The often cavernously empty
Business of life will always
Occasionally be overwhelmed by truth.
For the restless soul hungers for such moorings,
Such absolute points of recognition
Gifted by love,
By light shared with others.
But such chances come and go so suddenly
That what was once so recent, so vivid
Already seems so distant and long ago.
What then,
If not still true to your heart?
Only swamped I fear.
Lost on a surging tide,
Swept back to faceless oblivion,
To the ruin of indifference to start again…
Bulstrode
Soft shapes and slips in the landscape
Speak of times long gone by.
All the footsteps before you
Discern a definite line, a course to follow.
And, witness to the power and patronage of the past,
This way leads us up and over, across the hillside,
To a close kept garden, ages old.
A garden of faith, a garden of trust freely given
That shelters it carefully tended secrets well.
Here, edged by the big bushy bright colours
Of tumbling exotic flora,
Or bathed beneath the trained canopies of handsome foreign trees,
Patches and eddies of personal presence reverberate and linger still.
Ripples in time across the centuries,
Cast in both sunlit and shadowed vistas,
Reveal a visible spiritual tapestry.
An intricate lattice work of all the energies,
Whether selfless of not, spent and given here.
A redolent memory, a lesson.
A bequest from the countless ambitious souls
Some iridescent now,
Others so dark and lost still,
That have passed through this charmed place
On their timeless journey before us.
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