Podcast Episode: Walking The Road Within

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This podcast keeps eyes and ears trained on the British blog windinmywheels.com – dipping into it here and there, rather as one might draw water from a well – actually one of the blog’s recurring themes, come to think of it. And – like all good podcasts – we’re unearthing all kinds of memorable surprises in the wellspring

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Pip: A barn swallow gathering mud, a wren in a Cumbrian hedgerow, and a postscript that somehow contains Simone Weil, Kipling, and Levinas — windinmywheels has been having some mornings.

Mara: This episode moves through two territories: the naming of creation and what it means to belong to it, and then the harder question of who gets told they don’t belong at all.

Pip: Let’s start with the wren, the flute, and the Swedish botanist who named everything — then forgot his names.

The Wren, the Reed, and the Art of Naming

Mara: The opening post – The Universe includes the Wren – in this series asks what it means to pay attention to the particular — a single bird, a Latin binomial — and whether that attention is a distraction from the infinite or the very shape of it.

Pip: The answer arrives early: ‘The Universe doesn’t dwarf the tiny cave-dwelling Wren, or you and me. It includes the Wren, and you and me.’

Mara: That’s the panentheist position laid out plainly — not God above creation, but woven into it. The wren’s outsized song pouring out of hollow places isn’t incidental to the argument; it is the argument.

Pip: And Linnaeus, who spent a lifetime arranging creation, suffered a stroke and forgot his own names. The great namer returned to the earth. Adamah to adamah, dust to dust — which is either tragic or exactly the point, depending on your morning.

Mara: The second post – Thou emptiest again – picks up that image directly. It brings in Tagore’s Gitanjali — the hollowed reed carried over hills and dales, breathed through until it yields something new. The emptied vessel as the condition of music.

Pip: A cave and a flute as the same image. That’s the kind of observation that makes you put your coffee down.

Mara: Kabir arrives here too — the fifteenth-century weaver-mystic from Varanasi who refused to let the divine be housed in any single tradition. He wrote of having been ‘thinking of the difference between water and the waves on it.‘ Eleven words that do the work of an entire theology.

Pip: The motto that quietly accumulates across both posts earns its place: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly. Which sets up the harder question — what happens when naming is used not to honor, but to exclude?

When Naming Becomes a Weapon

Pip: The third post – Go back to where you came from – in the series asks what it means to name carefully when the names being thrown around are alien, barbarian, illegal, go back to where you came from.

Mara: The post traces those words back to their roots. On the word alien: ‘The strangeness, the menace, the otherness we load upon it came later, and from us.’ Barbarian was onomatopoeic — the sound of a language you hadn’t learned to hear yet.

Pip: So the barbarian is just someone whose music you haven’t learned yet. Which reframes a lot of recent headlines fairly efficiently.

Mara: Arendt appears here — her concept of thoughtlessness, not stupidity but the failure to pause and consider the world from any perspective other than your own. And Toni Morrison: oppressive language, she argued, does not merely represent violence. It is violence.

Mara: Mahmoud Darwish holds the emotional center: ‘I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here.’ Out of perpetual displacement, luminous poetry.

Pip: And the argument circles back to adamah — the Hebrew ground, the earth from which the human is formed. Follow the instruction go back to where you came from with sufficient rigor, the post says, and every line leads to the same address.

Mara: The postscript then maps the road ahead — Simone Weil on rootedness, Levinas on the ethical demand of a face, Etty Hillesum keeping compassion intact inside a contracting world. The series isn’t ending; it’s pausing.

Pip: The cantus firmus – the enduring melody – hums on. The road makes itself by walking.

Pip: What stays is the motto: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly. Three words that turn out to carry a lot of weight. Roots, mutual regard, compassion — the next mornings are already waiting. We’ll be back when the road offers more.

The continuing road — a postscript

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Postscript to a short series of 3

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking

Antonio Machado
Proverbios y Cantares

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Adagio – to accompany reading

This series began, as the best things do, without intending to be a series at all. A morning walk. A barn swallow gathering mud. The Latin name of a Wren. And then, one morning leading into the next, something accumulated that felt worth following — until three posts had arrived, not quite planned, not quite finished, and a motto had quietly established itself: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly.

A postscript, then. Not a conclusion — the cantus firmus doesn’t conclude — but a pause, and a look ahead at some of the views that might be encountered along the road still to be walked.

A dear friend and colleague, now gone from this world but not from memory, once observed — with that particular mixture of rueful amusement and genuine wisdom that was his gift — that ‘the trouble with being retired is that one too often finds the words one couldn’t find or speak when starting out in one’s twenties.’ I’ve been thinking about that remark this morning, on a bright Lakeland day, the lawn freshly mown, three miles already behind me, coffee in hand. This series has been, in its own small way, an act of finding words. The words for what it means to name carefully. To hold lightly. To see the Universe in the Wren, and mean it.

Perhaps that is what the liberal arts, at their best, have always been: not a syllabus, but a vocabulary for being fully human. A set of lenses, each ground differently, each revealing what the others cannot quite reach alone.

And we need those lenses now. Rudyard Kipling — not, perhaps, the first name one expects to encounter in a series that has moved from Linnaeus to Tagore to Kabir to Arendt — wrote a poem whose opening lines have never felt more timely:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too …

The gendered conclusion belongs to its era and hopefully will not detain us. But the wisdom is universal and urgent: the capacity to remain grounded, thoughtful, and generous precisely when the surrounding noise is loudest — to hold one’s head and hold one’s humanity simultaneously — may be among the most important, and most countercultural, acts available to any of us just now.

So: where might the road lead from here? I’m hoping to home in a bit more— one at a time, as the mornings allow, on

Roots: Simone Weil wrote, in 1943, that to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. Her book The Need for Roots has never been more necessary.

Mutual regard: Emmanuel Levinas — less well known than he deserves — built an entire philosophy on a single observation: that the face of another human being constitutes an ethical demand before any word is spoken. The face says ‘do not harm me.’ We might spend a morning with that.

Linguistics and meaning: George Steiner’s After Babel argues that the miracle is not that we so often misunderstand one another across languages and cultures — but that we ever understand each other at all. A humbling and hopeful thought. Will any of my readers want to burrow into some more etymology with me? – not for decoration, not for being ‘precious,’ but because ‘the root and meaning of a word’ is too precious a gift to miss out on. Words can be lighthouses. Life-savers.

Compassion: Etty Hillesum — a young Dutch Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz in 1943 and whose diaries were published only decades later — wrote of finding, and keeping, compassion intact even as the world contracted around her. She is one of the most extraordinary spiritual witnesses of the twentieth century. What can the cries of the suffering teach us about ‘all our yesterdays,’ and our hoped for tomorrows?

Spirituality, cultures, ground, meaning, the liberal arts: all – and so much more – waiting, patient as adamah, for the mornings that will come.

The road, as Machado knew, makes itself by walking. This series arose from a single barn swallow gathering mud at Red Barn. Who knows what future walks will bring – for any of us?

Pay attention. Name carefully. Hold lightly.

The cantus firmus hums her invitation – the road beckons.

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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

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archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

iii Go back to where you came from

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3 of a short series of 3

I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here

Mahmoud Darwish

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Adagio – to accompany reading

Three posts now in what has become, without quite intending it, a small series — arising, as I wrote last time, not from plan but from encounter. First, a walk, some birds, and the great Swedish botanist who spent his lifetime naming creation, only to have his own names taken from him in the end. Then a Bengali poet’s hollowed reed, and a Varanasi weaver who stubbornly refused to let the divine be housed in any one building or adequately named by any one name. Threading through all of it, three words that have become something like this series’ quiet motto: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly.

This morning I want to sit with a different kind of naming. A harder kind.

The phrase ‘go back to where you came from’ has become one of the defining utterances of our political moment — shouted, tweeted, insinuated, increasingly legitimised — aimed at those deemed not to belong, not to fit, not to be truly ‘of’ whatever place they inhabit. It is meant as an exclusion. But language, examined carefully, has a habit of subverting those who wield it carelessly.

So. Where do we come from?

The word alien comes from the Latin alienus — ‘belonging to another’ — from alius, meaning simply ‘other.’ The strangeness, the menace, the otherness we load upon it came later, and from us. Barbarian — that ancient term of contempt — derives from the Greek barbaros, thought to be onomatopoeic: an imitation of how foreign speech sounded to Greek ears. Bar-bar-bar. Every language, to someone who doesn’t speak it, sounds like babbling. The barbarian is simply the one whose music you haven’t yet learned to hear – the one who unwittingly holds up the mirrored reflection of your own ignorance and parochialism to you. Pagan and heathen were, originally, purely geographic: the paganus was the villager the new faith hadn’t yet reached; the heathen was the one who lived on the heath. Neither began as a moral judgment. Both became weapons.

And then there is treasonous — a word much in circulation just now. It comes from the Latin tradere, ‘to hand over, to pass on.’ And tradere also gives us the word tradition. Treason and tradition share the same root. To betray and to pass on a heritage: linguistically, etymologically twinned. Worth pausing over, I think, in a moment when the word is thrown so freely at those who question inherited arrangements.

Hannah Arendt — herself a stateless refugee, herself someone else’s alien — wrote of what she called thoughtlessness: not stupidity, but the failure to pause, to think, to consider the world from any perspective other than one’s own immediate position. It was thoughtlessness, she argued — not demonic evil, not unique depravity — that enabled ordinary people to participate in extraordinary harm. Those who processed the categories. Applied the labels. People who had simply stopped asking what their words actually meant.

Toni Morrison put it more precisely: oppressive language, she said, does not merely represent violence. It is violence. The naming is not neutral. When we say alien, foreigner, of another faith, go back to where you came from, we are not merely describing. We are doing something to another human being. We are making them less, in the only place it has to happen first: in the mind and the mouth of the one who speaks.

Martin Buber — whose I and Thou has haunted a lifetime of contemplation, and continues to haunt this series — saw this as the fundamental failure, spiritual and ethical at once: the reduction of the Thou to an It. To meet another as a Thou is to encounter them in their irreducible particularity — this person, this life, this story, this adamah-made, stardust-formed creature. To name them ‘alien’ or ‘illegal’ or ‘of another faith’ is to convert them into an It: a category, a problem, a statistic.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish — less well known in these islands than he deserves to be — spent his life writing from the experience of perpetual displacement, perpetually named as other, perpetually told he did not belong. He wrote: I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. Out of that dispossession he made some of the most luminous poetry of the twentieth century. Which is what humans sometimes do with the stones thrown at them: they build something else entirely.

I began this series with adamah — the Hebrew ground, the earth from which the human is formed. We are, every one of us, earthlings. Made of the same dark, generative stuff. The sciences now confirm what the mystics always intuited: trace the human family back far enough, and every line leads to the same small family, on the same continent, beneath the same vast sky. If we were to follow the instruction go back to where you came from with sufficient rigour — with genuine etymological seriousness — we would all arrive at the same address. Dust. The same adamah. The same earth. The same stardust, if you want to go far enough back.

Which I always do.

The Universe doesn’t dwarf the Wren. It includes it. And if it includes Troglodytes troglodytes — the tiny cave-dweller, singing its outsized heart out in a Cumbrian hedgerow — then it includes the one who crosses the sea in a small boat, the one whose prayers sound to unlistening ears like bar-bar-bar, the one who loves differently, the one who has been told, one way or another, their whole life long, that they do not quite belong.

Pay attention. Name carefully. Hold lightly.

The cantus firmus endures. ALL the songs continue.

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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

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archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

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ii Thou emptiest again

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2 of a short series of 3

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life … This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new

Rabindranath Tagore
Gitanjali – ‘Song Offerings’

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Adagio – to accompany reading

Yesterday I wrote about a walk, some birds, and Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist who spent his lifetime naming creation — only to have his own names taken from him in the end. Adamah to adamah. Dust to dust. Many a different name is given to us in the course of a lifetime. And many are taken from us, too – you might like to pause for a moment to think of yours. Anyway, something in yesterday’s piece seems to want to continue.

Reflecting afterward on Rabindranath Tagore, led on to thinking of W B Yeats — who wept reading Tagore’s Gitanjali on a London train in 1912, and confessed, in the manner of his era, to being ashamed of his tears. I understand the weeping. I am not, though, ‘ashamed’ of tears. Tear-washed eyes, I’ve learned, so often come to see more clearly.

Gitanjali — the title means ‘Song Offerings’ in Bengali — opens with an image that has stayed with me, the grandson of an accomplished clarinetist, for years: the image of the flute. A reed, hollowed out, carried over hills and dales, (and in my grandfather’s case, up the Khyber Pass on his twenty-first birthday), breathed through until it yields melodies eternally new. The emptied vessel as the condition of music.

Yesterday I wrote of Troglodytes troglodytes, the Wren named twice over as ‘cave-dweller’ — that tiny, tuneful creature whose song pours out of darkness and hollow places. Perhaps the cave and the flute are the same image. Perhaps they always were.

Tagore’s theology is essentially panentheist — shaped by the Upanishads and by the ecstatic Baul tradition of Bengal, which insists that the divine is not above or beyond creation but woven into its very tissue. He would have recognised our Wren immediately.

But here I want to introduce a voice perhaps less familiar — one that Tagore himself so revered that he undertook to translate him into English.

Kabir was a 15th-century weaver-mystic, born in Varanasi, perched on the crescent-shaped western bank of the Ganges River in north-central India (modern-day Uttar Pradesh), around 1440, who wove cloth by trade and verses by vocation, and saw no essential difference between the two. He belonged to no single tradition; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh teachers all claim him, because he stubbornly refused to let the divine be housed in any one building or adequately named by any one name. He wrote: I have been thinking of the difference between water and the waves on it.

That is panentheism distilled to eleven words. The waves are real — the Blackbird is real, Turdus merula singing its Latin heart out in a Lake District morning is entirely and gloriously real — and yet never for a moment separate from the water that bears them. The Universe doesn’t dwarf the wave. It is the wave.

The medieval Christian tradition spoke of the donum lacrimarum — the gift of tears — as a mark not of weakness but of spiritual sensitivity: the heart permeable enough to be moved. Yeats had it. Tagore had it. Kabir, I suspect, wept at his loom.

Something is taking shape in these morning walks and the writing they give rise to — a small series arising not from plan but from encounter. The Swedish botanist. The Bengali poet. The Varanasi weaver. All of them, in their different ways, saying the same thing: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly. The vessel is frail. The music is not.

The cantus firmus endures. The song continues …

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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

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archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

i The Universe includes the Wren

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1 of a short series of 3

A small parliament
of the ordinary and
extraordinary

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Adagio – to accompany reading

After a couple of days off — the UK heat wave briefly making an oven of Eden — I’ve been out and about again this morning for a 75-minute walk through the familiar and always astonishing landscape of the English Lake District.

I slowed down deliberately today. Not to cover ground, but to listen. And the birdsong rewarded the attention: Barn Swallow (at Red Barn), Eurasian Wren, Common Chaffinch, Linnet, Rook, Blackbird, Jackdaw. A small parliament of the ordinary and extraordinary.

What stopped me — ever the etymologist — mid-stride was the Latin. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the great Swedish botanist who named creation with the devotion of a man continuing Adam’s work in the Garden, left us these double-barrelled gifts in his binomial system: genus, species.

Troglodytes troglodytes: the Wren, named twice over as ‘cave-dweller.’ Fringilla coelebs: the Chaffinch — coelebs meaning bachelor, because Linnaeus noticed only the males wintered in Sweden, the females having quietly departed. Linaria cannabina: the Linnet, named for linum (flax) — a bird defined entirely by what it loves. Corvus frugilegus: the Rook — ‘the grain-gatherer,’ practical and unsentimental. Turdus merula: the Blackbird, merula being the old Latin word that gave medieval French its merle, and English its music. And — my particular favourite — Coloeus monedula: the Jackdaw, named from moneta (coin, money), for its legendary love of bright and shiny things. Which, I confess, probably makes the Jackdaw my spirit animal, though I’d tend to swap ‘coins’ for ‘ideas’ — and granting that I also have a close affinity with the Unicorn!

Linnaeus believed naming was vocation, not vanity. God creates, Linnaeus arranges. There is something deeply theological in that instinct: that attention to the particular — this wren, this mud-gathering swallow — is never a distraction from the infinite. It is the infinite. Wearing a small feathered coat.

Yet Linnaeus himself, in his final years, suffered a stroke — and the great namer forgot his names. There is no tragedy in that. It is, rather, the pattern written into creation itself: the pattern of adamah. In Hebrew, adamah means ground, soil, earth — and from it comes adam, the earthling, made from the dust of the ground. The Latin humus (soil) carries the same truth: it gives us human, humble, humility — all rooted in the same dark, generative earth. To be fully human is, etymologically, to be close to the ground. Linnaeus, who had spent a lifetime naming and arranging all things, was quietly returned — as we all are — to the earth from which he came. The great namer gave way, in the end, to a deeper silence. Adamah to adamah.

In the course of a lifetime’s contemplation of ‘God in all things’ — panentheism — I’ve come to believe that the Universe doesn’t dwarf the tiny cave-dwelling Wren, or you and me. It includes the Wren, and you and me. That, I think, is the panentheist’s quiet, constant and enormous joy — the cantus firmus, the enduring melody, the reason and the season for my song.

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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

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archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

Lanterns and stiles

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The years did not close the gates.
They opened side paths,
small stiles through old stone walls,
where astonishment still waits,
lantern in hand,
for those willing to walk on.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on the curious possibility that age and youth are not always opposites. We speak so easily of growing older as a narrowing — fewer horizons, familiar routines, settled conclusions. Yet I’m increasingly persuaded that another movement is possible: not contraction, but widening.

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I recently came across a study suggesting that centenarians (like Sir David Attenborough) often score highly on one trait in particular: openness — a flexibility of mind, a receptivity to new ideas, a continuing willingness to be surprised. I find myself delightfully encouraged by that.

Part of my own curiosity and gladness in and with the advent of new technology arises here. Not from novelty alone, but from creative possibility: fresh rooms opening within old houses; new conversations entering landscapes already rich with memory and meaning.

The years bring their own graces — love given and received, losses endured, books read, dawns witnessed, paths walked. So perhaps age need not close the gates. Perhaps it quietly reveals side paths we had never noticed before.

And there, somewhere ahead, lantern in hand, astonishment and the ‘widening gyre’ still waits. And the beauty and wisdom seen in the smiling face of Brother David Steindl-Rast describes the arc of life’s fullness in him, from child to man.

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Break through

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I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while …

R S Thomas
The Bright Field

It’s a wonderful thing that a 30-day walking challenge opens onto such fascinating horizons — both in the outer world and the inner one.

Today, in rural Lakeland, I find myself in glad company. I can almost hear R S Thomas on his knees in a Welsh parish church, contemplating depth, quietly murmuring beneath the great panoply of dark and light that stretches over us all –

Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future …

I delight in the heart-held companionship of the poets and sages I’ve known and loved across a lifetime. And I am so profoundly thankful for all who ‘walk’ with me.

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Around the headland

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My dad was always ‘Dad’
except on days when I
loved him more than on
the ordinary days – like the
days we’d spin the old
Seagull engine into life and
he’d let me pilot our little
boat around the headland
to Porthdinllaen, orange
fishing line, hoping for the
distinctive tug of mackerel.

He died eight years ago –
but I found an old Ilford
photograph the other day
and spontaneously said
aloud, ‘my Daddy’ …

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By The Front Door

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Rain through the morning
and in the long pool a toad singing
happiness old as water

W S Merwin
By The Front Door
The Moon Before Morning

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Around eleven, my ninety-year-old mother and I were winding down long conversation toward sleep when we found him — a toad, gleaming and unhurried, caught in the glow of her front door lantern, rain-jewelled and magnificently himself.

We stood on the threshold, she and I, and talked to him. And he received us. There are encounters that don’t announce their significance. They simply arrive — old as water, older than words — and restore something we hadn’t quite known was missing.

And my mother became 28 again, and I her curious, often delighted, little boy.

Walking – with cloudy canvases

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vibrant abstract art with dynamic flow
Photo by Landiva Weber on Pexels.com

You can know yourself, if you bring up those cloudy canvases from your dreams, today, this day, when you walk awake, open-eyed.

Memory is valuable for one thing, astonishing: it brings dreams back.

Antonio Machado, from Times Alone

There’s something quietly unsettling in Machado’s words — the idea that our dreams are not separate from us, but unfinished conversations with ourselves. Most mornings, dreams dissolve almost instantly. We reach for our phones, our routines, the practical demands of the day, and whatever felt vivid a few moments earlier slips back into fog. But Machado seems to suggest that if we pause long enough to carry those ‘cloudy canvases’ into waking, morning-walking life, they can reveal something true about who we are.

This month, I’m engaging in a daily challenge: a three-mile walk awake, open-eyed. Along the way, unexpected memories emerge from their burrows like the rabbits and hares I meet on the path, their distinctive ears attuned and pointing to the sky. In Machado’s idea of abstract art — of cloudy canvases — I recognise something of the colour and ultimately boundless and borderless shape of my own humanity.

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Roberto Cacciapaglia, ‘Gratitude,’ from the album ‘Diapason’ with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

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I think that’s what makes memory so strange and valuable. Not because it preserves facts perfectly — it rarely does — but because it keeps emotional truths alive. A dream remembered hours later may not make logical sense, yet it can leave behind a feeling that lingers all day – delight, longing, fear, tenderness, regret, hope, melancholy, joy and gratitude. Sometimes those feelings point more honestly toward our inner lives than our carefully organised thoughts ever could.

What I love most about the poet’s suggestion here is its gentleness. It doesn’t demand certainty or interpretation. It only asks us to remain open-eyed to ourselves — to notice what rises from beneath the surface, and to treat even our fleeting dreams as part of the story we are still becoming.

What must become

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more @gardenstudiogram | click photos to enlarge

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What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm …

Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway

There are moments – rare, but unmistakable – when language seems to recover its full dignity. Not merely as a tool for communication, but as something closer to nourishment: shaping thought, steadying feeling, and enlarging the space in which we meet one another.

For some observers, yesterday’s address by King Charles III to the United States Congress seemed to be one such moment. Much has been said about its tone – measured, gracious, unhurried – and about the surprising hunger it revealed. Not for information (we are saturated with that), but for eloquence: language that carries weight without strain, and music without ornament.

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Why should this matter so much? Perhaps because eloquence answers a human need we do not often name. We speak easily of our need for food, for shelter, for company. But there is also a quieter appetite: for words that do not merely function, but form us – words that help us inhabit reality more fully, rather than skimming across its surface.

Poetry has always understood this. And if we listen carefully, we can hear in three great American poets, and in the keenly attuned Irish poet, Louis MacNeice, a kind of compass for that deeper linguistic life.

You do not have to be good …

Mary Oliver – Wild Geese

Please see The family of things

Mary Oliver offers an acceptance of what is. Her language opens outward, reassuring without diminishing. She does not argue the world into meaning; she receives it, and in doing so teaches us how to stand still long enough for reality to disclose itself.

My father could hear a little animal step, or a moth in the dark against the screen …

William Stafford – Listening

Please see Lingering at the well

William Stafford gives us an attention to what is barely heard. His cadences are patient, almost tentative, as though meaning might withdraw if approached too quickly. In his work, listening becomes an ethical act – a way of honouring what lies just beyond the threshold of our usual awareness.

Now I become myself …

May Sarton – Now I become myself

Please see Metamorphosis and Now I become myself

May Sarton embodies an arrival into self. Her voice is more declarative, yet never strident. It unfolds. In her lines, one senses the slow alignment of inner and outer worlds, achieved not through assertion, but through a kind of disciplined honesty.

… each of us has known mutations in the mind

When the world jumped and what had been a plan
Dissolved and rivers gushed from what had seemed a pool.

For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;
The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation.

Louis MacNeice – Mutations

Please see Variables and Inner Universe

Louis MacNeice reminds us of the rupture into what must become. His language carries pressure within it – the sense that any settled pattern is provisional. And yet, from that instability, new forms emerge. His is the eloquence of transformation, where cadence itself seems to register the moment when ‘the world jumped.’

What unites these voices, including the King’s, is not style, but attention to cadence – to the way meaning lives in movement, in breath, in the subtle placing of stress and pause. Their lines do not merely say something; they enact it. The King’s holding the weight of history, unique experience and diplomacy in his person, Oliver’s reassurance, Stafford’s listening, Sarton’s unfolding, MacNeice’s breaking-open – all are carried not just by words, but by the way those words move.

And this returns us to the larger question: why eloquence matters.

In a world increasingly driven by speed and utility, language is often flattened – made efficient, frictionless, forgettable. But something in us resists this reduction. We recognise, even if only dimly, that to lose the richness of language is to lose a dimension of experience itself.

Eloquence slows us down. It asks us to listen—not only to what is said, but to how it is said. It restores proportion. It allows complexity without confusion, and feeling without excess. In its presence, we are not merely informed; we are oriented.

This may be why moments of genuine rhetorical grace – whether in poetry or in public speech – still resonate so strongly. They remind us of a measure we have not entirely relinquished. They suggest that language, at its best, is not decorative, but constitutive: it helps make us who we are.

And perhaps that is why we respond to it as we do – not with mere approval, but with something closer to relief.

As though, for a moment, the world had been properly addressed.

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The Art of the Cool Heart

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… we cool his heart to make him gentle

Are the San people the happiest on Earth? In exploring this question, Vishen Lakhiani touches upon a profound social technology that stands in stark contrast to our modern, ‘power-branded,’ gold-embellished world.

For the San—the indigenous hunter-gatherers whose ancestral territories span the vast Kalahari Desert across Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa—happiness isn’t found in individual conquest, but in a radical, gentle egalitarianism. This way of being has been erroneously viewed by ‘colonial forces,’ past and present, as ‘primitive,’ while they attempted to ‘favour’ the natives with their own rigid systems of hierarchy, ‘law’, and ego.

The San understood what many often forget: that the ‘Big Man’ complex is a poison to communal harmony. This is why, when a hunter returns with a great prize, the tribe does not worship him; they playfully belittle the catch to ensure his ego remains disciplined and his spirit remains tethered to the group. ‘That skinny thing’s all bone!’ As documented by anthropologist Richard Lee, this practice serves a singular, beautiful purpose: ‘We cool his heart to make him gentle.’

In a world currently scorched by status anxiety and the ‘heat’ of dominance, perhaps the ultimate ‘favour’ we can do for ourselves is to adopt this ancient wisdom—cooling our own hearts to rediscover the quiet joy of belonging, laughing at our own swollen egos, even as we playfully giggle at those of others.

Astronaut Christina Koch, encircling the Moon, radioed home while viewing Earth from a unique perspective; ‘You’re all one!’

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A lifeboat …

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… when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what  impressions we had, and honestly what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the Universe. Soooooo … (overcome with emotion)

Astronaut Christina Koch

Artemis II – Orion (link)

accompanied by astronauts Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen

The sound of some who believe themselves ‘big noise’ voices in our time grate and enervate.

Christina Koch, though, together with her travel companions, restores our energy; she and they present us with an holistic perspective, held, honed and nurtured not only by technical skills, supreme emotional intelligence, intellectual and physical capacity, but by readily articulated humility and love. Christina’s is a voice that resounds around the Universe – in ‘all the blackness around it.’

Christina Koch presents us with a unifying vision of a communion, of Earth as a lifeboat, and of humankind as her crew – a people and a planet with the same potential for connection and purpose as that shared encircling the Moon by the Artemis II crew, aboard Orion.

Tears of joy, and of something else, as yet nameless, and much, much deeper, stream down my face as I listen to these charming, gentle, companionable heroes. I want to hear more of them. I want their brave, and soft, and strong, and wise words to drown out present-day harsh, lewd, cruel and ignorant voices. The crew of Artemis II restore hope in me. Blessed, indeed, are peacemakers.

O, hush the noise ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing …

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Please also see Far from the city

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A Glass of Water …

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Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day
To drink, and be restored, and go his way…

May Sarton (link)
A Glass of Water
Collected Poems: 1930–1993

May Sarton has long been, for me, a sustaining presence – one of those rare writers whose voice seems not only to speak, but to accompany. I return to her work again and again, not out of habit alone, but out of a quiet recognition: that here is someone who has lived fully within the tensions that shape a human life – solitude and connection, suffering and delight, restraint and ardour – and has not turned away.

Her writing carries the imprint of a life deeply felt. There is no evasion in it. She does not disguise loneliness, nor does she sentimentalise love. Instead, she holds both with a kind of steady gaze, allowing each its weight and its dignity. It is this honesty that first drew me to her, and it is this same quality that continues to call me back. To read her is to encounter a sensibility that has endured, questioned, and still chosen to remain open – to beauty, to others, to the difficult work of being alive.

Over the years, I have come to feel not only admiration for her courage and clarity, but also a kind of empathy – a sense of kinship across distance. Her struggles, though uniquely her own, echo in quieter ways in the lives of those who read her. There is something profoundly human in her oscillation between withdrawal and longing, in her effort to reconcile the need for solitude with the desire to be known. These are not abstract concerns; they are lived realities, and she renders them with such care that one cannot help but feel accompanied in one’s own.

I often think of her image of offering ‘a glass of water from my well.’ It is a gesture both simple and generous: an offering of what one has, drawn from one’s own depths, given freely to whoever might pass by. In returning to her work, I am conscious of myself as such a passerby – a stranger, in one sense, who comes to the well of another. And yet, over time, that strangeness softens. The well becomes familiar, its waters recognized, even anticipated. What was once an encounter becomes a kind of relationship, quiet but enduring.

Each return is slightly different. The same words yield new meanings, shaped by the changing, searching contours of my own life. What once seemed distant now feels immediate; what once comforted may now challenge. The water still quenches thirst. There is a constancy in her voice that does not impose itself, but waits – patiently – until one is ready to receive it again.

To admire May Sarton is, for me, inseparable from this act of returning. It is not a static admiration, fixed in time, but a living one, renewed with each reading. And in that renewal, there is gratitude: for the depth from which she drew, for the courage with which she offered it, and for the quiet assurance that, whenever I come back – stranger or not – the water will still be there.

Perhaps someone will pass this house one day …

The ‘house’ and the ‘well’ remain—though the poet’s life blossomed into all eternity in July 1995. And – along with other such abiding loves and friendships – I drink still-living water.

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See also: Wonderment and Hello Jack Frost

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