What
then is in common between the ‘stars’ whose light we have glimpsed?
They capture the ordinary and make it reverberate, but they also leave
room for meaning to flow in…… The
doorways are not just one way doorways. Meaning
is not just created, it also flows in. Perhaps
this is the same as Heschel saying that God is in need of man - since we are
supposed to become that which will manifest His image.
I
have here tried to present one subject in terms of another; an essentially
poetic thing to do - epistemology in terms of poetry, poetry as the means to
epistemology and so on… - all in order to overcome the ironic problem of
writing and teaching about the whole fragmentedly, and also perhaps to do
what meditation does, send to sleep the guardians at the gate of the unconscious
to allow us to sense the wholeness of reality.
I
take wholeness as a pre-requisite, a concomitant, to ‘spiritualizing
education. In deed I take
humanization, spiritualization and holization to be three parts of the single
‘clover leaf’ of a model of holistic education, such as SunWALK.
To
think of the clover leaf is to think of Ireland, of course, and I end with a
piece I wrote in homage to Heaney, as another attempt to
“devote myself to that ineffable space, mystical almost, between the three modes of engagement of the human spirit, caring, creativity and criticality, that perform a magical dance, when I’m in holistic education dialogue with children or adults.”
Laughable,
but true, even though I couldn’t, and probably still couldn’t, communicate
it to the General.
In
all of what I’ve pointed to, in our short journey together this morning, there
is a truth that is still being resisted so powerfully in our Western world.
Flatland thinking would have us believe that mind is all – in fact that
we are brains on legs. Closer
to the truth is that, thought is a subset of feeling, the mind
a subset of the heart, logos a subset of mythos.
On
Friday I will try to show you some of how all that I’ve pointed to, works in
practice when teaching children or adults.
The
homage;
Dangerous Transportation;
on being taken ‘too far out’ by the poet Seamus
Heaney
INTRODUCTORY BACKGROUND
This homage was written upon reading the Spirit
Level collection of poems by Seamus Heaney, he whose hand was taken by
President Mary Robinson, to lead the new Nobel Laureate back on to Irish soil.
She stepped down from her high office, and off Irish
soil,
to ascend the plane's steps,
to bear him the nation's accolade and to re-connect
him with
the land
of his birth, and of his growing;
a noble woman greeting a noble man;
an exquisitely moving moment.
No act of honour was ever offered more tenderly, more
sweetly,
nor, in my case, pierced so deeply.
When she took his hand, half-way up the plane's
steps, I felt
directly connected with all the love and beauty and
truth
of
Ireland and all the love and beauty and truth beyond.
She now labours for us, to secure human rights for
the oppressed.
He, on
our behalf, continues to secure voicings of the ineffable.
____________________________
Beware
the souls of great men and great women and their poetry.
That such a man could exist,
should
exist, in my lifetime………
should eat and ponder, wipe mud from his boots
and latch the door,
and travel and return,
and conjure poems
poems
unyielding
as the earth's granite bones,
poems
soft
as filigree fibres of wind-dispersed dandelion seeds
poems
that
bring meaning and beauty, in and out of focus,
resonating
up
from unfathomable depths
of ineffability
connecting us with what we know and what we
love.
How can he
bear the weight of his poetry;
his
soul embodied in so comfortable a rural frame?
How can it be that his shoulders and heart,
softened
as they are
by
so much working with pen, not hoe and spade,
can bear the weight
and
transport
of so much electrifying truth, so much beauty,
so much goodness,
that,
water-divining-like,
charges through him
as his muse rarefies domestic echoes,
crockery
fragments, silhouetted figures in
brightly
lit barn doorways,
the
touch of loving hands,
thereby setting anew common-places in all our
landscapes
yet also sweeping in
energies sublime and transcendent
that carry us to
the very edge of our abyss
- how can
his heart expand so far, and/yet/not/burst?
He takes my soul so far out, that I have to
stop listening,
for fear
for fear of not finding my way back
to here and now, and to the solitary task of
having to be, and to be me.
So though I would be one with all that is
I put a stop to my heart's expansion
and get a grip
of those familiar limitations
that keep me in the here and now,
and the here and now in me.
Yet
right now, at this very moment, just outside
my window,
I
hear
a
bird
sing
-and instantly again am in mortal danger
from his, and other great souls,
from
the poetry that through them charges,
from
the Mythos that makes a whole
of
that bird-song, this world, and me
poetry which would lead me
too
far
out.
Beware the souls of great men and great women
and their soul-transporting poetry.
Roger
Prentice Burnlaw, 24th May 2000