A White Feather and a Black Dog

“Hope is a thing with feathers.”
– Emily Dickinson.

The other day I was walking Willow, our French Bulldog, in the nearby macadamia forest, strolling along by the creek, thinking of nothing in particular, when I noticed there was a slight breeze wafting through the bushes – all the leaves were quivering and, it seemed, waving to me.  I’ve often thought that a sudden breeze seems to indicate a passed beloved is near me, and as I tuned into the feeling of the breeze, I felt I was immediately surrounded by loved ones – humans and animals.

In the past few years, I’ve lost a lot of family, friends and four-legged friends, as I know many of us have done during these difficult times. Sometimes it’s a pain that’s hard to bear, but on this morning, I was suddenly filled with a huge surge of gratitude that I had experienced all of this love from all these different beings.

I could feel my heart expand with joy until it was almost dancing in my chest – and as I stood still, taking in this wonderful, light-hearted moment, I noticed that at my feet was a small white feather.  My mother had always told me that a white feather meant love, pure and simple, and as I stooped to pick it up, I was glad to receive this sweet message from her. She had left the planet decades before, too young and in pain from her alcohol addiction, and although I do sometimes feel her presence, as time’s gone by she’s not around quite as much as she once was. I held the feather in my hand and acknowledged all the unseen ones, and walked on, feeling remarkably at peace.

Willow, who lives her best life 99% of the time, was having a great walk, ducking in and out of the woods, checking in with me, bouncing along in her usual happy way, and for a while I concentrated on just being where I was, on a walk, in the woods, with the dog, but after about ten minutes I started thinking about my mother again, and much she’d loved her older brother, my uncle, and how he and I had often had conversations about how loving she was, and how I’d told him, after she passed, about her belief that white feathers were always a message of love – and guess what?  Just as I had this thought, there was another white feather, a larger one, just by my feet.  I smiled and picked it up as well, and on we went, and I finished the walk very conscious of this light-hearted feeling of joy, which quite honestly does not come calling quite as often as it could, does it?

But then…just as Willow and I came up the last small hill back towards the car which was parked on a track where the adjoining farm and the macadamia forest meet, I saw in a split second, that a farmer had arrived at the furthest fence, with his chain saw, and was cutting up a fallen tree – and that his dog, had left him, traversed the field, and was right by my car.

Adrenalin surged through my body.  After almost a lifetime of country living I was not about to walk Willow the 500 metres to my car, in direct sight of a large dog I didn’t know.  Call it being over-careful, but I’ve had a dog chased into a lake by wild dogs, a dog attacked twice by a neighbour’s dog and almost killed, and I wasn’t about to risk even the tiniest encounter. She was about to head for the car, and hadn’t seen the dog, and I quickly called her, clipped her lead on, went back down the hill, and out of sight.  Just to the left of me there was a steep, small path that I’d followed on occasions, and I knew it would take me back down to the creek, up a hill, and I would be able to see, from the safety of the trees, where the dog was.  I didn’t care how long it took.  I was going to wait until the coast was clear enough for us to get back without a confrontation – particularly since Willow seems to think she’s a Very Large Dog disguised as a small one.  We stood together at the edge of the wood and waited for about 15 minutes until the dog lost interest in my car, and started back towards his owner, before he or she stopped about halfway across the paddock and started sniffing around. I decided it was far enough away for us to make our way back, and so we headed off, walking way up past the car into the rows of macadamias, and then down through the macadamias, using the car to keep me hidden.

We executed our manoeuvre perfectly, slinking through the shadows of the trees until we were in line with the car, and walking quietly down towards it.  We were within 10 metres of it, when the black dog lifted its head and looked towards us, and quicker than you could say ‘knife’, we ran the last few metres.  I flung the backdoor on my side open, Willow hopped in, I raced around to the front of the car, just as the black dog was aiming straight for me, its hackles raised and barking like crazy, and I literally just had time to jump in and slam the door, and it leapt for the car door, its teeth bared.

I sat in the car, turned it on, took a deep breath, while Willow threw herself against the window in an attempt to ward off this sudden intruder, and drove off, the dog following us.  I had time enough to see that it was actually quite elderly, with a grey muzzle, and at the same time that it was in semi-attack mode, it was also wagging its tail, and was probably not quite as threatening as it had seemed when it was racing towards me full tilt. But still, I thought, way better safe than sorry.

As we got further away, it dropped off, and headed back towards the farmer, and we got back on the road towards home.

I was a bit mystified – why on earth, I wondered, had I had this wonderful, deeply joyous, spiritual experience which had completely uplifted me from the mundane everyday world, only to then be thrown back into a situation in which adrenalin and cortisol were pumping through me, and I was having to think quickly about the best way to proceed in a circumstance which might well have been ok, but could also have been downright dangerous?  It didn’t seem quite fair really. Not on a quiet Saturday morning when you’re out for a walk with the dog.

But then it hit me, that I was just being shown the duality of life in a very clear, almost bizarre fashion – a white feather, a black dog. Heaven and earth. Peace, joy and love, and the daily grind of being human. I wondered what the lesson was, and it occurred to me that for me it meant, or means, that the quicker you can drop into one state or the other, and let go of the feelings of the moment, the more balanced and light you become, whether it’s a moment of joy or a moment of fear.

I could put the dog moment down and move straight back into the connection I’d felt with the spirit world, and take that feeling back into my everyday life, and that is what I did.  I took a few deep breaths, congratulated myself on being careful and looking after Willow, and let it go.  I thanked the breeze, the beautiful day, and all my beloveds, and went home to make a cup of tea and ponder the strange twist and turns of life.

My latest book, A Time for Alchemy, how to turn your passion into purpose, is available on Kindle and Amazon as an e-book on https://www.amazon.com/Time-Alchemy-Transform-Passion

Silence is Golden

“Silence is not the absence of something

but

the presence of everything.”

   John Grossmannn

 

 My best friend Sally and I could ride our ponies for hours through the English countryside where I grew up.

On the way back home, all of us – humans and horse – tired from our outing, would mosey our way along the grass verge, feet out of the stirrups, dangling our boots through the cow-parsley, while the ponies took the odd snack-on-the-go.

In those moments, life often seemed sweet and almost perfect, and it wouldn’t take much for one of us to burst into the chorus of one of our favourite songs…

‘Silence is golden, but my eyes still see

Silence is golden, golden, but my eyes still see…’

Anybody who remembers the song will know it doesn’t say much for our taste at the time, but it was 1967 and we were 12-years-old, and we were collectively in love with the Tremeloes, who, as it turned out were going to be a one-hit wonder, with not even, as I found out many years later, their own song.

What I remember thinking in those far-off days, and it’s a thought that has stayed with me all my life, is that there are two kinds of silence – an outside silence, which in a sense does not really exist, and an inner one, which arrives on a rare occasion – well, rare to me at least – unbidden, as a sudden sense of quiet inner peace.

I grew up in the country, and I now live in the country, and I still horse-ride – these days through the green macadamia-covered hills of northern New South Wales.

Until recently when we sadly lost my daughter’s Shetland pony, Sally-the-Boy to a brain tumour,  I would take my daughter for a trail ride on him, and  I would walk beside her.  Whenever we did our lane outing, she liked to close her eyes, so, as she said, she could hear the ‘quiet’ sounds. And the quiet sounds were the sounds her pony’s hooves make clip-clopping steadily along, the sound of the breeze, the carolling of the magpies and the far-off hum of the motorway.

If you want to further the argument that silence in a sense is a concept, and not something that really exists – think of the phrase, ‘Silence please’, and where it is used.

Take a school classroom for instance, at the beginning of an exam and the room falls quiet as students begin the unenviable task of working through an exam paper – is it silent in there? Of course not. There are a million little noises: the scraping of shoes on the floor, the occasional cough, the sound of a chair being adjusted, paper being turned – there is almost, in fact, a ‘noise’ of concentration.

And yet, conversely despite this outside noise that makes the notion of silence not – in any world I know at least – a reality, there is that time when you are in the exam, when your inner world is in silence. Then, if you are lucky and you have studied your subject, a kind of meditative trance falls on you where you become unaware of anything around you, blocking out everything other than that which you are doing.

When we were children we used to play many games in the fields and the woods around my home. One of them, a perennial favourite, involved an attempt to be silent. One of us would hide our eyes into a tree, while another would pretend to be a Red Indian – as we still called native American Indians then – and would creep silently up behind to scare the person hiding their eyes. Sometimes if one of us was feeling cruel, we would all run off and leave the innocent waiting to be startled alone at the tree, and as I know, that produced its own torturous silence – the silence of no response.

For a large part of the past 35 years I have been a journalist working in busy newspaper and magazine offices, and in those offices the ability to call on inner silence becomes absolutely vital. They’re noisy places, newspaper offices. Not quite as noisy as they were pre-computers, but noisy enough. A large open plan-office with telephones ringing and people talking, meeting, arguing, creating is not necessarily the kind of place that you would think would be conducive to writing, but write you must – and so you do – learning to block out every sound, so that you can meet your deadline. Much, dear reader, as I am doing now.

In a relatively quiet, relatively small space in my house, with white desks and two windows overlooking the paddocks below, I am typing an essay on silence. Outside I can hear the sound of the neighbour on his ride-on mower, every now and then my son’s mobile phone pings. I can hear the magpies, crows, rosellas, butcher birds, minah birds and doves that are just part of the noise landscape. One of the dogs is drinking water, each lap magnified by my attempt to hear silence. If I pause for a moment, I can absorb these sounds deep inside, and by absorbing them they become part of the silent interior, the place from which I am attempting to write.

William Penn once wrote: “True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.” For me that rings true, because the curious thing about turning into the inner world is how energising it is.

Sometimes, although not often enough, I manage to get up in the very early hours of the morning to meditate. Even then, deep in the country at four in the morning, the world is not silent. The creaks and groans of an old house keep me company; the cat appears at my side and grooms herself, if there is rain every tiny drop is magnified by the absence of day noise, and the silence of the night reveals itself as anything but, as I try to empty my mind and find that still place within.

If nature is so noisy, is it ever silent? “See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grow in silence,” said Mother Teresa. “See the stars, the moon and the sun how they move in silence….we need silence to be able to touch souls.” I like that idea that the tree whose branch creaks over my roof, is growing in silence, that silence can be something tangible, if not in fact what we assume it to be. I’ve never thought of the sun, stars and moon as silent, but it’s true, at least from a human perspective. I see its trajectory over my house, I don’t hear it and that somehow reinforces the idea of silence being a sensation, having a presence, rather than an absence.

I have often wondered if wilderness places are silent – if you climb Mount Everest, for instance, do you sit in silence? In the Antarctic are you surrounded by silence? People tell me this is not so, that even in the quietest places there is noise, even if the noise is the beating of your own heart – even the absence of noise can be noisy.

There is a wonderful book by photographer Jeffrey Gusky entitled ‘Silent Places’. This poignant photographic journey through Eastern Europe documents in black and quite the crumbling landscape of the Holocaust. Houses, synagogues, railway lines, a simple corridor, a door, the entry to a Jewish home now used as a public toilet – every image silently tells a screaming story. His work is of outstanding quality, and somehow what he brings to the photographs is even more poignant than those of the time – the absence of people tells us these were their homes, their places of worship, of education and play – and in the case of the railway line to Auschwitz, their journey to death.   You feel that if you stare at them long enough you will bring them to life somehow, that the families will return, peeking out of the shadows, bringing light and love and warmth and noise with them, but until then this landscape bears silent witness to the bloody past.

 

 

‘Corridor in Kazimierz’, former Jewish district, Cracow, Polan, Jeffrey Gusky, 1996.

Battlefields, memorials, cenotaphs, burial mounds, roman ruins – everywhere where man has once existed but is no longer, it is not the silence, or lack of it, in the direct environment of these places it is the silence of the structures themselves that strikes one as being so overwhelming, hinting at one’s own mortality. I am here, I am noise, I am flesh, I am anything but silent, my blood flows, my heart beats, my stomach growls, my joints creak, my eyes see, my ears hear, tongue tastes, in each movement I make, each kiss or cuddle I give or receive, in each angry word, or happy laugh or bossy command I am an active presence.

Perhaps it is this more than anything that creates anxiety for a lot of people around the idea of silence. In a world full of iPods, iPads, tablets, phones, facebook and computers, whether we live in the (supposed) peace and quiet of the country, or the white noise of a city, the idea of silence, without or within, can be laden with fear. I can’t hear, does that mean people can’t hear me? Do I, if I am not constantly in contact with humanity, matter? My lack of silence, my constant interaction reassures me – I am here, I do matter, I am in contact.

The very fact of modern human’s difficulty with silence means that it is increasingly more important for us to acknowledge it, to hold it within and embrace the silence – to give our soul a chance to speak.

Perhaps one of the best-known prose poems in the world is the Desiderata, which far from being written in the 1600s as was commonly thought, was in fact penned by Max Ehrmann in 1927. Ehrmann, a philosopher and writer who wrote six books in ten years and then became a lawyer because he felt he would never write a book that made him enough money to support his family, would be astonished and gratified to know that 84 years later the Desiderata is one of the most widely read poems in the world.

‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste,’ he wrote, ‘and remember what peace there may be in silence.’

What he was speaking of, I am sure, is inner silence – that deep, profound state of being when all is right with the world, so right that one could still be compelled, in the right circumstances – a horse ride along a quiet avenue of trees, a dog or three at my heels – in my case – to sing out loud, ‘Silence is golden, golden, but my eyes still see’. And always to remember, of course the wise words below:

The Dreamer

 

 

 

Here, Everything is Dreaming, Robert Moss, Excelsior Editions pp 170 rrp $16.94

I often envy poets.   As a writer, I frequently wish I could let my words go wild – and yet, of course, the dichotomy is that poetry at its best is also highly disciplined, a technical craft it takes years to master.

It’s this combination of technique and wild words that Australian-born, now US based author Robert Moss, brings to Here, Everything is Dreaming, his poems and short stories spanning a twenty-year period.

Take the first two stanzas of ‘If You Spill a Dragon’, for example:

If you spill a dragon,

          don’t think about washing the tablecloth.

Everything interesting happens on the boundaries,

and when you are real, shabbiness doesn’t matter.

 

You can’t see the whole picture when you’re in it,

and inside the soft animal of your body, you forget

that you are a star that came down because

         you wanted a messier kind of love.

What a wonderful visual feast is contained in only those eight lines!  And it’s a feast that is repeated right throughout this enticing volume full of love, life, death, sex – and dreams.  It is also a paean of praise to the natural world, and in particular the earthly and other-worldly animals that accompany us in our lifetimes.

As a dream-meister Moss is well known.  For many years he has taught and practiced Active Dreaming, a synthesis of dream-work and shamanic techniques.  His books include Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life; Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death; and The Secret History of Dreaming.  His novels include the three-volume Cycle of the Iroquois – but this is his first collection of poems.  He is also an imaginative and accomplished artist, and perhaps it is this artist’s sensibility that creates the rich vein of visual imagery that runs through these poems and stories….

The cherry trees are disconsolate lovers;

they can’t hold their pink smiles

after the unkindness of that night…

 Or

Before the secret green cells in the leaf

drink from its suncatchers, light walks

all paths through the protein scaffold…

Moss wasn’t always a poet.  He began his career as a lecturer in Ancient History at ANU in Canberra, but after a move to the UK to study for his PhD he joined the editorial staff of The Economist as a writer and special correspondent.  He was an active commentator on international affairs on the BBC World Service and on British television, and also wrote for publications as diverse as The Daily Telegraph and The New York Times Magazine. He later became a full-time writer, publishing a series of suspense novels.

It’s an intriguing combination of erudition and belief in the power of dreaming that gives both his poems and stories layers of meaning.

In his story The Other, Again, Moss uses Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Other as a springboard to explore him meeting a younger version of himself, in what may or may not be a dream.

This story, written in 2010, reveals a writer at peace with the extraordinary, and, it has to be said, his move from the mainstream into his shamanic dream-work was extraordinary in itself.

In 1986, as Moss tells it, he felt the need to get away from the city life and moved to a farm in upstate New York, where he started to dream in an unknown language, which, after investigation turned out to be an archaic form of the Mohawk language.  Helped by native speakers to interpret his dreams, Moss came to believe he had been put in touch with an ancient healer – a woman of power – and that he was being called to a different life.  It wasn’t long before one of his animal spirits – the bear – made itself known to him – and it’s the bear that often guides, reveals and surprises him in his work as a shaman.

Here too, perhaps is the poet’s courage to charter unknown imaginative terrain – not easy to put aside a mainstream international career for a ‘calling’ into the unknown, but Moss embraced his new life with the same dedication he had put into his previous careers.  His central premise being that dreaming isn’t just what happens during sleep, but that active dreaming is also a source of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind.

It wasn’t long before his work and writing attracted international attention and he was asked to present his method at the conference of the Association for the Study of Dream at the University of Leiden in 1994.

All of this long career involved in words and worlds of so many different varieties come to fruition in Here, Everything is Dreaming – at the height of his powers Moss entices us in; creating a pathway between the worlds, and a way for us more mere mortals to draw closer to the gods, goddesses and animals spirits that wish to live through us.  This is a book full of texture and wonder from a dreamer and poet in his prime.

You can purchase Here, Everything is Dreaming through the State University of New York Press:  http://www.sunypress.edu/default.aspx or directly through Amazon as a kindle or paperback, and, of course from US bookshops!