Amy is outside. She is raging. Throwing everything at the landscape. All of her gathered self. Her speeding winds and towering rains filling the sky and troubling teeming earth. The trees are animated by her passing as she not only ruffles their branches but tussles with their roots. They would surrender if only she could listen. She saturates this island as far as I can see across fields and hedgerows, rivers and hills towards blurred horizon.
I gaze out of an arched window. The restless scene flashing before my eyes without raising a thought. A 1980s, brick built house constructed for farming folk now a sacred temple. Sheltering from the storm. From Amy’s ambivalent atmosphere. Standing, waiting for the next period of meditation to begin. A short break between pulses of swelling stillness beginning in the dark of early morning and returning to the dark of late evening.
Mock-lead – Gavin-Birchall
Twenty two times over two days and for forty minutes each period but these details have lost their meaning. Looking out of the window I know not what time it is or where we are in the day. I only know that it is light outside and that Amy is fierce. The cowl she has cast over this place filters the sun to a shimmering, translucent glow while she howls down the chimney.
Mock lead lines create diamonds on the surface of the glass. Drops of water slip down and change course as they route around the criss crossing shapes. I see waves of rain stroking the tarmac of the driveway outside before striking out for the orchard and the floodplain and the sea. One after another they counterpoint the motionless body from where I witness. Vision shifts and I can see through the mock lead as if it wasn’t there. Beyond its substance into the tumbling wild outside. A play of angles as my focal point changes but I have never seen this way before.
Mock-lead-inverse – Gavin-Birchall
This strange seeing mirrors the formless moments while sitting. Again and again sitting and accepting. Seeing into, through and beyond. Gradually, period by period, so exquisitely and so painfully settling and surrendering to stillness. Soothing the startled animal and allowing wonder to return. Emptying everything that has come before and finding only endless expanse.
The wind blows, the rain pours, my vision dances and there is no land and no sky, no outside and no inside, no Amy and no Gavin, no temple, no time, no motion, no stillness, no separation, no unity. There is only awareness, potential and rhythm.
Moments apart from our usual day to day can provide new ways of seeing what our lives are about. Integral Development Coaching provides moments apart. In abundance.