In Byzantium

Sailing to Byzantium on Sabbatical

I was planning to be completely silent on sabbatical after 10 years of building the science of healing. However, the 10^thYear Samueli Symposium: Creating Healing in 2021, in which thought leaders from around the world came together to envision the next decade of wellness and healing revealed something unexpected. That the future of science, spirituality, healing and world health sustainability will require a concerted effort to bring the "inner environment" – the world of our intention, listening, teamwork and love - into an explicit focus both in the research and application. And so, what ended as a call to translation begins as a journey of transformation.

Alas, we are aging and what we have built is seen for the temporary temple that it is and the battle between building, translating and being arise ever more prominent. And so my wife, Susan and I have traveled to Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium. Here is Yeat's lament on the search for soul in the midst of his aging. We will travel to Istanbul, to Cappadocia, to Ephesus and then later to Assisi and Rome to find out more about how the inner life, indeed, even the invisible life, leads us to what is next.  

Here is the Yeat's poem that inspired the title of this blog. We will post pictures and writings as they arise on the journey. We hope you enjoy it.

Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.