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 love Edith Piaf. I love the angst in her voice. Imagine if Edith Piaf had sung Jacques Brel! What an over indulgence of angst that might have been! The interesting thing with these indulgences of angst is that the more deeply you go into them, the more you find that ultimately there is joy.
Sometimes it's joy in the indulgence; sometimes it's joy in the moment; mostly it's joy in the story. Piaf's rendition of 'Les Amants d'un Jour' is heart-rending and creates such an image of innocent love. But that is only a sham-veneer. The truth is, the 'love' described was not innocent at all but merely escapism. The young 'lovers for the day' had a suicide pact and that is surely a contradiction in terms. Love is never destructive. It is always creative and expressive. I used to love the story of Elvira Madigan - the lovers who killed themselves beneath a holm-oak tree. It's wonderfully moving and massively self-indulgent and to do with the spirit not being able to find its way in the material, or the material not being able to reconcile the spirit.
I think there is a middle-way. A balance. A way in which the spirit and the flesh aren't in conflict. The 'Our Father' states, "on earth as it is in heaven' and, I believe, that is at the root of so much conflict.We don't believe it is possible to create heaven on earth, or else we expect it to come to us from outside ourselves. Surely it must begin with seeing and experiencing our own inner discord and taken from there. It isn't an escape into utopia, but rather the need to live through our discord and change it and enjoy our angst, our esctasy, our moments of grandeur and our moments of despair...and just live through it all in wonder at what amazing people we all are.

Conquests, Ominipotence and Taming

Why is history so concerned with conquests? Why is religion interested in conquests? The whole notion of a conquest is bizarre and contradictory. One gains at the cost of another. One crushes and panders to ego and feels boosted on pride. History speaks of the conquests of nations.
The halls of stately homes are filled with the relics of slaughtered animals, the killing of which gave someone with a gun (but obviously very little else to soothe their ego) a sense of achievement. Religion speaks of conquering passion; conquering the will; conquering a mythical Satan who is somehow in conflict with an all-powerful, all-loving God (does that make sense)...why? Why the need to kill or to crush in order to be who we are?
Isn't there a far more beautiful alternative in the notion of taming? In 'The Little Prince', Antoine de Saint Exupery has fox speaking to the lovely little prince about 'creating ties' - taming. When one is tamed, he says, they work together, become friends, stop hiding, stop fearing. Taming isn't about one-upmanship or crushing anything; it's about understanding.
The pictures on this post are virtually identical to me in their meaning and yet, for centuries, the holders of the religious beliefs that have upheld the one on the left have tried to conquer the beliefs of those who consider the one on the right. The left is St. Francis taming the wolf of Gubbio, whom the people of the town wanted to kill. St. Francis 'tamed' the wild beast and pointed out that he was only killing their animals and children because he was hungry. The picture on the right is from the Tarot - the image of strength - which depicts the ability to tame, rather than conquer the passions and the will, and bring the whole self into accord, rather than discord. Same message in both.
Trying to conquer anything or anyone is a ridiculous task, isn't it? Why do we ever call conquerors 'great'? Some we have made into heroes. Some we have made into saints. But surely everyone of any sense knows that the only taming we have to do is within our own selves. If we concentrated on that, we would be able to respond as St. Francis did, or as the woman on the Tarot card does, and see the truth in each other. There's no need to evangelise or to conquer anyone. To attempt to do so is to set ourselves up as cleverer than everyone else - to set ourselves up as God. If believers in any faith truly believe that God (whatever their image of Him/Her) is omnipresent, then surely they must see that every other human being and every other creature or aspect of nature is equally imbued with the same divinity and therefore, why the need to convert, to conquer....why not just 'tame' - create ties - and live symbiotically?

January "is the cruelest month"

T.S.Eliot was wrong in "The Waste Land". April isn't the cruelest month. January is.

January has seemed so excessively long this year and what a wearily wintry month it is! Once the fireworks of the first have burned out, and all the New Year resolutions have had time to be broken, it's just the stark reminder that it's still the dreary English winter of dark mornings and rain. No wonder scientists have observed the gloomiest day of the year fell last week. If I were Gregory or Julian creating calendars, I'd have made January last for no more than a fortnight and, rather than making February the shortest month, I'd have lopped days off January and added them to the others throughout the year.

One day, a thousand years ago, when I was at school and January had dragged on and on and on, I was sitting in a classroom with black blinds drawn over the windows, poring over the fine print in a very dull history book - "Modern Britain" or "Modern Europe" can't remember which one, but they were both equally dull with green binding, describing the massacre of the Tsar's family and the entire reign of Queen Victoria as though they were mere dates and battles! - when the black blinds slipped up and a chink of light flowed over the desk. It was February 12th - I remember the date from it being written at the top of my page. The light flowed over the book, over my hands, over the desk and I pulled on the blind till it shot right up and flooded everything with light. It was like a massive gloom had suddenly been dispelled...like spring had come and the world was suddenly new. The glow was pure amber and seemed to seep into every cell of my being.

It was a time when the upper deck windows of green buses were always clouded with cigarette smoke on the inside and smog on the outside; when it took forever for the bus to come - standing with a violin case, school bag, cookery things - and wet, windy walk home. A time of car headlights in the slush at the side of the road. A time of nothing moving or growing....just grey school gabardines and puddles splashing fawn socks or 'American tan' (orange) coloured-tights and sensible shoes and a stark black and white world, cold, wet world...

And now, again, on a gloomy January Sunday night, when all the trees still look like skeletons and it seems that nothing is growing or moving, and everyone around seems so depressed, I feel that again but I think, "When the black blinds shift just an inch...when the chink of light comes in...." And it will. It always does...without fail. January - named after the two-faced god; one looking forward, one looking back - I don't think January has ever been a month for living in and I wish it were much shorter.

But, to quote (one of my least favourite poets!) Shelley..."if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

Dorothy and Douglas

Guinea Pigs are such gentle creatures and so wise. Once I bought (it's odd that you can 'buy' creatures) a guinea pig called Douglas and, feeling sorry for his solitude, bought him a mate and Douglas gained the middle name Abraham 'father of a nation' because the outcome was my having 26 guineas. Dorothy was Douglas' 'wife'. She was the 'Marilyn Monroe' of guinea pigs, having a huge quiff of pure golden hair over her eye, and such a silky coat that she was particularly beautiful.
Guinea Pigs don't blink or have eye-lids and one day Douglas had a fleck of sawdust in his eye. He made a different sound than usual and immediately Dorothy, who was in a different part of their living quarters, came running. She went to the water bottle, filled her mouth with water and then, putting her mouth to his head, let the water trickle over his eye. The sawdust was washed away. He made a kind of, "Hmm..." sound and she squeaked and went back to whatever she was doing before (probably stashing away a cabbage stalk or a carrot!).
Some time later, I was cleaning out their hutch and they usually ran happily onto the grass, but this day they were quite frantic about something. I didn't know what was the matter but they were beside themselves on the grass, trying to get my attention. Being a foolish human, I ignored them but when I tipped out the rubbish from their hutch, I found a little baby pig. He startled me, so I called him Startle. Once he was back with them, they went about their munching grass business as usual.
And, speaking of grass...When there wasn't enough grass here to satisfy all 26 needs, I used to go each day to Temple Newsam House to gather dandelion leaves and grass there. One day, it was the time of the big rock concerts that used to be held there, and I was stopped going in by a bouncer. I rolled down the car window and said, "I don't want to stay. I've only come for some grass..."
He shuffled about a bit, then said, "Have you any Rizla papers with you?"
Confused and somewhat naive, I said, "No."
He shook his head and I was turned away. And laughed all the way home, suddenly realizing that 'grass' meant something completely different to him!
Guinea pigs are lovely. I wish they would stop being synonymous with nasty experiments.

The Power of Images and Words

There are several studies which show different heart and brain rhythms when looking at different types of pictures, and it might sound like navel-gazing but it's interesting, isn't it, to take your pulse while listening to different pieces of music? When absorbed in something stirring, the pulse often quickens; it slows to gentler strains. Clearly, what we take in through our senses has a major affect on our metabolism and, should we prolong adverse effects, there is bound to be some kind of repercussion on our overall health. And what has an effect on our health, also has an effect on our thoughts, which, in turn affect the world in which we live, I think.

Like music, the power of words is immense. How often do we use throw away terms, "I'd give an arm and a leg for...", "It makes me sick that..." "Will be the death of me..." hardly aware of what we are saying? There is an amazing example of the power of words in the work of Mr. Emoto:

http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm

In the Bible it says, "By your words you will be acquitted and by your words you will be condemned," and the term The Word is of enormous significance. What we take in, and what give out, has, I think, far more importance than we realize. For this reason, I wish that rather than, for example, putting patronising pictures of dead bodies on cigarette packets or "Drink Sensibly!" warnings on bottles of wine, we would create a far healthier society by being aware of what we take in, listen to, look at, and take in every day. For this reason, too, I believe that rather than churning out so-called art and literature in pickled fish, half-cows and other ugly things, or endless strings of expletives, which are supposed to create 'realism', we could look at loveliness and listen to beauty and use beautiful language and supportive, powerful, life-enhancing words.

Finding Lost Things

Have you ever noticed that when something is lost - a key, a pen, a belt, joy - the harder you search, the more difficult it is to find? I've noticed a lot, recently, a rather strange phenomenon.

I grew up believing St. Anthony of Padua always found every lost thing. Pray to St. Anthony and you find it - and it certainly worked! Perhaps because I stopped looking and then it fell into my hands as I believed it would. I still have faith in St. Anthony and believe that we have numerous unseen helpers rooting for us, but also faith in the idea of stopping looking. The more we search, the more we see the thing as lost. Stop looking; know it's there somewhere and just see it back in your hands. It always works. It worked today for me twice in most unexpected and happy ways.