Focus

Sometimes I chirrup and chatter away daily. At others it’s as though life provides built-in sabbaticals affording periods of listening and reflection in the spaces where talking and writing usually take place.

Sometimes the call to “sabbath” moments comes from sudden deep awareness of a songbird at the window; at others, it’s the need for time to process enormity. The mind seeks quiet like my camera lens seeks focus.

One month ago, a week or so after the first reports of mayhem in Brussels, I wrote

I’m sitting in the presence of arum lilies, a generous Easter gift. Entirely silent, glossy, slowly unfolding to the light, they beckon me into precisely such wordless being, into reaching searchingly inwards, and hopefully thereby more graciously outwards. Silence changes and hopes in me, embracing our wondering, yearning world.

Relative wordlessness gives way to the camera lens. And in the last month I’ve revelled in making photographs of great windblown seas, pollen-attracted bees, unfolding leaf buds and “ice cream castles in the air”.

And I’ve listened – to experts in a gallery of fields – most recently to one of the British Museum’s leading explorers of the Lost Civilizations of Central America, and an engineer leading the search for the world’s energy supplies for a predicted population of 10 billion by 2050.

Our is truly a wonderful – and richly diverse – world! And, as ever, out of “sabbath” days, thankfulness ascends. Yes, sometimes absorption rests in writing in light.