Sun in Your Heart

This week's quote reads, "Have sun in your heart and nonsense in your head."

Hmm. I'm not sure about the second part, but having sun in your heart does sound good. A source of warmth and illumination, which lifts our spirits, on the darkest days. For me, that of God within, the Spirit, is the "sun in your heart".

I do enjoy this time of year, when (at least in this part of the UK) there are more sunny days than rainy ones. I love drawing back the curtains each morning, to see blue skies, fluffy white clouds and sunshine. Even though part of me is uneasily aware that this has been the driest year for ages and we really could do with some rain....

There is a huge tree growing at the end of our garden and I like to feast my eyes on it, as I sit at my desk. It is now in its full Summer glory (see below) but I love it in all seasons.

The beauties of Nature call forth a deep response from me. The sun in my heart responding to the sun in the world around me. And I believe that being open to this can help us to be resilient to the darkness of the human world.

Laughter - really belly laughter, caused by amusement and joy - "nonsense in your head", if you like -  can also help us to be resilient. Last week, we watched the old film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the umpteenth time, and it was just as funny as the first time I saw it, way back when. Even though I knew what was coming, and could (at times) quote it word for word.

Awe, wonder, and the ability to laugh - all these qualities are precious gifts of the Spirit. For which I am truly grateful, every single day.

Finding the Spiritual in the Natural

 I rather like the words of the 12th century Cistercian abbot (and later, saint) Bernard of Clairvaux. He writes, "For the spiritual does not come first, but the natural." When I googled the quote to check for the accuracy of the translation, I came across another, which underlines it: "What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scriptures, I learned in woods and fields. I have no other master than the beeches and the oaks."

And I felt like reaching out across the centuries and giving him a high five. Because that has been my route into the spiritual life also. I can remember my father taking me out into the garden when I was young and telling me to look, really look, at a flower. To wonder at the intricacies of the petals, the slenderness of the stalk, which yet supported it, the stamens with their yellow pollen, so attractive to the bees, and the leaves, busy in the work of photosynthesis. And the roots that I knew were beneath the soil, gaining sustenance from it. 

I will never forget his question: "How can we not believe that this has been designed by God? Surely such wonderful intricacy could not occur by random accident."

This is something I have always sensed - this feeling that the natural world is too well-organised to be random, that the complicated inter-relationships between plants, fungi, animals could be accidental. As I wrote in Gems for the Journey, "Growing out of the fairy tales and legends of my youth, Elsie Proctor's wonder-full book Looking at Nature, and J.R.R. Tolkien's powerful evocations of Middle-Earth, I have always found it easiest to sense the presence of God / the Spirit in the natural world."

My grandfather wrote in my autograph book (do you remember the craze for autograph collecting, back in the late sixties?) "One is nearer God's heart in a garden, than anywhere else on earth." This quote, which I later discovered was by Dorothy Frances Gurney, chimed in with what my father had told me, and I accepted it unquestioningly. And have not seen any reason to doubt it since. 

This was brought home to me once again last week, during our time in Pembrokeshire. The place we were staying was near the sea, and outside the village of Solva. It was on the first floor of a converted barn, and one of its features was that all the rooms had sloping walls above a certain height, set with Velux windows. On the first night, I read a comment in the visitors book about the stars through the window, so I deliberately left the blind up, in the hope that if I woke up, I would be able to look up and see the stars in the sky directly above me. And so it proved...

There was hardly any visible night from street lamps, so the stars were vivid points of light in the velvet blackness. And there were so many of them! I had to get up and go through to the balcony outside to see more... And I had never seen so many stars. Not only the brightest ones that we can usually see, but countless fainter ones, filling the gaps inbetween with pinpoints of radiance. I wish I could have taken a photo to share with you, but my phone's camera wasn't good enough.

Seeing them all made me think of the line in Tolkien's poem about Earendil: "the countless stars of heaven's field / were mirrored in his silver shield." A perfect description of what I was seeing. I bowed my head and gave thanks.

Rejoice!

This week's quotation, from Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, "Rejoice in the sky, the sun, the stars, the grass and trees, the animals and the people," really spoke to me.

Because I love walking outside in nature, at any time of day, whatever the weather (although sunshine is best!). It has been one of the great consolations in my life since lockdown started - to be able to go for a daily walk, either round the village, round the fields that surround the village, or in the Forest. It is a constant joy to watch the cycle of the year unfolding in front of my eyes, and to marvel both in the perennial familiarity of snowdrops in February and daffodils in March, and yet to also be filled with wonder that I have never before seen these snowdrops, these daffodils. And in the endlessly changeful beauty of the trees and sky. And so I rejoice.

I also rejoice in the presence of my beautiful cat, Luna, even if she wants to sit on my knee at the most awkward time (such as when I'm trying to record my weekly service, or when I'm trying to crochet). She is warm and friendly and loving. And so I rejoice.

I rejoice in the daily presence of my husband and son, and in the more distant, but regular, connection (because she is in Kilnhurst) with my daughter. This evening, we are getting together on Zoom to do a family quiz. Each person offers two rounds, with ten questions in each round... it is fun and often hilarious. This month, I'm doing a round on Harry Potter and an online version of Kim's Game. Simple pleasures, enjoyed with my family And so I rejoice.

What do you rejoice in?

 

Dreams and Reality

This week's quotation comes from the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Eupery. "My dreams are more real than the moon, than the dunes, than everything around me."

It may be tempting, at the moment, to retreat to the world of dreams. Because in our dreams, the world is a happier place, with everyone living together in peace and amity. There is no illness, no poverty, no disease, no injustice. Which is why the lyric's of John Lennon's wonderful song, Imagine, still have so much power, all these years later.

Imagine...

But I believe that although it important to have dreams, to work towards such a world, it is more important to live in this one, and to accept the realities that we have been given.

A few months ago, a friend asked me this question: "What makes you come alive?" and I have been thinking about the answers ever since. For many of us, interaction with the natural world - walking by the sea, making a garden, walking a regular route and notice the day-to-day changes in the nature around us, being awed by natural beauty - play an important part in re-connecting us with the spiritual; with making us come alive. And so it is with me. To which I would also add, interacting with family, friends and fellow Unitarians - even if we can only do this virtually at present.

I am blessed that I live in a village surrounded by open countryside. When I go for a walk, it is wonderful to be out in the changing seasons - to see and savour and appreciate the blossom in spring (which is coming out all over at the moment), the mass of wildflowers in the summer, the first conkers in autumn and the elegant spareness of the trees in winter. This connectedness of the natural world is something that very often gets lost in Western society. We are so busy doing the job in hand, rushing to the next appointment, that we don't take enough time out to appreciate the world around us.

Maybe this time of enforced staying at home could be doing us a favour - forcing us to slow down, open our eyes, and appreciate the beautiful reality with which we are surrounded. Even if we live in a city, there is still the sky above us, and trees along our streets.

So yes, dreams are important, but give me reality any day!

Quiet Interval of Peace

I've just spent a week in the beautiful Welsh village of Trawsfynydd. Its setting is beautiful, above a deep blue lake, with the green and brown mountains and hills, noisy with sheep, all around. Last night, on my return, I felt moved to write a sestina about it:

Trawsfynydd: A Sestina

I have this blessèd interval of peace,

A pile of books and notes and files to read,

The hours stretch out before me like a path,

A week out of time to do some writing.

Inside the cottage all is very still;

Out in the world, the sky is dazzling blue.

Unsettling my mind, I’m yearning for blue –

The hills lure me out with promise of peace.

I walk to the lake, its quiet waters still,

The beauty of God is there to be read.

Yet somehow I must get back to writing …

I sigh and retrace my steps down the path.

And muse as I walk down the soft, green path,

Turning my back on the water so blue,

On my research, that I should be writing;

Instead I’m possessed by a deep, quiet peace,

Which bids me forget what I need to read

And start on this poem in quietness still.

So I get out my journal, sit quite still,

Fall into reverie, follow the path

Of my thoughts as I write, re-write, then read,

Begging the muse to come out of the blue

Bestowing on me her blessing of peace

As words start to flow, and I am writing.

Bliss happens. I would not exchange writing

The joy of creation, that serves to still

My restless heart and restore my lost peace,

Placing me firmly back on the right path.

Words down on paper – why was I so blue?

I pull the files towards me, start to read.

I read and take notes, then once again read,

Nothing now stops the flow of the writing.

I glance outside, the sky is now dark blue.

I look at my watch, quite unready still

To stop work just yet, now seeing the path

To fulfilment, and a deep, grace-filled peace.

No more time to read, it’s time to be still;

No more swift writing, I’ve mapped out the path,

With quick strokes of blue, time to trust in peace.

Not the best sestina in the world. But it has satisfied a very deep need in me, to translate what is in my heart into words on paper. Writing is such a glorious satisfaction. I feel so very blessed.

Delight in Creation

In his book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero writes: "On Sabbaths we are called to enjoy and delight in creation and its gifts. ... We are to take the time to see the beauty of a tree, a leaf, a flower, the sky that has been created with great care by our God. He has given us the ability to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch, that we might feast with our senses on the miraculousness of life."

When I read this, I realised that I do this all the time. Most mornings I go out for a two-mile walk, either round the village or up into Salcey Forest. And I always have my phone with me, so that I can snap anything particularly lovely that catches my eye. I am so grateful for modern technology, because the camera in my iPhone takes surprisingly good pictures.

When I'm out and about, I try to open all my senses to the world around me, and walk mindfully, which makes it a quiet pleasure to wander alone in God's world, seeing the natural or cultivated beauty around me, listening to the ever-present birds, and sometimes, being intoxicated by the wonderful smell of newly-mown grass, or the roses in one particular front garden in our village.

I am so very blessed to have such beauty on my doorstep. Yet it is also present in the urban environment, as the photos of friends on Facebook testify. As Wayne Dyer writes, our aim should be to  "Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe."

Still Beautiful

The glowing orange roses I was given on Mothering Sunday have aged in an extraordinary way. They have dried up and withered, but have neither dropped any petals, nor lost their shape. Their colour has darkened from that bright silky orange to a rich old red with hints of dark yellow. They are old, yet still beautiful.

They were bought to celebrate my 25th year as a mother. Like the roses, I am older, a little more dry and withered on the outside. But they have taught me that I am still beautiful, and can still give pleasure. And that it is what is on the inside that matters.

Long-Term Hope

It takes a special kind of faith in, and hope for, the future, to start a project that is so long term that only your descendants will see the benefits.

The patrons of the Victorian plant hunters were such people. Last week, I visited Bodnant Gardens in North Wales, which had been established in the late Victorian era, and subsequently tended by five generations of the same family.

There are acres and acres of the Gardens, from formal rose gardens and a delightful golden Laburnum Arch (which we were in perfect time to see) to the Dell, planted in the 1890s and now home to magnificent trees, reaching over a hundred feet into the sky. There are groves of rhododendrons, all the colours of the rainbow - some so bright that they look almost artificial, as though they had been coloured by a child's felt tipped pens, and some so delicate that their beauty took my breath away.

Maintaining these beautiful Gardens is now the job of the National Trust in Wales, and they do a bang-up job. It was a lovely sunny day, and there were a lot of people visiting, but the Gardens were big enough to absorb us all without feeling crowded.

Visiting Bodnant was a very special experience. I gave thanks frequently for the natural, yet human-planned beauty all around me. I marvelled at the faith of that Victorian gentleman, who had a vision for the future, who planted saplings that are now great trees. Some now question the credentials of the Victorian plant hunters, yet I couldn't help being grateful for the opportunity of seeing so many exotic and beautiful shrubs and trees, from all over the world, which otherwise I could never have seen in my lifetime.