May132024
Words of WonderScreen-saver - Imtiaz Dharker

I carry your face in a mobile shrine
and I take it out on the Underground.

Your digital eyes look into mine.
I change at Farringdon and I have changed.

Touched by you, my skin is kozo tissue,
my hair rose perfumed ink,

My eyelids are gold leaf.
The woman on my right,

reflected in the window opposite,
takes on the stillness of an icon,

The boy across the way
lifts his cheek to be pure marble

sculpted in living light. Together,
we travel on into the night,

all of us grown precious,
each of us alive and rare.

by Imtiaz Dharker
Have you ever experienced a moment where everything seems to shine as if luminous? Maybe when sitting looking out at a city scene or when looking at an expansive view of mountains or the sea, or when watching children playing…

Imtiaz Dharker, who is a Pakistan-born British poet, artist and video film maker, experiences such a moment through an intimacy with loss. Somehow the awareness of life’s transience brings an acute, luminous, extra-ordinary quality to her perception, as if, I imagine, the air in the tube were charged with effervescence.

We trundle along most of the time in a trance characterised by narrow, calcified tracks of habitual thinking. But, once in a while, something cuts through this and the world springs into magnificent life almost like it’s super-charged.

This can be catalysed by intense life events, spiritual buildings – like cathedrals (stained glass windows evoke this quality I think), poetry, art, films and natural beauty. But it can also become more available in our lives through mindful presence and heart opening compassion.

Fay Adams

Ps. If you’d like to taste how poetry can evoke mindfulness and open heartedness, check out these two upcoming opportunities:

And if you’d like to begin your mindfulness journey at the beginning, try our Level 1 Being Present course.

 

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

Author: Fay Adams

Fay Adams trained to teach mindfulness under the guidance of well-known teacher Rob Nairn, whilst living on the Holy Isle retreat island off the west coast of Scotland. She now teaches courses and retreats in mindfulness, compassion, insight and engaged mindfulness around the UK with the Mindfulness Association and she is a tutor on the University of Aberdeen's Studies in Mindfulness MSc. Fay is a dedicated meditation practitioner of 15 years. Fay was originally drawn to mindfulness in her twenties because of her chronic pain. Throughout her 6 years of living on Holy Isle in a small meditation hut, she immersed herself in discovering what the pain was all about. In the process she began to find a new way to inhabit mind, body and community. Ultimately, as well as (mostly) freeing her from the pain, this has become a deeply rich basis for living life fully. Her practice was formed and matured within a Tibetan Buddhist context. More recently it has been influenced by Reggie Ray's somatic practice and is now also coached in a love of nature and the Earth and she finds that deep ecology, as taught by Joanna Macy and others, is a path towards wisdom. Fay now lives on the Staffordshire/Cheshire border with her partner and son.