A quiet botany

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The Japanese acer at the bottom of the garden is doing its slow work of letting go. Green still holds the shaded heart of the tree, but at the branch-tips the leaves have begun to blush: first a lemon wash, then amber, then one startling ember-red leaf at the top, as if the tree were being painted from the outside in. Beside it the pyracantha burns its own small bonfire of orange berries, and the sky above is so deep and cloudless that it seems less a ceiling than an invitation. Low October light falls across the sandstone and weathered boards, and nothing here is striving. The leaves are not failing – they are finishing, and the finishing is the most beautiful thing they do.

There is a quiet botany in it. As the chlorophyll withdraws, what was hidden all summer beneath the working green (the carotene, the quiet gold) is at last permitted to shine. The reds are something else again: the tree makes them fresh, brewing new pigment in the very act of leaving. The tree becomes luminous. To stand here, coffee in hand and nowhere else to be, is to be given leave to do likewise. Here is Richard Rohr’s great paradox, written in leaf and light: falling upwards. The leaf lets go, and something new is made as it falls. The bare branches will reveal the honest architecture that was always there, the fallen leaves will feed the soil that feeds the roots, and even the paired winged seeds still clinging on are a small promise folded inside the leaving.

The names seem to know it too. Acer is Latin for ‘sharp,’ kin to acute and acid, for those pointed lobes; palmatum, the species name, means ‘hand-shaped.’ This is a sharp little open hand, which is rather what loosening one’s grip looks like. In Japan the tree and its autumn leaves share one word, momiji, from momizu, ‘to turn crimson,’ and the custom of momijigari, simply going out to gaze at the turning leaves, is a contemplative practice older than most of our own. Even autumn may carry a hint: the Latin autumnus was heard by the Romans as kin to augere, ‘to increase,’ though that link is probably folk etymology. It’s a wise one all the same. Perhaps the second half of the journey is not diminishment but deepening, and the harvest of a life, like the acer’s, is gathered ultimately and precisely in the falling?

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Glenridding dew

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The phrase ‘achingly beautiful’ has been on my mind today. Sunlight and morning dew at Glenridding, before many others were out and about, stopped me in my tracks. Ullswater herself, of course, is always calling to photographers from her depths – landscape mirrored in her, upside down, in moments of glassy stillness – but the environment around her asks ‘stop and look at me awhile, too.’ I did. First at a heavy mist curtain over Blencathra; then aware of water’s dripping from the fleece of a dozen sheep; and of steam rising from a café van on the side of the lake; and of dew and lawn, swans and high fell. Sunlit, here, now, all is well.

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Stillness

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Are you ever suddenly aware of colour combined with intense stillness? And having noticed, do both the colours and the stillness come into sharper focus?

Attention changes the thing attended to. The garden seems to become more itself because I have stopped to look.

In awe of the complexity and richness of the kaleidoscope of colour, changing by the second and ever present all around me, I become aware of similar depth and hues in my own presence in this world. I notice the steady, faithful beating of my heart. I observe the breadth of my imagination, and an underlying sense of thankfulness. I celebrate noticing the slowing in me, and the knowing. Yours and mine.

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Mist rising

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Today is grey and overcast in England’s Northern Lake District. After weeks of intense heat and scorched earth, the clearer, cooler air feels like a gift. The hills have softened. The fields seem to be breathing again. In hedgerows the berries are beginning to colour, and I find my thoughts turning towards autumn: mist rising from the valleys, Martindale’s bracken taking on its copper glow, the first leaves loosening their hold on the trees. The year is beginning to change its mind about summer. I welcome it.

There is something in autumn’s willingness to let go that has been speaking to me since my mother died two whirlwind weeks ago. A tree does not cling to every leaf simply because it has loved the summer. It releases what has served its season, and makes room for whatever comes next. Nature seems to possess an instinct for surrender that we humans spend much of our lives learning. Like mine, my mother’s life had its own seasons, each one asking something different of her. At 90, she came to the threshold of another kind of letting go. Being beside her brought me close to the mystery of it, to a deep sense of rightness in allowing a life to complete its own season, to thankfulness for the memory of her suntanned, windblown smile on our happy Mediterranean cruise together – and innumerable other remembrances.

Perhaps this is part of what autumn offers us each year: a quiet invitation both to remember, and to loosen our grip. There are possessions, habits, and ambitions to put down, each having served its time and purpose. There are things to receive, too: cooler mornings, darker evenings, the extraordinary colours of decay, the pleasure of walking beneath trees whose leaves are already preparing to fall. I want to meet this autumn awake to all of it. To appreciate it. To release what has finished. To make room, willingly, for the seasons and the bestirring that are coming. Morning mist rising – gradually sharpening into focused human detail.

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Lowered voice

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the room has become very still

There are moments when language lowers its voice.

I am sitting beside my mother’s bed.

Ninety years and six months have brought her here. Daughter. Sister. Beloved wife. Faithful friend. Mother of three – two sons and a daughter. Mother in law. Sister in law. Cousin. Aunt. Grandmother and Great-grandmother. A woman of many gifts. Steady hands. A Christian faith worn lightly and lived deeply.

Our mother loved abundantly. Her parents and siblings. Our father and his family. Friends, neighbours, children, grandchildren. Love seemed to come as naturally to her as breathing, in every hour of every season.

Her hands made our childhood clothes and – later – uniforms, play-wear, trousers, jackets, summer dresses and wedding gowns. And baked countless scones and cakes, held children, comforted friends, tapped out time in a million songs sung. Hands often folded in prayer.

Her heart was full upon being named Honorary President of the choir she has loved for forty years. She loved the things of God and sought to represent her Creator’s love well. She loved her parish church. She loved her priest, and told him so. She loved and was always interested in her neighbours – every one of them, young and old.

These hands and this heart have done their work.

And now the room has become very still. Nursing ‘angels,’ and holy archangels, come and go, and their extraordinary kindnesses bring a lump to my throat and healing tears to my eyes, and to our mother’s.

Time feels different here. It gathers itself around small things. A hand held. Eyes opening for a moment. A familiar voice. The quiet rhythm of breathing. A treasured friend tells me that these are blessed moments of ‘witnessing.’ I hear and know that.

Family and friendship are present here, too. Distance, or lack of words, have become no object in the heartfelt nearness and quietness of the hour.

I am full of thanks, just as my mother has been and, beneath her changing presence, still is.

Our lives are usually measured by beginnings. We celebrate arrivals. We announce achievements. We hurry towards whatever comes next.

Very little prepares us for mortal illness, or for the grace of accompanying someone as they come to the end of a long and faithful life. Very little, except for acceptance, or faith, or love, or trust, or all of these, prepares us for coming to the end of our own.

R S Thomas, late Vicar of Aberdaron, wrote of ‘the bright field.’ I think of those words often now. Perhaps every life of love leaves a bright field behind – somewhere others enter, finding themselves changed by the encounter, without ever quite knowing why.

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price …

And the poet Mary Oliver asked what we would do with our ‘one wild and precious life.’

Our mother answered with ordinary days – with compassion, with creativity, with delight, with empathy, with forgiveness, with gratitude, with hospitality, and with kindnesses offered before they were asked for. With birthday cards and Christmas cards. With her bird-feeders faithfully restocked. With prayers no one else heard – and especially in recent years, for her beloved sister and her family. With faith that remained steady through changing seasons, and all of us ageing. With family gathered around tables and Sunday roasts, or beach rugs and sandwiches.

Outside the birds are singing.

The swallows still cross the sky. Mum’s birds still pour themselves into the morning. The world continues, generous as ever.

I have always loved that.

Creation receives each generation, carries us for a while, then entrusts the world to other hands.

This bedside has become a place of quiet gratitude.

Sorrow has its place. So does peace.

I look at a face shaped by ninety years.

I look at, and hold hands that have loved well.

Some lives leave books.

Some leave buildings.

Some leave themselves in other people.

In other people – trusting each of us to represent well something of the essence of who they’ve always been, and will be; embracing all of their and our so-called ‘human failings,’ and all of their and our so-called ‘human successes.’

Yes: some leave themselves in other people.

In you and me.

And – through us – in the embrace of Immortal Love.

It is enough to ask of a life.

More than enough.

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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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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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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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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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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

~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments
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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

~ windinmywheels ~ 1 Comment
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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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