A simple heart between the limitless heavens and the good earth

This existence is truly strange, astonishing and ordinary. Keeping those three in a bright, healthy and vibrant balance is a challenge that shapes my journey through this life as a human, and as a poet.

Strange in that we find ourselves here, given the command to BE, to live and to breathe. To move through this life as best we can, dancing with grief and joy, sifting through the glitter and dreams of our world to find our way home to ourselves and the aching simplicity and perfection of what we have always been.

Astonishing in the continual unfolding of a life where door upon fractal door reveal themselves in our thoughts and feelings, in our bodies, in our miraculous hearts. This existence we are given is always and forever so much more than we think it is. Our bones carry the echoes of ancient starlight, our minds a golden palace of creativity and imagination, our hearts share the one seed that gave birth to this whole impossible whirlwind of creation. Forever unique and perfectly woven into the ever unfolding work of art that is life and the great everything. Astonishing and wonderful.

Ordinary in our meeting with each day, with our friends and families, with grief and with simple happiness. Having our hearts broken over and over again by the suffering we see around us and find within us and by our own meeting with what life has to offer. Ordinary is having to greet a new day every morning, to open our eyes and find a way to move through our day in kindness and connection. To rise in dignity when what we feel is exhaustion and fear. To grow softer and younger as we move toward death, opened and polished like a river stone, not hardened by our failures but made soft, surrendered and wise.

"When the story of your life is read, it will not matter if you played beggar or king, for all the words of the world could not speak a single line of the exquisite holy poem that you are."

I am a husband and father of three girls. I am a carpenter and a writer. I am a lover of trees and wild places. I am a performer and a recording artist. I am a circle guide and pirate priest. I am fearful and I am courageous. I am the deep love made manifest and the seed of the one tree. I am all of these and none of these.

I do not claim to carry answers but I am so willing to be an asker of questions. The questions that are really worth asking deepen like an ocean trench as we allow ourselves to become intimate with them. Secrets are whispered there in the dark still ocean of our own knowing and being. Poetry, words, ceremony and circle are ways to gently try to lift those secrets to the surface where they can be seen and heard. They can carry a vibration, an essence of something that is not to be understood but which resonates with something within us, calling forth a heart shiver in response. In the best of worlds, on the best of days they strike a chord within me that can be heard within you. They can cause another being to rise in recognition, remembering their dignity and place in the circle of life. On other days they are inky scratches on paper or words whipped away by the wind. It matters not, I have to try, because the reaching quite simply makes me happy and keeps me sane. If no one ever spoke about the one great elephant in the middle of the sitting room then maybe we would just go on pretending it wasn’t there – this inconvenient truth of our strange, astonishing and ordinary existence. This simple miracle of being. This life. This heart. This breath.

"Walk the prayer fields of your heart, walk until your knees soften and your forehead nears the earth. There the voice of love will speak a truth that causes even the dark, quiet stones buried in the deepest places of you to weep tears of grace in silent homage to this garden of bright and holy dreams."

There is great dignity in our human lives, in how we meet the life that comes to us. The search for and the finding of spirit is not a means to escape from a mundane existence into a realm of bliss and perfection. Rather it is an opening through and into ourselves, into the realization of this being as the gift we have searched for. Reality is not be transcended or broken but embraced and honoured. In that honouring, the hands of love lift our foolishness and wisdom, our bodies and emotions to the light so that we may see with unveiled eyes. So that we may feel that all that we already have is perfect, so that we meet the wave of life just as it is and in doing so remember that this now is made of love. We do not have to go past our blocks or breakdowns we need only bring them to the one altar which is presence. There they surrender their gold and the life that you live within becomes a flower on the great tree. The ordinary does not stop being ordinary but starts to gently glow with an inner radiance which it has always carried. Peace will not be attained through great discipline, it is not a destination. Peace is now and peace is here, inside the turmoil or the boredom or the fear. Peace is here in the spirit crushing ordinariness of another day chasing our own tails trying to make this life puzzle work. Peace is a deep heart sigh, a pair of feet in the earth, the track of a tear cutting new valleys where life can flourish. Peace is the space between the stars and the space between our breaths. Hang your coat at the door and be the love that made you. There is no place else to rest than here.

You may contact me here: bushillben@yahoo.co.uk or by using the “contact” button at the bottom of the page.

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