April, April...

April, April,
Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish tears!
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears,
April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!

William Watson's poem so captures the season - the season that has been much the same for centuries in spite of the global warming myth!
Compared to the span of history, my life has been pretty short but I know that the weather, when I was a child, was pretty similar to what it is now. There were warm winters and cold summers. Reading back through the journals of peoples of the past, Queen Victoria wrote of 'unseasonably warm' winters, and cold summers, and centuries before her, people recorded the same apparently drastic weather when it was suddenly hot in December. Gloucester, for example, the place where the relatively recent floods were put down to global warming, was known to flood so often that centuries ago, the rhyme about "Dr. Foster went to Gloucester in the pouring rain..." was written.

Is there anything more arrogant than the idea that Man is bigger than Nature? (When you plant a tiny little seed and it suddenly becomes alive, it fills you with such wonder that you know that a greater hand is at work). It's rather like the idea that Man can somehow offend God - that Man is responsible for everything - the the Sun revolves around the Earth and we are the centre of the universe! Oh, how we need to get real about that! Man - or rather the Ego of humanity - who lives in some speck of the Universe, has so short a span of life on this planet, and yet grows grandiose ideas about his ability to offend Life Itself, is surely the child within us who failed to grow up. At the same time, the ultimate dignity of each person becomes clearer when we see our true place in all that is.

It seems that now, as the institutions collapse and all the things by which people have been bound through centuries show themselves to be meaningless, people are returning to our roots. So many people are cultivating gardens for growing vegetables; moving from, or being forced out of the coma of the virtual world of plastic money and returning to reality - a reality that is surely free from the notion that we are somehow dependent on equally frail beings to tell us what is so or not so. We need no cult; we need no violence or anger or someone to tell us what is good for us.

Ordinary people get on with their lives and blend into the reality that 'little man' cannot destroy or control.

And April laughs her girlish laughter so beautifully and weeps her girlish tears in the same hour! Times and seasons...all is surely in greater hands than those of little grasping fists!

"The Simple Beauty of Nature"

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy," wrote Anne Frank, "is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy amidst the simple beauty of nature."

She's so right, isn't she? Such serenity comes from ancient trees that weather storms, witness so many people passing and just go on growing and being what they are here to be without a care in the world; and rivers rolling on regardless of who is and who isn't in power, untouched by 'economic downturns'. You never see a dog that is worried about losing his job, or a duck fretting over the collapse of a bank, do you? You never see the sun in a bad mood, or the moon or stars concerned over the impression they make on their neighbours...And we, humanity, consider ourselves the wise ones! Nature teaches everything.
"Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor store in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them...Look at the lilies of the field; they neither toil nor spin, yet not even Solomon in all his splendour was arrayed as one of these!"

A Time For Every Purpose

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions," wrote Thoreau, "perhaps it is because he marches to a different drum. Let him step to the music he hears."
It seems that the most enslaving thing in the universe is stepping to the march of what goes totally against the grain, when being 'out of step' is too fearful to contemplate. There are people who feel like curling up and dying for making a social gaffe; even people who do not feel complete if they are behind their neighbours in some kind of technology. The common practice is to label everything and everyone so people fear certain labels and cling to others.
It seems, too, that this 'enslavement' has taken us totally out of step to our own music - the real music of the spheres and the seasons and who we really are. We rail against deadlines - how apt an expression is 'deadline'? - and are governed by someone else's time unless we move with the reality of the seasons and the Earth.
Nature knows this far better than we do. The trees don't bemoan the long winter. They shed their leaves and patiently wait for the spring. The tides don't bemoan their ebbing, they patiently wait for the moon to govern their flow. The planets don't rush to be up at dawn or be in bed at a certain hour. They continue on their paths quite naturally.
Animals don't worry about the hour. They don't look at a clock and think, "Yikes!! I need to go to bed; I have to be up in the morning!" or wake in the morning to a nasty ringing sound and have to leap out of bed. They go on following their inner guidance, knowing it is all alright. People have their own peaks and troughs; highs and lows. Some are night owls, some are larks but we forgot how to make allowance for that when we all decided we had to walk in step.
It might seem like a pipe dream to imagine it is possible for a world or a city to function on such terms. But it could! Many years ago I spent time in a convent in Rome. There, there was all kinds of work to be done - from sticking together cardboard boxes, picking grapes in the vineyards and working in the fields, giving lessons in the school rooms etc. etc. - but people followed their instinct; they worked in the cardboard bit, till they felt it was time to move on. Sometimes they dropped everything in order to go and visit a place. It was so 'free' and yet so orderly because everyone was working - without the drudgery that often is equated with work - and everything that needed to be done, was done.
This very famous extract from Ecclesiastes says it all,

To everything there is a season,
a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal ...
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance ...
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to lose and a time to seek;
a time to rend and a time to sow;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.

Expressions of the Divine

Four hundred years ago, Thomas Traherne wrote:
"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flowereth in your veins; till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself tp be the sole heir of the world; and more than so because men are in it who are, every one, sole heirs as well as you....Every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels."
It's quite strange that a man who wrote so metaphysically - and also wrote of many life times of experience - became an Anglican minister. Perhaps that was the only way for a spiritually-orientated person of that era to express himself.
His writings (virtually unrecognised in his life time) speak so clearly of the kind of wisdom that is becoming better known today. Far removed from the idea of humanity being the 'massa damnata' of Augustine's internal hell, or the worms in the dust who need daily to beat our breasts as sinners before some kind of unrelenting tyrannical God, he recognised the intrinsic worth of each person as an expression of the Divine.
This is something that endlessly intrigues me. It seems so bizarre that for four decades I believed in a beautiful God of love - one whom I sensed amid nature and amid the random and beautiful acts of kindness that we find by chance in others and in ourselves; one who lavishes abundance throughout Nature, who moves in cycles of seasons and tides - and yet I could stand before an altar each week, abasing myself as a sinner. What kind of parent/creator would want such a thing of a child? What kind of distorted Deity/idol have we been reduced to worshipping in that kind of religion - or worse, in the kind of religion that says, "Be a martyr and die for me!" or even worse, "Be a hero and kill my other children for me!!" Utterly anthropomorphic nonsense! If there is a God - and to my mind, everything in Nature and humanity assures me that there is, and more than that, suggests that God is utter beauty and love - can't we only begin to touch the hem of the garment of such great beauty by seeing that we are the offshoots/offspring/expressions of something so beautiful and touch on that same power of Love in ourselves? And to reverence all creation, all humanity and all the animals and plant and mineral kingdoms as expressions of that One Life?
Indeed, Thomas Traherne wrote so beautifully! Surely, everyone we ever meet is an expression of the Divine.

Inherit the Earth

There is a beautiful short poem by Robert Frost that encapsulates how we feel sometimes:

The rain to the wind said,
"You push and I'll pelt."
They so smote the garden bed
That flowers actually knelt
And lay lodged - though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

England right now seems to be the 'land of endless winter.' I think it has snowed everyday in February - and we so long for the daffodils and snowdrops that are normally out by now. Day after day, the news reports are filled with the usual horrors of child murders and neglect, the horrific accounts from the Australian fires and the interminable arguments about who is responsible for the so-called credit crunch. People seem a bit down in the dumps to say the least.

It all brings to mind one question, though. Suddenly everyone is angry with the bankers, the government...and, in my view, quite rightly so, but isn't there something else to see? In whom or what do we put our faith? Let's face it, all the institutions to which people hand over their power are proving to be very corrupt or unreliable. Churches hiding paedophiles; government ministers feathering their own nests while telling everyone else to tighten their belts; banks, to whom we go a-grovelling for a loan, turning out to have made far greater financial mistakes than we have. And the part that makes me smile is the hammered-home message about global warming (another excuse for another tax?).

Meanwhile, there goes Mother Nature in all Her glory. She goes by Her cycles - sometimes there are ice ages; sometimes there are ages of global warmth, and the idea that somehow 'puny' man, who arrived on earth long ages after the earth came into being, can damage her is the utmost in arrogance. Funny how She can bring the country (well, London!) to a stand-still in one blizzard, and even then people refuse to see that She is the powerful one. The floods, melting polar ice caps, the whole of it, for which those who view the world as their domain like to think we are all responsible really, in my view, need to get over their arrogance and start loving Nature and acknowledging that they don't rule the world at all. How much more blatant can it get before they see? Before we all see that the real truth and power lies within ourselves.

When Hitler planned to command the world, the people who followed him were not all 'evil' or anti-Semitic (to begin with). They were simply led like sheep and allowed themselves to be brainwashed. We have all spent too long believing that someone else knows better than we do; that there are those to whom we must grovel, or those in authority whom we must obey. Of course, this isn't a call to anarchy. We need order too, for so many varied minds and beings so live in harmony. But, really, let's get over the notion that we cannot trust ourselves. Let's grow up and put our faith in something better than those who seek power. Let's not see ourselves in a constant battle against Nature. Let's not see Nature as something to be conquered. Let's love Nature in all Her expressions - the animals (not gorging ourselves, to our own detriment, on battery-farmed innocent creatures), the trees (not cutting them down because a child might climb one and be injured??), the oceans, even the cold, snowy, wet seasons. We don't have to go overboard believing what some arrogant ministers would have us believe. We, surely, need to listen to our own voice and be our own expressions of what it is to be a Child of God/Nature/Life....Who we really are.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Indeed!

(Oh...since, from midnight last night all emails, telephone calls and probably internet posts now posted from England, and maybe our sneezes, hiccups and anything else we do, are being stored by our government - at an enormous cost in a time of economic crisis! and in a similar way to Soviet Russian bugging - I hope that which ever government department stores this one, you read it and enjoy it! Really, have you nothing better to do? Why not go out and look at the trees instead? You will learn a lot more there than here!).

The Beautiful Wisdom of Trees

Walking among the tall trees with their bare branches and mossy trunks and roots that look like elephants' feet digging into the earth, inhaling the scents of the wet earth in the icy wind, those hermits who settled by rivers and lakes come to mind. In the ancient Celtic tradition, there were many of them who found the essence of life (call it God, call it Life, call it Nature - it's all one) in solitary and beautiful spaces. The more I wander in woodlands at all different times of the year - sometimes chilled to the bone, sometimes sweltering (though rarely, since English summers are so rare!) and frequently up to my ankles in mud, the more clear it becomes that Nature, the Earth and the expression of Life is all One.
There might be a need for order and for authority, but I don't see it. The more time I spend among trees and see in those trees the physical, material expression of God at play, the more bizarre the idea of dogmas and doctrines becomes.
As soon as structure or dogma enters into the picture, there comes an idea of paranoia. Somehow, someone decided we needed a set of rules or we would all go off the rails and start stealing and being cruel to one another. But if we lived like the trees - who live far longer than we do - being in our wisdom, giving out our fragrance, going through our seasons and housing a million other creatures from the tiniest ants to the squirrels and crows, all just being ourselves, there would be no need for anyone to tell us how to live, what to do, where to make money and why we must become square pegs in round holes.
I'm not a wacky tree-hugger or an obsolete hippy! I just walk with trees and think what wisdom they possess. They are filled with life; they are expression of the Divine. We cut them down at our cost.
The photo is courtesy of Andrehilliard.com

I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore

There's a song in "Gigi" called I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore.

We live very much in youth culture - I believe that is truer in America than in England, though I might be mistaken about that - and people go to such extremes to remove any signs of ageing, as though it is shameful to no longer be young.

Nature has no such qualms. Nature goes through her seasons so happily and the wise old trees are equally beautiful as the saplings, often more so. The trees and flowers are so refreshing in the spring, but the trees in the winter have a loveliness of their own. It's a wisdom, a certainty, a sense of everything being as it should be. Faces which are stretched and pulled tight by a scalpel are not nearly as beautiful to me as faces that tell a story - misery, selfishness, kindness, laughter - all these things are etched into faces and do we really want to remove those signs of life experience? Those signs of wisdom?

There are elderly people who take great pride in being old - why? It's no great honour to say you lived a long time. Equally there are people who are terrified of being old. Why? It's no great honour to say you are young. Surely, it's how we live that matters. Age is utterly irrelevant.

Having said that, and thinking I'm glad I'm not young anymore - isn't there something wonderful about being beyond the angst and self-consciousness of youth? Isn't there something wonderful about being able to feel deeply and not feel the world is about to collapse because something unpleasant has happened to you? Isn't there something wonderful about having the experience of so many different people coming in and out of your life that you gain a fuller picture? What is really sad to me, is that perhaps many people who want to appear eternally youthful, are really trying to capture a youth they never enjoyed or they live in fear of worse to come.

The most beautiful thing of all is surely to maintain the wonder of children, the excitement of adolescence, the confidence of early adulthood, and combine that with the wisdom of experience. Who cares how many years we've been here? The question really is, are we doing here what we came here to do?

So, if you wake on a Monday morning with a face like an old sack and wonder where the years went, why not think, "Well, this old sack is filled with goodies! I'll bring them out today like a magician brings a rabbit from a hat, with a young and happy heart!"

Nature and Cycles and Seasons

I don't remember the first time I heard about death. You would think that something so alarming would be a major trauma of childhood realizations, but I have never met anyone who remembers when their mortality first became apparent. At the changing of the seasons, at the stillness of the year, when the trees are like skeletons, the flowers have gone and the sky is starkly bright, that thought comes home.
Everything moves in cycles and, though we live now in a semi-seasonless, hourless world, where we are governed not by Nature but by technology, it is interesting to think sometimes how far we have come from our roots and who we really are.
Nature is so much wiser. Nature doesn't go against the grain and force summer flowers to bloom in winter or the sun to shine in the middle of the night. Nature allows things to move at their natural pace; Nature has no targets; Nature doesn't expect everything and everyone to be the same or to fit the same pattern; Nature is filled with diversity and yet everything has its place and moves in perfect syncopation.
Nowadays, it seems, we think we are more powerful than Nature. Because we can create light in the middle of the night and can create heat in the middle of winter; and because we can create and then combat disease, we think we are overcoming Nature. We even have the audacity to think we are so powerful that our little footprints and meddling have altered Her course.
Nature, to me, is like a wise Mother who sits silently in the middle of chatter - the chatter where children argue and struggle for supremacy in a game and believe for an hour or two that they are Richard the Lionheart, Spiderman, or any superhero and things seems to be of huge importance - and all the while, the wise Mother just goes about her business calmly, listens and shakes her head and then says, "It's time for bed children." The games are over and reality dawns.
Powers, dominations, kingdoms rise and fall. Nature, and the gentle hearts who listen to her wisdom, go on - as Robert Louis Stevenson so brilliantly wrote - 'at their own private pace, like a clock in a thunderstorm.'
I don't remember the first time I heard about death. Still less, do I remember anyone ever teaching me what it really means to be alive. Perhaps that is a lesson we learn for ourselves; and perhaps that is the only lesson worth learning.

Birds Singing In the Snow

December and there was snow - how perfect is that? It wasn't the beautiful depths of snow as on André's lovely photograph but perhaps it will come and go and, for the first time in years, we will have a proper white Christmas.
Once all the traffic rush and bothers about transport are over, there is something so calming about the snow; a sort of stillness when all the sounds are muffled, as though Nature is saying, "It's time to be still and reflective." Seeing the frozen grass and fallen leaves, like the white hair of the earth, it seemed as though it was the part of the year's cycle when Nature is old and wise and still. It brings a quietness inside.
Strange how the birds seem to rejoice in the snow! On the damp, grey days, the birds seem so silent but in the icy sunshine, they all start singing again. There is something so beautiful about the sound of winter birds singing in the snow.