Alan Spence

I recently took part in a conference (organised by the Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace) on the great Scottish novelist Neil Gunn.

Late in his life Gunn developed an interest in Eastern spirituality, in particular Zen Buddhism. Some of his mature writings, reflecting this, were greeted with a kind of bewilderment and bemusement. However, for Gunn this Eastern culture was not something alien or esoteric. On the contrary, he felt very much at home with it, found it somehow familiar. In his own words, he found it ‘very like the thing!’  He recognised also that there were elements of this culture that echoed aspects of his own Celtic heritage – a closeness to nature, a clear-eyed looking into the heart of things.  We all know those little moments of awakening, a kind of insight, where we feel in touch with a deeper part of ourselves, profoundly connected to the world around us. The struggle to express this awareness may lead us in interesting directions in terms of language and form.

In the workshop I will use the haiku form as a way of catching those little moments of grace. But I’ll also use poems from East and West (for example poems by Rumi, or Mary Oliver) which consciously use the language of devotion and praise.

Here’s a little piece by my own teacher, Sri Chinmoy, which captures that sense of recognition, of familiarity, of coming home to what feels ‘very like the thing.’

EVER THE SAME AGAIN

Ever the same again
My lost truth rediscovered.
Ever the same again.

Ever the same again,
My forgotten self remembered.
Ever the same again.

Ever the same again,
My lost goal regained.
Ever the same again.