Photo: Martha Brettschneider/Damselwings Photography
When was the last time you had a laugh-out-loud ah ha moment? This week the Universe finally got me to read its “Flow” memo, and I did, indeed, chuckle audibly.
If you’ve attended any of my programs – morning meditation sessions, Search Inside Yourself, PQ® Mental Fitness, or retreats – you’ve heard me talk about being in flow. We experience flow when we are engaged in something that is in alignment with our deepest values and sense of purpose personally or professionally. In flow, we are bringing our gifts and attention to the task at hand with so much focus that time slips away. The work or activity feels effortless and energizing, even if we’re “busy” or exerting ourselves physically.
Living in flow through intentional choices about where we direct our attention and energy leads to all sorts of doors opening for us. The Universe loves supporting our flow work in creative ways, as it did this week for me.
As part of a recent office declutter and refresh project to kick-start my year, I hung my Peaks of Otter Flow metal print on the northeast facing wall with a nod to feng shui principles. More specifically, it’s in the “Knowledge, Wisdom, Harmony” quadrant of the feng shui design grid.
The next morning, John O’Donohue’s poem “In Praise of Water” landed in my lap during my post-meditation wisdom reading. As I read it, and re-read it, and re-read it again, I felt part of the flow of the poem myself.
Next week I will share more about this, including the chuckle inducing revelations. Today, though, I wonder what your experience might be with this poem.
Reading poetry is its own form of attention practice (and what we practice grows stronger in the brain!). Just like in meditation, when you find your attention has wandered, simply bring it back to your chosen anchor of attention. In this case, your anchor of attention will be John O’Donohue’s poem.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes in the comments, both the experience of keeping your attention on the poem and how the theme resonates with you. It may take a couple of readings to “get in the flow”!
In Praise of Water
by John O’Donohue
Let us bless the grace of water:
The imagination of the primeval ocean
Where the first forms of life stirred
And emerged to dress the vacant earth
With warm quilts of color.
The well whose liquid root worked
Through the long night of clay,
Trusting ahead of itself openings
That would yet yield to its yearning
Until at last it arises in the desire of light
To discover the pure quiver of itself
Flowing crystal clear and free
Through delighted emptiness.
The courage of a river to continue belief
In the slow fall of ground,
Always falling farther
Toward the unseen ocean.
The river does what words would love,
Keeping its appearance
By insisting on disappearance;
Its only life surrendered
To the event of pilgrimage,
Carrying the origin to the end,
Seldom pushing or straining,
Keeping itself to itself
Everywhere all along its flow,
All at one with its sinuous mind,
An utter rhythm, never awkward,
It continues to swirl
Through all unlikeness,
With elegance:
A ceaseless traverse of presence
Soothing on each side
The stilled fields,
Sounding out its journey,
Raising up a buried music
Where the silence of time
Becomes most audible.
Tides stirred by the eros of the moon
Draw from that permanent restlessness
Perfect waves that languidly rise
And pleat in gradual forms of aquamarine
To offer every last tear of delight
At the altar of stillness inland.
And the rain in the night, driven
By the loneliness of the wind
To perforate the darkness,
As though some air pocket might open
To release the perfume of the lost day
And salvage some memory
From its forsaken turbulence
And drop its weight of longing
Into the earth, and anchor.
Let us bless the humility of water,
Always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it,
The buoyancy of water
Stronger than the deadening,
Downward drag of gravity,
The innocence of water,
Flowing forth, without thought
Of what awaits it,
The refreshment of water,
Dissolving the crystals of thirst.
Water: voice of grief,
Cry of love,
In the flowing tear.
Water: vehicle and idiom
Of all the inner voyaging
That keeps us alive.
Blessed be water,
Our first mother.
~ John O’Donohue
From: To Bless the Space Between Us
