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I’ve just read Thomas Merton’s Dark Path by William Shannon. William Shannon takes Merton’s writings and life experiences to 
provide a field book for the apophatic spiritual path. The apophatic tradition begins with the premise that God or Truth can never be captured in language, and can therefore only be described by what it is not. Apophatic mysticism is found within all of the religious traditions and seeks a direct experience of the divine reality, beyond the realm of our ordinary minds or senses. This divine union is the goal of all seekers, and is the only solution to the riddle of life and death. Nothing else we can say, do, think, or become will satisfy the need we feel so desperately to know that “all shall be well” and that our doubts, fears, and perceived inadequacies are all, in the end, unfounded.
This book gives an overview of Merton’s major writings on contemplative prayer. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, but was captured by the chapters on The Inner Experience, a book which in part compares the contemplative to the existentialist. As Merton was a ‘rip roaring Trappist’, his path and views are invariably rooted in Christianity. Yet I was able to strip away the religious references and find much food for thought rooted in his writings and thoughts on contemplation, views on the darkness and his ‘discovery’ of Zen Bhuddism and Eastern mysticism. Ironically though, and as Merton himself wrote (here I paraphrase) one doesn’t learn about contemplation by reading about it, but by direct experience of it. But one who has been there can have an ‘Aha’ experience when reading that which is so difficult to put into words and at which Merton is so eloquent.
“The darkness becomes an atmosphere of breathless clarity, in which we find peace and the deep night becomes the brightness of the noonday sun in which we find the one our heart desires.” – Thomas Merton
According to the apophatic way, in order to engage the spiritual source with the most intense intimacy, at the moment of union the mystic suspends all beliefs and disbeliefs. Taking an empty mind and an open heart, she steps over the mystical threshold and crosses into the realm of the unimaginable. This crossing into the state of complete surrender is the way of the apophatic mystic.
Once again, I am beckoned into the darkness. I am coming to know it as a friend and willingly heed its summons. I can look back on a time when I was literally dragged very reluctantly, heels dug in, into a dark night, but somehow stayed in it and came out the other side much richer for the experience. It is so tempting for the uninitiated to try and avoid a dark night at all costs or to cling on to the first piece of flotsam drifting past just to make it end sooner! But the price that we pay for avoidance is not finding the treasures in our depths. A dark night is the subject of one of my next fibre art pieces. I wrote a poem just when I was coming out of it and will use screen printing to put it into the piece.
Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire
Where does the poetry and artwork come from? Not from me but through me. It’s all already there and I, the artist, am blessed with the vision to see it and gifted with the skills and materials to capture the fleeting, shifting beauty and make it manifest. Each poem, photograph, video and piece of fibre art is a prayer. And what is a prayer but a dialogue with the Divine.
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you.
but sometimes I do and that sight becomes this art.
-Rumi
I love my bicycle journey to and from work, along a road which undulates and curves with the river valley it inscribes. Every day that I ride, I enter into a poem. I read the poetry of the landscape around me in scattered lines of verse – a heron fishing in the shallows as I ride over an ancient stone bridge, a necklace of Devon Ruby cattle strung along a narrow field like prayer beads, a flutter of autumn leaves, mist hanging high over the River Teign, frost-brittle bare hedgerows, lemony sun pools poured through verdant summer trees.
One morning last April, I rode through a dew-drenched morning.
buddha
Night Washed
buddha
Here on the shoreline where night meets dawn meets day
A pearl encrusted dandelion glows like a seacreature brought here by the tide
Mysterious
buddha
No precious spumes of seafoam here, but diamond drops of dew
Stud each blade of grass
buddha
buddha
A seashell scattering of wildflowers is left upon the shore of morning
Now high above the tide
buddha
In a valley washed over by the dark ocean of night
When I was seeding and juicing the pomegranates for our dinner party last weekend, I told Steve the story of Persephone and Demeter. There are many versions of this ancient myth, but here are the main elements . . . .
The earth mother, Demeter, had a beautiful daughter called Persephone who was playing out in the meadow one day. Persephone came upon one particularly lovely bloom, a narcissus, and reached out her fingers to cup its lovely face. Suddenly the ground began to shake and a giant zigzag ripped across the land. Up from deep within the earth charged Hades, the God of the Underworld. He stood tall and mighty in a black chariot driven by four horses the colour of ghosts.
Hades seized Persephone into his chariot, her veils and sandals flying. Down, down down into the earth he reined his horses. Persephone’s screams grew more and more faint as the rift in the earth healed over as though nothing had ever happened.
When Demeter discovered that her daughter was missing, she was distraught. She neglected her duties in her grief and all that grew began to die. She who had made everything grow in perpetuity, cursed all the fertile fields of the world, screaming in her grief, “Die! die! die!” Because of Demeter’s curse, no child could be born, no wheat could rise for bread, no flowers for feasts, no boughs for the dead. Everything lay withered and sucked at parched earth or dry breasts. She searched everywhere on earth for her daughter but when she could not find her she appealed to Helios, the God of the Sun, who could see everything. Helios told Demeter of Persephone’s abduction by Hades.
Demeter confronted her husband Zeus, the King of the Gods. Zeus saw the crops dying and knew that he needed to take action so that Demeter could return to her duties. He agreed to negotiate with Hades for the return of Persephone.
Meanwhile, in the underworld, with Persephone’s great capacity for love, she came to know Hades not just as her abductor and saw that the actions he had taken were motivated by love for her. She came to understand and love Hades and accepted from him a pomegranate, eating six of the seeds and thus binding her to Hades in marriage. Through this marriage she also took the title, and accepted the responsibilities, of Queen of the Underworld.
When Hades explained to Zeus that Persephone had become his wife, through the symbolic eating of the pomegranate seeds, Zeus ordered a compromise, declaring that Persephone should spend six months of each year in the Underworld with Hades and the remaining six months should be spent with her mother, Demeter, assisting each with their respective duties during the time she was with them. Her annual return to the earth in spring was marked by the flowering of the meadows and the sudden growth of the new grain. Her return to the underworld in winter, conversely, saw the dying down of plants and the halting of growth.
This is a multi-layered story.
It gives us an explanation for the seasons as Persephone’s return to her mother is reflected in the spring when Demeter tends to her responsibilities and things begin to grow again. The fertility of the land continues to grow into summer but when Persephone returns to Hades, Demeter again begins to mourn and neglects her duties so things begin to die in the autumn and winter months. In this way, Persephone is the goddess of life, death and rebirth.
The Greek goddess Persephone represents both the youthful, innocent, and joyous maiden aspect of a woman as well as the more womanly self who, innocence lost and family attachments loosened, can begin to consciously make decisions for herself. As Queen of the Underworld, Persephone assists those who are having difficulty transitioning from the land of the living to the land of the dead. She often gained their confidences and through their confessions and her powers of insight and empathy, she became the keeper of much secret knowledge.
The Eleusian Mysteries were an Athenian religious festival held in honor of Demeter. The mysteries existed from Mycenaean times 
(circa 1600-1200 BCE), thought to have been established in the 1500s BCE and held annually for two thousand years. The Roman emperor Theodosius closed the sanctuary in CE 392, and finally it was abandoned when Alaric, king of the Goths, invaded Greece in CE 396. This brought Christianity to the region, and all cult worship was forbidden. Our sources of information regarding the Eleusinian Mysteries include the ruins of the sanctuary there; numerous statues, bas reliefs, and pottery; and reports from ancient writers.
The true nature of the Mysteries remains shrouded in uncertainty because the participants did, with remarkable consistency, honour their pledge not to reveal what took place in the Telesterion, or inner sanctum of the Temple of Demeter. The successful candidate in the Eleusinian mysteries would have been purified, initiated, and ultimately had a change of consciousness in which a perception of the divine was achieved – the realisation that death is part of the cycle of life and is always followed by rebirth.
The Persephone myth can be helpful in explaining a modern woman’s psychological need to leave her mother and the topside world in order to deepen and mature as a human being, to get to know her hidden depths and the shadowy contents of her psyche. Several of the post Jungian authors I read in the early 1990’s when I was a graduate Counselling Psychology student – Maureen Murdock, Claudia Pinkola Estes, Linda Leonard Shierse, Kim Chernin offer women a road map to follow or at least an open door to walk through in order to discover a way into finding wholeness and meaning in a patriarchal society. At the time, I did what deep work and exploration I was capable of; but feel that I am now able to delve even deeper and feel ready to get back into the deep work of discovering who I am now, where I’ve come from and finding meaning in my life.
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Proserpine
Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, – one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar how far away,
The nights that shall become the days that were.
Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
O, Whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring) —
‘Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine’.
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— D. G. Rossetti
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The oil painting and chalk drawing of Proserpine, or Persephone, were made by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, using Jane Morris as his model. You can find further information on each work of art by clicking on each image. While writing this post, I came across a couple of very in depth resources for the original Persephone myths - Theoi Greek Mythology and The Endicott Studio and Journal of Mythic Arts for an essay by Kathie Carlson based on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
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Seeds of knowledge
John O’Donohue writes about the soul shelter. Rather than go out on a journey to find one’s soul or even to find it somewhere hidden within the body’s recesses, he suggests that the converse is true. That our body is in the soul and the soul suffuses us completely. Therefore all around you is a secret and beautiful soul light. This recognition suggests a new art of prayer.
Imagine a light all around you, the light of your soul. Then with your breath draw that light into your body and bring it with your breath into every area of your body. One of the oldest meditations is to imagine the light coming into you, and then on your outward breath to imagine that you are exhaling the darkness. When you bring cleansing, healing soul light into your body, you heal the neglected, tormented places.
In his book Anam Cara, he writes ‘The soul is the natural shelter around your life and will gather around you to mind you. . . . I love the idea of Blaise Pascal that in difficult times, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart. Perhaps, as a poet said, it is beauty that will save us in the end’.
I say that as well as keeping some thing of beauty in my heart, that one of my tasks as an artist is to work a thing of beauty out of the difficult and vulnerable times.
About three years ago I went through a long and difficult winter. On the other side, I wrote, I wrought, Solstice Dawn, a poem about daybreak bringing to a close the longest night of the year.
In my exploration of incorporating text into my fibre art I’ve been searching for a technique to write this poem onto a wall-based piece. I made a series of monoprints a couple of weeks ago based on my design and stamped the words of the poem onto the prints with copper ink. It’s a very rough draft, but the making of it helped me to realise that I may make the final piece in more than one panel.
I’ve made a video of the work in progress, incorporating my poem and a beautiful piece of cello music, a sarabande by J.S. Bach from his Cello Suite No. 4 in E flat major.
Wrought (v.)
An old past tense and a past participle of work.
adj.
- Worked into shape by artistry or effort; put together; created: a carefully wrought plan.
- Elaborated; not rough or crude.
- Made delicately or elaborately.
[Middle English wroght, from Old English geworht, past participle of wyrcan, to work.]
The writings of John O’Donohue, an Irish poet and philosopher, are one of my touchstones. John’s writing draws the reader into intimate conversation with neglected or unknown regions of the soul.
Language was his greatest gift — and his greatest blessing to others. His writing is grounded in human vulnerability and the desire, the longing, for a connection to the wonder of the divine in nature, and human life within it. He was one of those rare writers whose words help others make sense of the world, because he was held together, himself, by a sense that “there is an unseen life that dreams us; it knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize, and we need have no fear of change.”
Lately, I have kept Eternal Echoes – Exploring Our Hunger to Belong close by. While reading it, I find myself frequently putting this book down to allow the words to travel through my interior layers and reach their intended destination: my soul.
I’ve quoted him a couple of times and have been planning to write a post about his writing and it’s influence on my spiritual journey sometime soon. I happened to have a free hour in a cafe in Exeter yesterday morning and it was with sadness that I read in the Guardian of his death in January of this year.
Here is a link to a memorial site which has some of John O’Donohue’s writing and a link to his last radio interview The Inner Landscape of Beauty.
Finally, here is a recording of John reading his poem Beannacht, or Blessing.
Beannacht
On the day
when the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble
May the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you
May a flock of colours
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens
beneath you
May there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
- John O’Donohue ( 1956-2008 )
