It’s February; cold and wet, now… But in a few month’s time, It will be glorious May, and the landscape around the celebrated village of Grasmere, in the heart of the Lake District, will be transformed into one of the beautiful locations in Britain.
Grasmere is to be our base for the Silent Eye’s Spring weekend of 2024, 10-12 May.
Grasmere’s most famous resident was William Wordsworth, and the village hosts the world-famous Wordsworth Museum and Dove Cottage. Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s grave is located between the church and the river.
Our weekends are gentle affairs, but we do some serious walking and talking, too. We choose a landscape of beauty around which we can base three walks: A longer one for the Saturday and two shorter ones for the Friday afternoon and the Sunday morning prior to departure after lunch.
The main walk is taken on the Saturday, often in some circular fashion – and combining walking with other forms of transport. Last year, a number of well-exercised walkers were surprised and delighted to find an unexpected boat arriving at the jetty of Wray Castle, on Windermere, to ferry them across Lake Windermere and back to our base in Bowness.
Our spiritual theme, discussed at various points on our walks is based on one of Wordsworth’s most famous works: the Ode to Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
We will explore the idea of ‘Clouds of Glory’ and what that might mean in modern terms. Those joining the event will be welcome to bring their own readings and quotations.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home”
William Wordsworth. Extract from Poetry Foundation website
Grasmere is justly famous for its surrounding hills, including Helm Crag’s Lion and the Lamb and the landscape of the River Rothay, which snakes through its centre (close to the grave of William and Mary Wordsworth), before flowing out into Grasmere lake and eventually, through Rydal Water and on into the vast waters of Lake Windermere.
A circular walk around Grasmere lake, taking in the beauty of the village, with refreshments back in the town, will be part of our planning.
Come and join us! Friday lunch to Sunday lunch 10-12th May, 2024.
To register your interest and receive updates on the plans, contact us at rivingtide@gmail.com.
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©Stephen Tanham 2024
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All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a journey of the soul guided by lessons, inner guidance and outer companionship.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
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(general interest, poetry, humour and travel)
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Raze
by Steve Tanham
(📩70 words, winter poetry, a one-minute read)
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©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher.
He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a journey of the soul guided by lessons, inner guidance and outer companionship.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry, humour and travel)
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(📩100 words, a one-minute read)
The sky lit bright with promise
The dark earth sodden and soft
The tree – the form returning life
will use to shape itself.
Like, yet unlike,
Each season different yet the same
With a billion variants we do not see…
———-
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher.
He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a journey of the soul guided by lessons, inner guidance and outer companionship.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry, humour and travel)
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(📩700 words, a ten-minute read, final part)
(Note: due to a technical error, Part Two of The Touch of Experience did not publish on Sun in Gemini, though it did on The Silent Eye. There is a link at the end of this post if the reader would like to read the full set of three, in sequence. Apologies)
In Part Two, the ‘Apple’ became a friend that helped us quieten the mind’s focus on concentration (of things) and created a ‘light and bubbling’ sense of ourselves, a kind of glow…
In this final part of the series, we are going to do something quite wonderful … and very simple. I hope you will take this with you and use it, often.
When we feel the gentle affinity with the apple – or whatever object we have used to help us – we are going to include it in our being.
That’s right, we’re going to relate to it as though it were part of us; a part of the ‘me’ that is ‘you’ – your very special sense of self.
We do this by holding that bubbling glow that we feel at the presence of this friendly object and transposing it back to us, as though some invisible process was absorbing it back into our body.
Immediately we do this, we will feel that, actually, it already was part of our body, and that the bubbling glow we now feel was really coming from us, all along. Only now, we recognise the signature of that focus on the apple was actually the sense of peaceful self.
While the energy of this is glowing, use it to sweep up your whole body, starting with the muscles and bones of your feet and rising up within the legs to the mid-section, stomach and chest, and holding it in your heart. Then, let it rise through your throat and head with a sense of ‘flowering’ at the very top of your head and out into the space above you.
As though you were a flower, feel your feet rooted to the Earth and your flowering head connected to the sky (and stars) above you.
It’s a beautiful feeling, isn’t it?
The body is always in the now, but we don’t often pay this kind of attention to it, so we stay lost in our thoughts and concerns and feelings – the mind. All of these are imaginations compare to the reality and ‘present-ness’ of the body.
Go back now and feel how much your body is in the ‘present moment’. Does it have that gentle inner glow? If so, then the whole of it is present to the beautiful now, and the phantoms of the busy or troubled mind have been pushed where they belong.
The future is an idea. The present is where everything happens; and it is constantly changing, Our lives can change in an instant, so our heavy thoughts and worries simply hold us away from the power of the now and that which is present in the now to change things.
Our minds are usually in a chaotic state of ‘must do this, must remember to do that … and worry about things that have yet to happen to us. The body is always in the now, and when we return our full presence to it, it glows with joy.
Experience –where we started – touches the body, first. That is reality, What we then make of that touch of experience is down to the state of our emotion and thoughts – the mind, in other words,
With care and love for our-selves, we can separate these, and see how they work. At any stage, we can stop the compulsive busyness and simply be present to our bodies, re-inhabiting the bubbling joy of being alive and being ‘me’.
This ‘other realm’ of being is what we always had before our minds became ‘sophisticated’ and cluttered with concerns, anticipations and worry.
It belongs to us. It is us. We can reclaim it so simply.
I hope this works for you… Its effects can be a revelation.
Previous parts of this series:
This is part Three
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©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a guided inner journey from the state of conscious personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry and travel)
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(-📩 500 words, mainly photos. A five minute browse)
It was so late there was literally no-one else around.
An unsettled dog with an upset tummy had led me out into the unlit streets of Sedgwick: our small village, which lies about 25 miles from Lake Windermere.
With nothing else to do except walk the poor collie until she was tired or cured, I got the iPhone out and began to play with ‘Night-mode’, switching the flash off and letting the lens and internal computers do their best against the darkness. There are no street lamps in Sedgwick; the village has a dark-skies policy.
I don’t use a tripod, so half the shots were taken just standing up and holding the phone as steady as possible. The rest were taken jammed against a fence post, lamp-post or anything else that was tall enough to brace and steady the shots. I did, though, have the benefit of a bright and full-ish moon, which made all the difference at the ‘cold’ end of the spectrum.
Opposite the old Wakefield estate, there is a row of individual houses, built at various times in the village’s history. Geographically, this is the centre of the village.
The old Wakefield house and gardens are extensive. In the darkness they look ominous… The perfect setting for a ghost story, perhaps?
Apple’s night-mode on the iPhone works by using AI to evaluate what’s being asked of it, then taking and merging multiple shots to get the best result it can. All this without using the flash – which makes it good for any kind of landscape photo; near or far.
As the hill steepens towards the River Kent, the houses thin out. This is one of the old gunpowder-foreman’s houses , now divided into two dwellings.
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a journey guided by lessons, correspondence, exercises, zoom reviews and personal meditation. This takes the conscious personality to the dawning of realised personal Self and its restored home of Being.
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📩 humorous photos, fright. 17 words. One minute read)
Winter shadows are great fun.
The strong sun, coming in at a low angle, creates images of high contrast. Many of these carry a degree of humorous ‘threat’: the kind one can imagine on the cover of a dark novel.
The ‘intruder’ appeared when I was framing the shot of Tess, sitting on a bench. The sun came out behind me and suddenly there was a new figure in the shot… An ancient monk, perhaps, bearing a staff!
And he’s behind us!!!
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©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers an intuitionally-guided journey from the state of conscious personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry, humour and travel)
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+ #Photography,, #Silenti, iPhone photography, landscapes, Photography, Places and Prose, Travel and people, Travel and Photography
A round of Roundhay
by Steve Tanham
(📩 300 words, a five-minute read)
Roundhay Park in north Leeds. I had stepped in at short notice to drive over the Pennines to help ‘toddler- sit’ our grandson.
He was under the weather; possibly teething, and had been sent home from nursery. Dad – my son – was abroad on business and unable to return at short notice.
A well wrapped-up walk with the grandson in his buggy was in order; giving mum some precious time to get on with working from home.
Just me and the young lad, who, I’m told – and apropos of nothing – could play for Yorkshire at cricket, since he was born there. The rest of our Lancashire-bred family is, of course, distraught at the prospect.
Roundhay park is famous for its birdlife. The 700 acres boasts a huge lake as the centrepiece of literally dozens of walking routes.
The park is beautiful, and has over a million visitors each year. One stroll around it tells you why.
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers an intuitionally-guided journey from the state of conscious personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry and travel)
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And, far overhead, top right, in fact, Marjory ordered a gin and tonic…
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, an online school of the Soul that provides monthly lessons, assignments and personal mentoring.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry, humour and travel)
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(📩 740 words, a ten-minute read)
To enter a process of mystical training is often considered an intellectual experience, with limited connection to everyday experience.
In practice, the opposite is true. The everyday experience is the heart of the matter.
There is no finer example of this than the admonition, given early, to ‘experience, fully, what is happening to you, now.’
At first hearing, this sounds self-contradictory. How can we not experience what is happening to us?
Try it for a moment: fix your attention on a familiar object in your house. It doesn’t matter what it is. Take that apple over there in the fruit bowl….
Look at it, then really look at it. At first you’ll get a reaction from ‘the objector’ in your mind. Oh, not this nonsense again, it might say. I’ve focussed on apples and oranges a hundred times, before. It’s boooooring!
It is boring, for the first few seconds. The wandering mind doesn’t want its precious single point of attention limited like this. It wants to retain the butterfly nature that it luxuriates in, floating from one bright and juicy ‘fix’ to another. Why would it look at that apple (note the movement to enemy status, here). We’re now dealing with something that’s in the way of our freedom!
At this point, you pick up your hiking pole and whack it – the butterfly mind – and tell it that you’re serious about doing this exercise because you sense something important beneath it.
Return to the ‘apple’ and literally trap your own mind in its enduring state of reactive resistance.
Where did that come from? You initiated this search of the experience of the apple, yet a whole wave of resistance followed it…
The truth will make us think … deeply.
We are not really in charge of our minds. Instead, we have built up – or allowed to be built up – a whole set of layers of resistance to ‘deeper thinking’, most of which follows habit.
Deeper thinking isn’t our sole goal, but it is a gateway to it. We do need to be able to direct our attention, fully and at will, and the most powerful object of that attention is our experience of ‘the world’
We all know the power of habit. Often, it’s a brilliant thing. I don’t ‘really’ have to think about driving my car. After so many years behind the wheel, my mind-computer has developed a sophisticated and very accurate set of monitors and reactive processes that, basically, drive the car for me, allowing my attention to be brought instantly back into focus if something new or urgent interrupts my journey.
This is not inattention; it’s the human’s mechanism for not being exhausted all the time – which would be the result if we had to live in the hyper-attentive state, fear-driven that we needed when we were learning to drive.
So we can see the pattern. Our mind comprises layers of wonderful processing power which have developed during our lives. It has a very fixed view of its world, based on looking after us and streamlining what we need to focus on.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that, as we get older and hopefully wiser, we want to delve into deeper states of our experience. Why? Basically, because before we leave this mortal coil, we have a deep desire to know ourselves, and we have seen that we don’t.
When we have this thought – and allow it. We feel an immediate connection with a deeper and neglected ‘layer’ of me.
What we know is the ‘habitual human’, many of whose characteristics are admirable … but now antithetical to our more sophisticated need to get to the truth of what we see to be our real existence.
In the next post of this ‘touch of experience’ series, we’ll grasp that enemy apple and go deeper – much deeper…
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers an intuitionally-guided journey from the state of conscious personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry and travel)
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(📩260 words plus photos. A three minute read)
Although we live on the edge of the Lake District, one of our treats, at the end of a cold winter day, is to drive south on the old A6 trunk road to Milnthorpe, then take the right turn to follow the River Bela along the edge of the Levens estate.
Ten minutes later, we’re in the small seaside village of Arnside. Ideally, we arrive with about thirty minutes of daylight left (currently around four p.m.)
which gives one of us time to run Tess on the shore while the other collects the pre-ordered fish and chips.
Shortly thereafter, with the car warming up further along the promenade, so we can watch the energetic tide race in or out, often twinkling with the light of Grange – across the estuary, while we eat our meal in hungry silence.
Somehow, it’s more fun in winter. But Arnside’s ‘chippy’ is justly famous all year round.
A simple pleasure … but wonderful. The opening photo may convey something of the atmosphere.
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and post-processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers an emotionally-guided journey from personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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(📩 140 words, poetry, a four-minute read)
The last car, angry, leaves the sloping bank
Bullets from rubber as gravel flies
Inside, warring words, a hiss of parting
Then gone…
◽️◽️ ◽️
Devoid of jagged sound, our ears extend
The tiny hum of far-off workers’ journeys
Streaming home, their day is done
◽️◽️◽️
Save those last few miles, then softer, glorious home
A place to which we will return – in normal time
But this is not complete, nor here…
◽️◽️◽️
…And now, when light falls from darkening sky
And mercury melds the tidal ponds aflame,
The Collie’s eager call; the ball that must be thrown,
The simple sense of now; cold sea and harsher winds.
◽️◽️◽️
The inner glow that shines the silence of unsaid,
She watches me, hearing nothing, sensing all,
Brown love, golden, pierces my eyes
And once, again, the shore is hers … and mine.
◽️◽️◽️
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers an intuitionally-guided journey from the state of conscious personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry and travel)
Share this:
+ #Photography,, #Silenti, Consciousness, iPhone photography, Lake District, Mindfulness, nature, Photographic techniques, Photography, Places and Prose, Seasons of the year
The liquid depth of January
by Steve Tanham
(📩 330 words, a two minute read)
I love to discover a scene that epitomises (for me) the main characteristic of each month. January is a particular challenge!
I took this one dangling the iPhone precariously over the safety railings of the village’s old bridge. As can be seen, the River Kent is in full flood, though not dangerously so.
In mid December, 2015, the ‘once in a lifetime’ flood waters came to within four feet of the road level. One hundred metres along the road the tarmac was six feet below the water’s surface.
Today, the river was energetic but stable. We get used to its background noise but it really does ‘roar’ as it adds another fraction of a millimetre to the depth of the gorge. The South Lakeland limestone here is mercifully very hard.
Advanced canoeists shoot these rapids. It’s quite a sight and not for anyone else. Occasionally, a police helicopter is seen hovering over this stretch of the river. It’s the nature of the gorge to reveal the body of anyone who has tragically entered the river upstream in Kendal… and lost their lives or been injured.
It’s deep, powerful and potentially ominous. But most of all, it’s Nature in January at its most potent.
The other side of the bridge reveals one of my favourite views. It’s a great vantage point from which to capture the melancholy ‘fullness’ of what can be a rather depressing month.
But not here…
©Stephen Tanham 2024
All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.
Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers an emotionally-guided journey from the conscious state of personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.
There are two blog streams:
(mystically-oriented writing)
and
(general interest, poetry and travel)
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