Every Diamond has a flaw. If you choose to chip at the crack, all you are left is dust. Ask yourself would you rather dwell in dust, or celebrate the way that the light plays amongst the shards, in infinite ways, refracted and gleaming, uniquely glinting as no other may play. Or, dwell upon the crack, and watch it all blow away.
I have within the last 14 months walked from the Netherlands to
Santiago de Compostella (2450km), from Madrid to Sahagun (320km), and
from Porto to Santiago de Compostella (240km)... A grand total of
3010km on behalf of Charity Water and those that they support
worldwide.
It has been both an illumination and inspiration, not only for
myself, but those whom I touch daily, as we speak and travel about water
issues facing us as a planet. I can not tell you what a pleasure it is
to do this on Charity Water´s behalf, and every kilometer has been worth the
struggle, as the inordinate support and benevolent spirit of all those I
have met shines forth, like a great beacon of love unto the world.
I carry 20kgs, on average 20km per day (a little more sometimes if
the feet are up to it) and for the most part in all weathers and
conditions. I do this as an act of solidarity with those who live in
water sparse regions who carry on average the same load each day, just
for their personal and familial water requirements.
There has not been a single occasion in all those months and all
those kilometers where I have been refused water when I have asked for
it, and I have asked for it a LOT. Never has it been refused. For I think there
is something quite instinctual within each of us that recognizes that
without water, nothing is possible, and that ´WATER IS LIFE´.
I hope that you will join with me and give generously to this
wonderful charity, who are doing such incredible work, and changing the
lives of countless communities and human beings by making fresh,
potable, water available in places where only water starvation, and
disease born from the lack of it, existed.
Please feel free to donate to Charity Water... who are doing incredible work across the planet to bring the most basic requirement of life to millions of people who are still without this most obvious of human necessities.
Okidoki... I have created a blog to accompany the walk I am presently on, and invite you all to share and follow me on a 2000km journey from the Netherlands to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
I am at present in Thuin, in southern Belgium, having already covered a couple of hundred kilometres, and as ever it has taken me a little while to put the blog together... but better late than never! Please bear with me whilst I fill in the gaps of the journey so far, having met and seen both wonderful folk and places, with images, poetry, and adventures to share with you all.
Please feel free to visit the blog, and you will find links to various people and places of interest there, along with a link to Charity:Water, where 100% of all donations go to water projects around the world.
I carry 25kgs, on average 20km a day, something many woman and children do on a daily basis, just to meet their daily water requirements. So hopefully this journey will in some small way highlight the need and necessity to change this plight.
Hope is a string of pearls, hurled onto the floor,
torn between the desperation and the craw.
Measured days of heartache, spoonfuls of opium scented flowers, strewn in careless abandon on bloody tiles, fake smiles, tossed to lions; Strangeness, stumbling between the shards, nothing left inside the hearth, but ashes and dead coals.
How do we string those pearls together again?
When all the threads are broken,
how does the heart find the courage to endure?
In the garden of love there are two pools,
one of joy, the other of sorrow,
one past, one, tomorrow.
Libations in the lamentations of betrayal,
The arrows dipped, slipped into the wound.
To bathe in cool streams of past regret,
dreams, turned in upon themselves.
From root to seed, that ancient tree still bleeds.
Finding the time to breathe again,
The wailing edge of sorrow,
a bough without a song.
Deep ray, the dawn comes,
and with her, bright lark,
resplendently reborn from out the dark,
settles upon your heart, with joy, once more.
Strings of pearls threaded through ancient eyes,
matriculating in the school where love never dies.
It is called mourning. Grief that comes from out the
loss, intimate loss, and though we seek to deflect it, deny, or in
anger, fail to accept it, still, in the end, it is loss, it is love. A
love that demands the truth of our sincerity, a sincerity in the grace
of that loss.
Those deep bonds of love, the intimate
vulnerability of the heart, where trust is an absolute, leave us open to
the truth of the deepest sorrow, just as they have allowed for the
greatest joy. They gnaw upon the marrow, as easily as the ecstasy they employ.
When we lose those we have loved, the depths they have dug into the
fathomless oceans of our heart, swallows us, until we too, crushed in
the darkness of that infinite blue... become those depths.
But this
is not a sign of failure or weakness, abnormality or affliction,
rather, it lends it's colours to the truth of the love we have shared,
the trust and the care, the infinite womb in the oceans of our mutual
tenderness.
How can one who has ever lost and loved ever come to a
place of forgiveness, acceptance, or the dawn of renewed hope once
more, except through the door that leads through the dark night of the
soul? One who has lost, in love, and grieved not, loved not.
Grief is a room where all fear to follow, for it is dark and hollow,
holding nothing but the sea's that we swallow; still, it is a room with
two doors.
On the outside of one, written in large dark script,
is the word, 'Loss'. On the inside of the other, written in equally dark
script, is the word, 'Hope'. Only, In that darkened place, the sanctum in
the sorrow of that infinite space, it is hard to read the writing,
without a light.
They were sweet and torrential!... The
fitful sleep of a carousel that whirls after long years of disuse;
cobwebs swept from out darkened corners, the dust brushed and removed.
From time to time I stop and pick up some fine bone china ornament or a
decorative figurine, a memory of all that has been, and fly, but for a
moment, into some long lost forgotten sky. Then all at once your suns
deep ray shines it's ceaseless way into the recesses of my mind, and I am
home again, the dust swept away in an instant as I open the window from
whence you have shone your loving balm upon my soul. Spring cleaning is
such a moment of bittersweet revelry, and though the songs of distant
days echo their sweet tunes in fragrant hallways, half lit stairwells,
nothing will quell the turning of the season, and the warm thaw of
winters cool heart. I close my eyes and walk into your light, your warm
fingers stroke these threads with imperceptible delicacy, a new day has
dawned, and warmer suns beckon me on.
These shapes and feelings, the efflorescent stealing's of my heart, the rhyme upon the tip of this feathering quill, a skill, deftly stroked upon the soul of another, my lover, whose eternity wraps her arms in the gossamer airs of night, to twinkle through the filigree's of starlight, that play upon the pages of these scripted verses, born for all the ages we have ever known, forsworn by every gratitude to each that was ever grown, a twin heart, beats time within my own. These cymbals of love, that sound upon the parchment with scratchings of earth and fire, resound within a hearth, stoked by the coals of this living desire, mark time, in sweet rhythm upon my heart, the sounding bell upon the depths, from which each feathered dip does swell, to crash upon the shore of every word that sings of this love, and speaks for two, a fusion of rebirth, forever bespoke upon wings reborn, flown between the crashing waves, the smouldering tide, the seething page, fervent words, drawn from out the ink well of this love. Words...
I think it is also that he left us such beauty, bared his soul and resonated with our own, often in less callous times. Years of hope and tenderness, before the full blush of summers harsh sun had whorled it's wicked way with us. The passing of these iconic personalities, finger scars, or more tremulous hearts than those we may know today, and so too their passing becomes our own, a thousand deaths, passing down passageways we have long since left, yet, indelibly they remain our own, filled with the remnants of all those passing moments, feelings, emotions we have known. An ocean of song, sung in a common soul, though we be different, each drop a part of the whole. In the end, every moment, every emotion meant something to us, and so in passing, perhaps, those emotions that were so vital in that time pass too... for that, though we be grateful for the beauty and shared remembrance, it is hard not to be a little sad. As someone sagaciously said: "We don't cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves."
You are the earth in which the seed is sown,
the silent dark, receiving every ray,
you are the night, the supple round, the fertile loam, the coddled warmth of summers glow in endless May. Wrapped in golden hue, this suckled honey, lapped upon the morning dew we lay.
You are the ashes from the forest of the fallen
the rankled cold of winters solemn deep
you are the crown on which the soul was swollen
the hope renewed, the promise that we keep.
And ever has the world unfurled her glory,
though oft that climb atop seemed all too steep.
You are the silence that bends before me,
the rolling wave that greets the salted knight,
the curl of dreams, the whisper in the hollow,
the lavish realm, the promise of the light.
Each ripple curved upon the yielding lip,
to slip into the fulsome sheath aright.
And when the yawn of death is over,
you are the revelry, the sprightly risen tune,
the morning star, the lark-full luscious clover,
rekindled in the spark'd hearth renewed.
For every day, the dark recedes, my lover,
you are the blessing of loves first dawning ray.
