from The Light Tree Journal... "Beauty for Ashes... "

   At my uncle and aunt’s ‘new’ house and down the long corridor at the far end of it where I was staying, my life became quiet. Oh, it was long ago that this happened; but still it was a very lovely place to grow quiet in. Williamston Park was situated on twenty-two acres of preserved beauty, of fairy woods and fields and tidal creeks on the upper reaches of the Milford Haven, in Wales. Days of ramblings passed and the stillness in my surroundings seemed to come inside me and brood there; although that was all unbeknownst to me and stayed hidden in the deep. Until one grey day the depths welled up and emerged. Taking form by pen and notepaper, bringing forth there the story of a new morning made bittersweet through a night so long the ending of it had not seemed possible at all. My hand raced across the paper as line after line it took shape in a strange imagery, which could never have come from me so vast each thread of symbolism and unveiling glory: it was all in essence the untellable tale none dared to tell.
   It came running out in poetry, twenty-one lines to each verse and twenty-one pieces of blue notepaper long. In scribbled lines of symbolic things it held the song of inner truth behind which was the inside story of my whole life – of which I had not lived terribly much of yet – in hope against hope telling of my life’s surviving every drowning wave; and at the last, the seventh, a drowning so dear that never before did any death bring forth so marvellous a life. At the end of the flow I wondered what on earth it was that I writing. But it must have been in heaven that I wrote, on ground where angels walked, because none of it made any earthly sense to me. The flow, the river, and the pool in the river had all come of itself, like magic; and all, uplifting, light, generous, and full of love.    Some while later, after I had flown to the other side of the world to New Zealand, I copied it out into a beautiful blank notebook; its blue cover beautifully gold embossed. But the story was so not of this world, that a few years later when I remembered it I was afraid and burnt it. I stole it back from another’s bookshelf. (I had given it away, as a gift.) And I ripped it up and threw it page by page into the wood stove; and watched it burn, and curl up, and go black and turn into ashes. I didn’t cry. I knew I was only giving back what I could not own; nor anyone own. Not owning the treasure then was it free to come or go in me, as it pleased. That way I could not lose it; nor afterwards be afraid: not any pain of loss would I feel in that which was not my own in the first place: the tale had been given me of God. Then, much later, my inner given treasure, life’s hidden wisdom gold within me was returned and multiplied inside me more than an hundred fold. And it and came out in the writing of five new books that I shared with another again; which would not have existed at all had I not given the original book back to God who gave it; and which I expect to see again when I return to Him from whom I came. 

     I saw that I have nothing precious, till I can give it up: I have nothing in heaven, until I put it there.

     As only my bottle broken can be filled again: spilled
     So only my book burnt can be written anew: lost
     Or how can I be found anew unless I am first: lost
     For how can I be poured again unless I am first: spilled?

      So I cast my bread upon the waters; and found it after many days.

                                                             *

Through the iron fairlead I pull the feathered light

Yet by a cord so thin it was only ever briefly seen

A swirling thread, a snuffed out candle’s prayer

Through the ancient pool of all there is

I pull my wisp of sight

And see but do not see

Eyes not half shut I see nothing

I look

And with eyes open I see not

I have too much

Too much hides the gift in just enough

‘Look,’ has its eyes wide open

And so takes in a flood

But ‘see,’ has its eyes half shut

To ponder and perceive

To find in one single line of truth

Its fleeting thread

Which truly going through

Unravels me within 

All found in the undoing

The oil to slip right through:

And the pull-less vision freed

Of every outward effort of my self

And then the winded horn, its strength

And the candle, its second life:

The subject given, light... 

Born of its being blown out awhile

                                                              *