The View from Here: Killiney Hill

I'm sitting cross legged on a layer of brown leaves... soft they are, fulfilled and expanded by the winter dampness that pervades this wood. To my immediate right a slab of granite is exposed....caressed by green moss.  

I realise that I also sit on another huge granite rock who wears his leaves as a crown... a King in His Woods. Blue  tits jump around restlessly on the twigs of the trees above.  Their staccato song fills the cool damp air within which I have my Being.  I am truly alive here.  My bare feet Earthed in the leaves, my eyes scanning the stark bare branches above that are dappled by the in-streaming, cold January sun. 

To my left, a wise old Beech tree slumbers.  An old friend, dozing. She murmurs to me in her sleep..... dreaming this wood into existence. The wind tickles her branches and they move in free flowing patterns of evolving forms. The slender fractal twigs at the end of her reach, extending like antennae upwards towards the sky. Could it be that she is listening to the voice of the cosmos flooding in to her reverie? Is this the source of her dreams?

And down, down, way below, the inexorable sea at high tide alights on rocks... singing a song of serenity, of rhythm and flow and real power ...in trust and patience... the cold blue-grey winter sea. Enjoying the way her fingers, the waves, stroke the beach. Just as her song flies up from below and reaches my ears and the heart of the beach tree too. 

I'll meditate in this place for a while and on all of that, all of those spinning thoughts and intuitions, and then I will walk away bare-foot on the cold damp leaves lining the pathways and corridors of the wood like magic carpets. I'll be feeling refreshed like the beech tree after her sleep.

The Storm Speaks: St Stephen's Day Storm - Tipperary

There is a tremendous storm building here... I hope to go out in it later and be buffeted and invigorated by it - to experience what it is to be a Storm. To allow the storm to express itself within me. To become filled by the storm as I expand into the storm. To raise up my arms into the night as if they were the branches of trees. To hear the whirring screaming wind at the centre of my head. In the core of my being. To feel the power of it in my heart and chest. To explode internally, to be blown apart and reassembled as a new me. A catharsis from both within and without. To be washed, baptised by the punching rain. To truly live. To truly love. That's all. To experience those things like storms and darkness and fierce wind that the others are terrified of and avoid...out into the stormy night....I go...I go...

......I ventured out into the farmyard as the storm continued to develop. Such intense energy and sense experience. No allowance for control with a storm. Water whipped up from the puddles in the yard. Water as rain punching me with pins. My face feeling like it's bleeding, my eyes watering up and flowing. Immersed in a water world I stood. The wind the expression of the sound of a waterfall and fountain all in one. I was squeezed upward and downward simultaneously. My body and mind stretched as I struggled to hold on to some semblance of reality... Up? Down? No gravity... Floating, flying in wind in water in spray..... Winded, breathing in short sharp intakes of compressed breath. Cold damp air in. Cold damp air out. Feeling my way in darkness. Shadowy forms flying at me... My tumbling thoughts shimmering within the night as this storm appears within me.....and outside me. A paradox that is truth. Where do I begin? Where do I end? Do I have boundaries? I am an open vessel now... Filling, filling with darkness and wind and water.. Overflowing with this intense energy... Within, without, tick tock, tick tock time disappears I am lifted off my feet and sucked up up up into the swirling darkness. And then some light, a stillness, quiet, unexpected serenity as I transcend the immanence of this experience. The light. The love. At the heart of the storm. Liberation. Acceptance. The storm is. I am. I return to me. Ears whistling. Damp face. Back to the warmth of the fire.......