A Life Line

Emergence from Wisdom's Gloaming

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

In the Celtic calendar, August is for harvesting and is the first month of Autumn a time to start to turn inwards. In my own life I am sensing a myriad of endings in both my personal life and my work - a loosening of binds and ties that has dropped me into the mystery of wisdom's gloaming.

In this place I came across this poem from the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly (RIP). A beautiful poem talks to the insistence of beginnings, beginnings that can only be because of endings.

“Begin”
Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of the light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and future
old friends passing though with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.

— From The Essential Brendan Kennelly

A poem that invites me to allow and feel the letting go of the bindings of work, place and relationship; textured twine rasping against my fingers, a grazing coarseness that would burn me to my core if I was to hold on

A poem that throws me a lifeline somehow, a silver, silken thread into the deep, a cool caress, soothing, healing somehow.