We’re happy to share poetry from ICNer Pete Armstrong, offered as invitations to guide us into deeper feet engagement. 

He says of his poetry:

These poems mostly arose within a space of meditation, of opening to All, and were shaped-up within that space. Only when they were more-or-less complete were they written down.

There are more poems in five books available on Amazon:

The Commitment of the Lark                 poems for looking deeply.
Target Practice                                            100 poems for your inner journey
The Words on my Face                              poems on opening to God in the silence
Of Love and Bent Nails                              poems on an Integral path
Some Palaeolithic Creature in me        poems on the Way through

For personal and non-commercial usage, please copy, use, and share these poems as widely as possible!

Contact: pilgrimpoems@gmail.com

You can also access the previous week’s poems:

poems of the feet

Poems of the Heart

Poems of the Womb

Beaks and Minds

 I saw standing on the stones of the riverbank
a dark bird with its back to me.
It turned its head to left, then right
revealing a beady eye
and an outrageous orange beak
almost as long as its head.

In some other world
I knew it as an oystercatcher.

I have seen different birds’ beaks adapted
in manifold ways to feed self and offspring.

I have also seen human minds adapted to their purpose:
displaying stabbing verbal sharpness
or the scattering gloom of anxiety
or the tight gleam of avarice.

And I have seen the enlightened mind
intimate with everything
like a soft beak the colours of the rainbow
big enough and flexible enough
to nourish the world.


From: Some Palaeolithic Creature in Me

Here are three more poems of the mind:

Below, you can also download a pdf of 6 more poems of the mind from Pete

Tree-line

Sometimes meditation
is like a climbing up a mountain
through woods.
You struggle in the gloom,
getting lost,
entangled in your everyday thickets,
sliding back down.
Your sense of direction is confused
but you know you have to do what feels hardest:
keep going uphill.
Sometimes you give up.

Clarity in meditation
is like breaking through the tree-line
into the open spaces beyond.
You have wide perspectives.
The light is unimpeded.
All is possible, all has meaning.

Sometimes, unaware,
you drop down into the woods again.
It’s easy to do: they are downhill.
Anywhere below the tree-line is wooded, darker,
but the light may still be very near:
head uphill again.

The woods have their own beauty.
But spaciousness comes above the tree-line.
Don’t hang around near the trees.
Go on further into spaciousness.
Go on.

From: Some Palaeolithic Creature in Me

This morning’s stillness

Sitting in the world this morning
the world flutters around me
in bird wings and breezes and nodding flowers 

as, within me, I descend past
the flutterings of my mind
to find a level of stillness 

that is not the stillness
of a table or a bowl of fruit 

but the stillness of a vortex
the stillness of a gyroscope
the stillness of constant flux
finding a pattern and holding it 

for a while until it collapses,
until I collapse,
back into flux, 

and then, descending past the flux,
I find that pattern of stillness
reforming itself
again and again.

From: Some Palaeolithic Creature in Me

Closer to the mind of God

Show me your mind and I’ll show you mine
that we may know the mind of God. 

Show me your mind
that I may enter your spaciousness
and feel your warm curiosity
that I may see how our potential
bubbles through into this moment
bringing love
illuminating all. 

Show me your mind
that I may learn from you
and come closer to the mind of God. 

And I’ll show you my mind
with its beauty and its foibles
formed in the stresses of this life. 

For I know you will hold my foibles with love
and we will laugh gently over them
and they will dissolve a little. 

Show me your mind
and let me show you mine
that we may learn from each other
and come closer to the mind of God.

From: The Words on my Face

About the Author

Peter Armstrong

I was born into 1950s England, the first child in a very loving family. But our lives were overshadowed by a serious accident that left my father paralysed, and led to his death three years later, when I was nine.

I grew up in the Anglican church, but, as is common, left in my late teens, when the mythological elements of religion became too much for my developing rational mind. I won a place at Oxford to study English, and my intellectual development continued there, but much less so with emotional literacy, or inner awareness, or spiritual connection…

I was determined to avoid a conventional career, and instead launched myself and my curiosity into the delights and flaws of the burgeoning alternative world. There was a lot to explore!

Becoming a parent to three children emphasised the need for greater stability rather than novelty…

Therapy took me further and further into an exploration of the inner life, and later on, serious meditation practices followed. I discovered Ken Wilber’s books and integral thinking, and was deeply grateful for those gifts, because they made sense of so much. His influence, plus that of Thich Nhat Hanh, brought me renewed perspectives on God, and gradually I came back to Christianity, particularly in its mystical guise. Paul’s book was a treasure, and ICN was another!

I had sometimes enjoyed writing creatively. In May 2010, my partner Mary and I, who had been together for many years, got married. It turned out there were to be some spiritual fruits of this new phase of our relationship. That same month, I found myself unexpectedly (and initially reluctantly) writing poetry…

I developed a way of sitting in meditation, opening to All, to God, and allowing new perspectives and insights to emerge. Then, sometimes, I would be able to shape them up into poems from within that space of meditation. Only when the poems were more-or-less complete in my mind did I write them down physically. This ‘poetry period’ lasted about five years.

Now, I continue to enjoy the pilgrimage of this gift of life, hoping to share more of the blessings with you, my fellow pilgrims!