Prayer for Overcoming Indifference

I watch the news, God. I observe it from a comfortable distance. I see people suffering, and I don't lift a finger to help them. I condemn injustice but I do nothing to fight against it. I am pained by the faces of starving children, but I am not moved enough to try to save them. I step over homeless people in the street, I walk past outstretched hands, I avert my eyes, I close my heart.

Forgive me, God, for remaining aloof while others are in need of my assistance.

Wake me up, God; ignite my passion, fill me with outrage. Remind me that I am responsible for Your world. Don't allow me to stand idly by. Inspire me to act. Teach me to believe that I can repair some corner of this world.

When I despair, fill me with hope. When I doubt my strength, fill me with faith. When I am weary, renew my spirit. When I lose direction, show me the way back to meaning, back to compassion, back to You. Amen.

?Rabbi Naomi Levy

Atonement with the Absent Father

Reflections of an Irish Mythic Storyteller

The Atonement

Until a man learns what went wrong in his father's relationship and finds healing for it, he never arrives at mature manhood. From Wisdom for the Journey by Don Jones.



Advertisers and glossy magazines promote many of the stories we are told today. In one advert you are advised that you don?t have to be a tree hugger to be a man. All that you are required to do is drink a certain brand of whiskey. This is what I call a poisonous story.

I was given a poisonous story fairly early on. It was held within a teaching story of shame. I am still wearing its message in my body even today though in so many ways I do not want it and it no longer serves me.

I was initiated into the hall of shame when I was instructed in no uncertain terms that big boys don?t cry and now I don?t. In my life the grief response to loss has to a great extent been armoured. It has become bio-energically sealed within muscles that have been patterned to hold the grief and not allow it expression. I am stuck.

In this way there is held within the body a pattern of non-letting go. There is a rigidity that holds the pain of the past in the present. The ability to let go is the ability to feel the shame in the present. Most men carry this kind of shame all through their lives. For many it makes a shambles of their lives. Then they do so many things that hurt others and thmselves out of this poisonous story.

This is the poisonous story of the immature masculine. It is not the real story of the spiritual warrior who also knows how to dance. It is not the story of the man who knows that if you haven?t wept deeply then you haven?t really begun to become a true warrior of peace. You have not entered the mature masculine dedicated to the alleviation of suffering. You have not entered the real role of protector of the innocent.

In entering the mature masculine you become a warrior for the alleviation of suffering within yourself, within your family, within your community and within your racial and national consciousness. You become a real story and a true storyteller. Unless you are willing to do this then the result of not being able to process the grief is more grief and more shame.

Without revealing our shame we engage with violence. Some turn this violence inward through some form of addiction and others turn it out unto some kind of scapegoat that has a different label. We shame others with violence in order to feel a disturbed kind of power. This is not real power. It is power over rather than the power to give away the totality of who you are. We do this individually and we do it collectively as a nation state.

Power over is always insecure. It can be overthrown. To maintain it often requires the escalation of violence that tends to cycle into deeper and deeper destruction. Thus we go over to the dark side and align ourselves with the death star that is our shadow side. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. The sense of separateness from our love nature is visited upon the soft bodies of our children and other peoples children who we broadly label as other.

Then, we as men, move out into the world with our armour on. We have one clear initiation and that is the code of shame. We have been shamed about what it is to feel vulnerable. Most of us make a commitment out of our experience. This is that we make sure that this doesn?t happen again. Then we often wonder why our relationship with women or our partners is a mess. When we need to be vulnerable in relationship we get stuck.

Out of this men?s code of shame we act in the world. We fight for success, we fight disease, and we fight for our rights, usually over the rights of the less fortunate. We have one approach fits all and this is fighting. We work ourselves into exhaustion but refuse to feel. We give our authority to those who poison our life?s story and we find it hard to connect to the feminine. In the end she often leaves us and we fall into some kind of addiction. Then we turn our anger inward or direct it outward.

This is the story of the allegiance to the death star and the dark immature masculine dynamic that emasculates us. It is not our relationship to Eros. The story of the hero is the one who consciously chooses to answer the call to unity and to the revelation of their love nature. The story of the mature masculine is the story of the knight who would remove that armour and become one who allows the soft animal of their body to love what it loves. This takes courage. It takes commitment. It takes intention and attention and also detachment.

It also takes the commitment to say, ?This violence stops with me.? It takes the commitment to no more shaming. No more of a sham life and no more shambles of a life lived without love. In this way there comes the atonement with the father and the experience of forgiving the wrong. This, also means living the experience of at one ment with those shadow aspects of your self. The dark side comes into the light. You become the one who refuses to abandon the child for any other goal other than love.

Unless this happens there continue to be generation upon generation of lost boys who are walking around in the bodies of grown men doing untold harm to themselves and others. These are the Lost Sons who cannot find the Father Sky. They go off into some kind of addiction that is often approved of by society. They work themselves into exhaustion. They drink themselves into oblivion or loose their identity as an individual in some group that tells them who they should be.

So it takes the son to become the man but where are the teachings to do this. Within all indigenous teachings there were rites of passage. Often these were fairly brutal but now they are brutal in different ways. The old initiation ceremonies gave you a sense of belonging but now there is only a sense of groping in the dark covered in the armour of shame.

This is the role of the storyteller but not just any kind of storyteller. It is the role of the storyteller to hold the shadow ? the shadow of his or her life story. They bring the dark secret into the light and all families have a secret. They invite the telling of this wonder tale of who you are. They invite the shadow from the darkness to the light. This is real entertainment. It is to enter the twixt and the between and bring back to the community the treasure of the sweet moon language that every other eye is longing to hear. This is your unique language as it speaks through a heart absent of shame and sham.

Healing the Family - Part I

A storyteller, and we are all storytellers, honours their family history. This does not mean they have to like their family history but that you give your intention and attention to learning how to create from it. You create from that history something worth honouring, not only for yourself but also through the whole spectrum of the individual to the universal.

In my own family there is a history of a certain kind of disease. It is a disease of the eyes. It is called glaucoma. It is a disease of the eyes that in days of old, and even with today?s medical science ultimately leads to blindness. Genetically, I carry this potential because both my parents had glaucoma that, in the later stages of their lives required medical treatment. Their parents before them carried this genetic code that was created from a resistance to a way of seeing.

As many of you who listen and read the articles I write I am drawn to a certain kind of vision. This is a way of seeing that is the way of a real storyteller, the way of a true bard, the way of a true schanachie. I am interested in my family history for the reason of wholeness and healing. While the sins of the father might be visited upon the children this need not always be the case. If the light of consciousness is brought to that which lives as unease and disease in the psyche then healing happens or can be a happening.

In the best selling book entitled, ?You can heal your life,? by Louise L. Hay she writes about the eye disease called glaucoma in this way.

?Stony unforgiveness. Pressure from longstanding hurts. Overwhelmed by it all.?

Louise Hay tells us in her book that the antidote to this eye disease casual by pressure behind the eyes is to see with love and tenderness. Or as the mystic Hafiz invites to learn to live with a full moon in each eye and to speak from such vision. The antidote is to speak from a vision that will allow others who are longing to be a vision of Love in form to hear what can be a real vision.

Here is something that I as a storyteller, the teller of my personal life story, am directly connected to. I know this connection through the definition give by Louise Hay. I know this connection through the longing for Love and tenderness and the longing to be able to express in this way.

I can see the pressure from long standing hurts and stony unforgiveness mirrored in my father?s life. I can see the over whelmed by it all experience in the life of my mother. So what do you do with this encoded message within one?s personal DNA? Well, you can fight it or you can transform it. When you fight it you are in effect dishonouring it. When you transform it you are in effect honouring the way the story of Love has informed your immediate family. In this way you become a healer and what it means to be a real storyteller.

As a storyteller I start with intention. This is where creation begins to express in form. It is the connecting point between the world of form and the world beyond form. It is the connecting point between time and the timeless. It is where the invisible begins to manifest. It is the invitation to the formless, timeless, infinite possibility to come into being. It is the invitation to the One to become what the mystic Loa Tzu calls, ?the ten thousand things.?

At least for me this word intention invites inner tending and inner tenderness. It is not the get up and go of an often disturbed over accentuated masculine approach to living life. It is more the humble grounded approach of the mature feminine. It is out of this groundedness that healing begins and wholeness can be known and felt. Both the masculine and feminine are needed for wholeness but it is the masculine that serves the feminine.

Each of us stands on the shoulders of everyone who has ever lived in form. This is particularly true of all those family members who have lived in form before we arrived within this time space body. The freedoms we have now are often taken for granted. They have often been won at the expense of deep personal sacrifice. This should not be forgotten. All families have wounds. It is within this wondedness that you have the stuff of wonder. As the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung pointed out, ?The gold is in the shadow.?

The shadow of our family history manifests in disease and as Louise Hay says, and as most wisdom teachers say, disease arises out of the unwillingness to forgive. The disease of my family manifesting as glaucoma arises from the pressure of long standing hurts. Yet it is not the long-standing hurts in themselves that is the problem or is the real problem the unease deepening into disease. It is the pressure from the resistance to letting them go that causes the suffering.

There are so many wondrous stories in books and movies that are available around this issue that is called forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn?t redeem the other person. It redeems you. It sets you free. It takes you out of the prison of separateness that you have allowed yourself to become deeply attached to. There is no judgement here. You are not being blamed but you are being invited. You do not do forgiveness. It is more that you become willing to see the world in a new way and allow that seeing to envisage your life. It is the willingness for something new to be that allows forgiveness to heal you.

Finding Real Confidence - Locating the Pool of Wisdom

Tom Cowan writing in ?Yearning for the Wind? writes

?When the beautiful people known as the Tuatha de Danaan learned that another race of humans was about to invade Ireland their seers decided to hide the pool of wisdom. They removed it from ordinary reality so that morals could not find the water and misuse its power.?

This story is not just part of an old Irish story. It is your story and my story. This pool of wisdom is available to each and everyone of us. It is, however, extremely powerful. Most everyone who comes to drink of this pool of grace is transformed by it. It is hidden but there is the promise that those who seek shall find.

Only as one off the world?s greatest drinkers of this pool of wisdom says, ?First you will be troubled, then you will be amazed.? You will be troubled because you will call this wisdom your own and you will, as most everyone does, use it to serve your self-interest. This is what this Irish mystic storyteller has done and in some little way is learning to undo.

When you drink of this wellspring of infinite knowing you will be given what you ask for. You will misuse it. It is a wishing well that you are intended to use for wishing well and not simply for getting everything that you wish for. In such focus of self-interest you will be setting yourself up for trouble. This isn?t a punishment but the universe does not give such power to those who would rush in where angels fear to tread.

You will through the self-serving of the ego lose contact with this wisdom pool that is at your deep harts core. This is the troubling stage. It can last a long time. The wisdom is really cultivated by the work of integrating the understanding that arose from within the depth of your deep hearts core. This is a humbling experience. You come back down to earth with a bump.

The wisdom pool is not a pool that is a bank of knowledge that you acquire. The wisdom poll isn?t like a skills bank. It is a pool of paradox, of riddle or parable and of story. It is a pool that dispels ignorance. It takes you out of the spell you are under when you identify experience with the separate sense of self you call me, myself, I.

The wisdom pool is not a pool of know how. It doesn?t tell you what you should do in this or that circumstance. It is a way of knowing that is free of concepts of time and end results. It isn?t within the realm of thinking about. Thought is not wisdom. Wisdom arises downstream of thought from the silence and majesty of no mind. No mind does not mean absence of a sense of being but the awareness of the vastness of being. Thought is conceptual. Wisdom is boundless.

The Fire that Takes no Wood

I went out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head

W.B. Yeats ? The Song of Wandering Aengus

These lines open Yeats? great poem of the hero?s journey. This going to the hazel wood is undertaken by the outsider. This is the outsider who longs for the source of magic and miracle within.

The hazel wood is a place of sanctuary. It is a place of initiation. You are invited to be an initiate of the threshold places of the heart. This often takes you into a dark wood.

The fire in the head is a creative longing. It is the longing to be. To be is to be creative. You cannot not be creative, but you are given the choice in how you will express this creative fire that burns within you.

Many of us have lost the ability to feel the fire that burns within us to express love in action. We may lose it through grief or disappointment or listening to our internal critic rather than the voice of purpose and wisdom within.

Our fire has become the fire of ?doing? our life, where we get burnt out. It is a limited fire that consumes itself. We do not tend at the fire that needs no wood. We have forgotten what it is to sit and feel or creative, to be enveloped in its invisible embrace that warms the heart.

Through spiritual direction and soul friendship you can learn to tend the fire that needs no wood. The fire in your head is the natural call to creative expression as love in action. It never goes out. Except that most of us forget that this every creative potential is available to us if we enter the Deep Hearts Core.

This Irish Mystic Storyteller has a longing. It is the longing to share the invitation to the beauty at the deep hearts core. This is why I have recorded a weekly podcast that is given that name. The Deep Hearts core is the last line from W. B. Yeats? poem entitled The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

In the Deep Hearts Core Podcast this Irish Mystic Storyteller unfolds the invitation, not only from the poetry of W. B. Yeats, but from Irish mythology, Irish folk song and modern day song lyrics. This is an invitation for you to learn to allow your personal song of beauty to be sounded within the world and delight not only you but also others who see you living it.

So if you want a weekly input of inspired invitation to the beauty of who you are simply go to the following link and download the podcasts that interest you or sign up for a regular free subscription.

http://www.anamcaraexperience.org/podcast.html

A Story of Global Land Grabbing

John Vidal the Environment Editor of the Guardian writes

?The acquisition of farmland from the worlds poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe?s farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.?

In the Guardian article entitled ?Fears for the world?s poor countries as the rich grab land to grow food? we are told

?Outsourcing food production will ensure food security for investing countries but would leave behind a trail of hunger, starvation and food scarcities for local populations. The environmental tab of highly intensive farming ? devastated soils, dry aquifer, and ruined ecology from chemical infestation ? will be left for the host country to pick up.?

Here we see more of the same by the forces of global capitalism hell bent on ensuring that they maintain their highest levels of return on capital employed. They have used up most all the capital resources that exist in their own countries having devastated the soil and water and now they are moving to countries where they can charge for their chemical quick fix that creates deserts.

As an accountant one of the first principles of sound business management one learns is that you do not erode your capital base. It is out of this base that you earn revenue to sustain your business for the long term future. If you find that you are using capital this is indicative of mismanagement. Not so it appears if the capital base is the soil on which we are all dependant to sustain life.

Return on capital employed is the driving force of corporate life. The higher the better. Chief Executive Officers of large corporations will no longer be Chief Executive Officers if return on capital employed is not increasing and damn the consequences. This increased return is reflected in rising share prices that are the be all and end all of the God called market forces.

Who pays the consequences? In the short term the poor and in the long term every one of us. Why does this happen. In simplistic terms it is because we in the Western world are not prepared to pay the cost of producing food in a way that is sustainable. We have become so used to cheap price food that we no longer accept prices that would reflect the full cost of production.

The result is that food is produced as cheaply as possible and as intensively as possible. When the resources of the land have been burned away through intensive chemical use the corporations move on to buy up other land resources by which they can maintain their one measure of success ? return on capital employed. No one stops to ask what happens when the capital base is fully eroded.

As a storyteller and writer on Irish mythology this fixation on ever increased return on capital employed would be recognised as a poisonous story. In a fairy story this market force would be represented by a poison apple. We are now a global village and this poison is set to come back to us in the West. We have allowed undemocratic forces to use resources that belong to us all in a self interested way.

Due to self interest we have refused to be stewards of the land in the interest of future generations. Sustainable food costs. It costs energy in the form of money. If that energy is not expended in the form of money it costs in other ways. The present system of ever cheaper food production costs lives. The price paid is that of hunger and starvation but not for you or me ? or at least not yet. It costs the lives of the most vulnerable in our global village.

Still the good news is that the FTSE index will in the short term have risen in the knowledge that the God of the market place will be for a little while appeased. At least until the land runs out.

Tony Cuckson


Quotes taken from the Guardian Friday 3 July 2009

Living the One Glorious Life

How does one as an Irish Mystic Storyteller begin to craft a story. One way is to pay attention to that which excites you and to be faithful to that feeling wherever it invites you to go. It also requires commitment and the ability to trust the process. It means learning to be comfortable with "not knowing."

Sometimes a story will simply happen and you have it down on the page very quickly. At other times the story is a kind of birthing. It will simply happen if you pay attention to simply getting out of the way and not being over anxious. In Zen such and attitude is summed up in the beautiful wisdom saying "Don`t push the river."

Pay attention when ideas keep coming back that you have resisted. Sometimes you will spend time with a story, even work very hard at a story, and it comes to nothing. Actually, what happens is that the story is flowering in a different way and will bloom through another story if you trust the intention.

When you feel excited, more than your head is involved. Excitement is the equivelant of the yellow brick road that takes you to the wonderland of Oz. Follow the yellow brick road. This is a metaphor for the wisdom road within you. It is the invitation to travel the beauty of the real story you are here to share.

Your real story is far more magnificent and more glorious than you might ever imagine. Trust this beauty to express as excitement within the body and live the one glorious life you have come here to be. You are the real wonder tale waiting to be told.