Remembrance beach

This is a photograph I took yesterday, rounding the headland onto Slapton Sands. We were taking a shortcut back, now that the tide had retreated, aching legs not fancying the upward, downward climb we had taken outwards, earlier over the cliffs.

Slapton, shown below, was infamously where a trial landing for D-Day in 1944 went disastrously wrong and almost a thousand American soldiers were killed as a result both of German attack and ill co-ordinated 'friendly fire'!

It is a history that on Remembrance weekend was close to memory yet distant from the actuality of present place: a serene beach held on a perfect early November day, sea stilled in peacefulness.

The gap between the unfolding 'suchness' of the world and our willingness to bend it out of shape, to do it violence, was vividly present.

I remembered a dream I had when I found myself on a tropical beach at night, the sea charged with phosphorescence, meeting Fr Bede Griffiths, Benedictine monk and Indian sage, of orange robe and fulsome white beard and a young woman, of flowing golden hair and white dress, inviting me to dance and me joining the ring, dancing on the water's edge.

I found myself thinking 'make dance, not war' and seeing that the world's natural unfolding is more akin to the improvised yet patterned nature of dance than it is to the orders of conflict.

How much more welcome would it be to all the young men who died (and killed) at Slapton that they danced instead, pressing their footsteps into the sands together?

They dance now in the rungs of heaven homed to them. May those rungs ever more deeply infect our world - thy kingdom come!

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog