Finding God in a Polytunnel On A Tuesday Afternoon

A futile attempt to capture it in words

Hi

It’s been a while. I’ve been thoroughly distracted by life to such an extent that I’ve not been writing anything beyond poems and notes in my notebooks.

But I’m coming up for some much needed air and have brought this poem with me.

The book has finally come together in my mind enough for me to block it out and start turning all my notebooks into something coherent.

I’ve been getting in my own way this entire time.

To be more accurate, my fear has been getting in the way this entire time.

And I think it just wasn’t time before, I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t lived the lessons enough to share them but there are enough now.

And the realisation came just this last week when I was mindlessly watering in the polytunnel.

It’s been a long road of healing these last few years.

Fucking painful.

But I’m actually finding myself grateful for the pain now - I couldn’t have grown without it and I wouldn’t have been able to cultivate the peace I feel inside myself now as a result.

That’s what this poem is about.

Speak soon and much love,

Rob

---

There is a whispering inside me now where once there was a storm.

Outside of me, the storm rages on and the horizon looks even darker.

To an extent, I have turned away.

I know what is coming but to stand any chance, I have to let go and walk away, focus on the here and now, the only place of any power - the present.

It’s here where the future is made, each moment laying the ground for the next, each seed of intention sprouting on some distant elsewhen morning.

There is a strange beauty in all this devastation.

As raw and as moving as the growling of a starving bear seeing me emerge from a borrowed pop-up tent.

So much beauty, even in the pain.

So odd an occurrence (or so it seemed until today) as to be of this rock and conscious; to be of this sea and aware; to be of these stars and alive with an energy that creates worlds.

To be of this world, not in it.

To flower from it in a string of daisy chains and exploding stars, that starts and ends in the formless void at the centre of my heart.

The wordless depths where I lose myself and find my soul and see at last the territory for what it is - free of any imitating maps, to sink beneath the surface and realise that here lies the source of all things.

Everything else is no more than shadows of maps that are themselves merely copies of copies, necessary but insufficient and all the while an illusion - or a distraction, or simply both.

All this time I’ve believed it was the outside that shaped the inside.

That I would be happy ‘if…’.

If only they would…

If only I could….

All the while it’s been right here in me as unmoulded clay ready to be shaped however I needed it.

All this time a victim to an illusion, holding myself to ransom with an imaginary gun.

We’ve created all of this, we’ve given everything it’s meaning.

We’ve told stories of separation, of being made and put here.

Of difference and finitude.

Of loneliness and solitude.

Of soulessness and a world of dead and empty matter.

Empty maps, never the territory.

Feeling.

That’s all anything ever really is.

The rest is just signs and proxies that do their best to capture the world no better than a mirror on the moon reflecting our deep blue oceans and claiming the seas as its own.

We can never pronounce the the things themselves in a tongue that was made for hearing, without shattering into pieces the oneness we can only ever fail in naming.

As I entered the warm muggy air of the polytunnel this afternoon, I couldn’t help but smile the hardest, widest smile as the mother of all ‘A-Ha’ moments grabbed me in it’s embrace, dissolved me and showed me who I really am.

There is only one thing.

One.

There is no such thing as a ‘leaf’ beyond our human tongue and want for naming and categorising, chopping up and making parts from wholes in order to know them better.

Funny then that in doing just that we condemn ourselves to forever know it less.

There is no leaf, there is only ‘tree’. There is no ‘tree’ there is only ‘forest’. There is no forest there is only ‘ecosystem’. There is no ecosystem only ‘Earth’. There is no Earth, only ‘The Universe’. There is no Universe, only ‘Consciousness’ and manifestations in it.

My ego is a leaf on a tree.

The ‘I am’ within me, the pure awareness, is all there is and it is inseparable from anything else.

It’s the effect of the earthquake that makes a sound while its cause is forever silent.

The moment we try to name the oneness, language shatters it into pieces.

And yet here I am with a pocketful of splinters trying to speak a silence.

Trying to capture a fleeting glimpse of a cause between my copied words.

A fruitless task.

So instead let’s sing and lose ourselves.

Raise a drink to forgotten rememberings of the cause of all causes that’s been a long time lost, that raises the hairs on my arms and neck and sends shivers tingling down my spine.

That causes the earth to quake and the bear to growl.

The wind to blow and the rivers to flow.

My breath to speak out loud, my self to lose and my soul to know.

There it is, I hear it now - the everything that still remains when everything else is gone.

I hear it in the silence that birthed the whisper, once the storm that overwhelmed me finally, finally gave me peace enough to remember.

I hear you. I am you. I’m home.

I AM.