Online Retreat: Earth, Heart, Sky
Day 5: Sky
Resources for Day 5:
Why am I here?
Why has reality chosen to manifest in me?
Friday 8am
Welcome to Day 5
Poem (Fluent by John O’ Donahue)
45 min unled meditation with bells marking 5 stages.
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
John O’Donohue
Friday 10.30am
Approx timings
Talk by Paramananda
25 mins led meditation
1 hr 9 mins lying down with drumming
1 hr 29 mins led meditation
If you are lucky with life
If you are lucky with this life
one day
while walking through a stand of silver birch
at dawn
when a golden light spills over the lip
of the world
or when crossing a swift shallow stream
on stepping stones
or just sitting still in your room
catching the song of a bird
woven into the din of your city
your body might reveal its self to you
as a home for the world
a glimpse that you
are entirely beyond yourself
like the white deer at the beginning of a fable
and if without hesitation you follow
you will find your self gloriously lost
in the rise and fall of your seasons
Paramananda
Friday 4pm pt1
Open sit (unled) with Paramananda.
Friday 4pm pt2
And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
Seamus Heaney
