The Shining Path

By W. E. Gordon

One summers afternoon, after reading some old personal notebooks and journals of mine from the 1960s and 70s, I found myself perplexed and astonished at the course my life has in fact taken. So I decided to write some poems.

Together they form The Shining Path: a poetic narrative winding its autobiographical way across key locations on my lifes time line. My bafflement dispersed as three guiding voices began to speak for themselves from the depths of the path:

The voice of the poet narrating and reflecting
The voice of the pilgrim trekking towards eternitys sunrise
The voice of the warrior of light clarifying and guarding the way

W. E. Gordon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Nov 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514464403

W. E. Gordon

Born in the USA in 1943, Bill has been living in the United Kingdom since 1975. He is married, with four children, and lives in Birmingham. A retired psychiatric nurse, Bill worked for many years within the NHS in acute psychiatry. He is also a founder and for many years was a director of Hebron Trust, a spiritually based twelve-step addiction treatment and recovery community based in Norwich. Bill now works as a qualified life coach specializing in life transitions and spiritual transformation. He can be contacted by e-mail, [e-mail], or through his website, lifevisioncoaching.co.uk.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by W. E. Gordon.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5144-6441-0

                eBook            978-1-5144-6440-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/03/2015

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

727475

Contents

Preface

October Flew the Coop

Day Trip (as remembered)

The Notebook

Dawn Apocalypse

The Ancient Starry Dynamo

Lucid Dreaming: A Story in Four Parts

Taking Leave

Descent into the Realm of the Dead

The Village Clocktower

Raziel Points to the Shining Path

Song of the Dead Leaves

Song of the Dead Leaves

Time and Eternity

The Song

The Man from Heaven

The Cliffs of Inis Mor

Poems

Rhymed Words

The Ancient Bard I Sing

Amongst other Types of Poets

Desolations of Moloch

The Hammer and the Anvil

Seeds of Life

Selah

With love, for Carol, Hannah, Norma, Bruce, Duncan and Andrew

Preface

One summer's afternoon, after reading some old personal notebooks and journals of mine from the 1960s and 70s, I found myself perplexed and astonished at the course my life had taken. So I decided to write a poem, initially inspired by the opening lines of an early journal entry from 1967:

October flew the coop

and the wind howled for six days

Over a number of months one poem followed another. The result is The Shining Path: a poetic narrative winding its autobiographical way across key locations on my life's time-line. But what were these precise locations and what happens when I seek to access them through memory?

According to recent research, our everyday experience of the 'now" consists of a stream of discrete 'present moments' of a typical duration of less than ten seconds. In addition to this, there is the disturbing fact that our memory of any past event is not that event itself. The experience of re-calling through memory our distant past happens now. Even the telling of something that just happened to us a few moments ago is taking place right now. We also have anticipations of the future, but these too are being experienced now, inspiring and shaping our present state of mind. The same holds true for all visions, dreams and revelations after the fact.

A poem is also and always a dream. It is like a daydream of wish