The ‘Pigeon Tree’

The Pigeon Tree, pictured here shortly before daybreak, is where the Wood Pigeons settle, keep lookout, preen, warm up at dawn, jostle, joust, coo, woo, flirt and mate.

Yesterday, cold or not, a pigeon pair was making love on the same horizontal branch they all prefer.

The Pigeon Tree looks fast asleep. But in truth, the roots are out of sight, busy with symbiotic fungal activity. At the cell boundaries of the millions of root hairs, new nourishment is being created.

As the days lengthen, so signals from the silence in the tree will be travelling down, and up will begin the dance of Spring. All new as new again.

So it is with the stillnesses I am subject to.

No new impulses, nothing to report. I pass in a car and I am the hitch hiker I see at the side of the road.

I do not know where my journey will go next.

My mind often plays the Mind Card on which it is written that nothing is coming and so I am going nowhere.

In truth the journey never stays still. I should remind myself it begins with my every breath.

With my breathing, is my beating heart.

My journey is billion coloured alongside all the other journeys!

My sometimes imperceptible journey is the ever dancing dance

~ Love is present EveryNow

{  With grateful acknowledgement to Magdalena Atkinson, my Shakti Dance teacher, whose theme of unseen regeneration was my inspiration for these words  }

Life seems complex

Life presents me complexity

All life is dressed to dance

I know it is love’s reduplication in continual renewal and flux

Life hides not in intricacy

Fractal multiplicity is translucid life dressed for the dance! 

The Biodanza effect. Do I dare to hope?

The Biodanza effect. Do I dare to hope?
For those who regularly practice Biodanza – and I am one of some few hundred thousand every week in dozens of different countries – there is a sense of coming home attaching to the word Mindfulness.
From way back, when I began to reflect on the big questions, up to today, I will almost daily catapult my mind into the Now by reference to the notion of my own death. It is a cleansing act which sharpens my gratitude and my wonder for being me being alive in this moment – right here now.
It’s with my regular practice of Biodanza that I am becoming accustomed to the practice – not only the idea – of living my daily life more and more ‘in the Moment’.
That’s to say I am going about the business of my days without tripping up over selfconscious self-referential thoughts. Less and less do I feel the need to question my motives, still less do I bother to direct my thoughts in at myself, where there’s a treadmill for thoughts with nothing better to do than trudge round and around.
What takes my mind away from mental closed circuits today is my gratitude for the pleasures of inclusive warm comradeship I feel from my fellow Biodancers.
Yes, I might still be lonely in my days and nights, but my friends in the Dance of Life have reflected my natural inner joy back to me from their integrity and respect and unconditional trust.
In Biodanza, something as simple as feeling joyful can be revealed as depending on nobody around me. I can see that the joy in the eyes of a partner in the dance spells out happiness all by itself. His or her joy doesn’t depend on me. It arises between us in the shared act of dance. We recognise it is our naked flame of humanity which each has made possible to reveal to the other in the unguarded intimacy of our moments of communion.
Biodanza to me is a spritual reawakening and a growth in potential of the whole person through wordless self expressive freestyle movement, mediated through music, under expert guidance and in the companionship of others whose integrity and trust is strong, explicit and bonding.
I have not dared to hope that Biodanza will always continue to reveal more subtleties of innerscape, more outward expanses of conscious joy, more awareness of the same upward spiralling awakening in those all around me.
I had not dared to hope until I asked Natasha, who has some eight years’ Biodanza. She says it’s perfectly clear that the beneficial effect goes on getting higher, deeper, broader both on the inside and out, and it will never end.
I’m reminded of the illusion of those lonely parallel tracks. In the experience of Busy-busy living, when I think I am alone on the path, I blink, look around and see others on parallel paths. As we face the horizon, all our different divergent paths converge, merge and blaze together in a revitalising sunrise. Or sunset.
Glory glory!

Thoughts like Snowflakes

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My Everyday is my Sublime
Thoughts like snowflakes fall on skin.
Thoughts like blood rise like flame.
Thoughts of infinity take up no space.
I think of loving so tenderly, so I survive.
Immortal thoughts, which guide us like stars,
Germinate from fertile minds in the pitch of peace.
Blinding truths tall as trees will bear no fruit in my moment of death.
In extremis, I will think no big thoughts of me.
Death will occult the lava flow of my soul,
And I will come to death like a shadow under the sun.
In my everyday arena I find my sublime overflows.
My everyday is where I dance my hope of love.
My every breath is my hope,
My smile is my soaring song in flight.
My opening eyes yell like rainbows.
My footfall tells me love stories.
Love is present
So very tender
My EveryNow,
My tenderness