The Ugly Ducking comes Home

The Chieftains Candle - Pittee



When I sing before the fire at the Benwiskin Centre I will at some stage during the evening ask if there are any songs that people would like me to sing.  On occassion there are songs requested that I do not know.


Recently at one of the drumming workshop one participant kindly agreed to send me the gift of a CD by an artist whose work I did not know.  These arrived in the post together with a lovely card and a blessing.  Included in this card was part of a poem I love.  It is by the mystic poet Mary Oliver entitled "Wild Geese."


Here are some of the wonderful lines of this poem.


"Meanwhile the wild geese
high in the clear blue sky
are heading home again."


Wild geese have a special meaning in Irish history.  It was a time of abandonment.  It was a time when the Chieftains of Ireland went into exile in other lands.  Abandonment is one of my key life themes.  I am the one who identifies with the story of the ugly duckling who feels he does not belong but holds true to an inner knowing that is later revealed.


High in the clear blue sky of direct awareness the ugly ducking is heading home to the awareness of the beauty that he is and is alway destined to become.  This is why I love storytelling.  I get to go home to the real home where I truly belong and can never be abandoned - the home of the heart in at-one-ment with the longing and belonging of the soul.

The Invitation of Poetry

Love locked Out - Merrit



Poetry is for this writer and storyteller one of the seven ways to living a wonderful life.  Poetry is the language that invites you to live the wondertale that you are here to tell - not so much in words but as the presence of beauty that is beyond form.  It is the one language that will allow you to travel to infinite worlds of potential.


Do you feel yourself to be beautiful?  Do you walk in beauty as the Navaho blessing invites you to do?  This writer is not simply writing here about being glamorous - but being in direct connection with the essence of who you are.  Moving as the grace note you are here to play as part, but never apart from, the pressence of the universal intelligence that your are.  This universal intelligence is Love.


Most people, most everyone I know does not consider themselves to be beautiful.  They will defend this idea saying that it is a kind of arrogance.  Yet look at little children playing for no reason at all and experiencing delight in their natural creative expression.
That is until such time that they are taught such creativity needs to be productively channelled into making something functional.


I tell stories about the Tuatha de Danaan - the beautiful people - who in the myths of Ireland are driven underground.  This story, like all mythology, is not just some old story.  It is an ever present story of the way we treat ourselves with our conditionality and our inner critic who loves to tell us how inadequate we are.  We are the sleeping beauty asleep in the high tower of the intellect that thinks that intellectual knowledge means you understand who you are.


Poetry is the language of the heart that knows beauty.  That is why in all the circles I have attended at the Benwiskin Centre I leave a book of poetry on the table in front of the fire.  These books invite you into the fire that burns no wood.