Geworfenheit

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I am tired of talk
                 of monsters and words
                                             that taste of rusted chains                                                                            
and snare
               this beautiful,
                                extraordinary world
                                                       with a noose of syllables and syntax

And of those who redefine
                                 my hope in words
                                                         that I cannot recognise or understand...


What strange creatures we are:

We find ourselves flung among darkness and stars
Adrift and alone on a spinning globe
in an Eden we think we've lost.
Is it not surprising that our dreams are of fire and light?


And we people our worlds with such gods and demons
That we scarce can tell them apart
                                          or know which to worship
                                                                         and which to fear

So we find patterns among our footprints
and music in wind-blown trees
and we begin to see significance in the lines of each palm
and read our future in the shadow of our past

And we mark our lives with cups of tea
or things more insubstantial and find small
words to reach across the empty space that separates us
So that, for one small moment, the night erupts with the
spun-gold light of our small suns.

'The gate at the end of the vicarage snicket was blocked by cows again this morning.'
'I won't be surprised if a spot of rain will be coming our way.'
'The clock is running a little fast today.'
'I'll see you tomorrow then, God willing...
                                                             ... God willing'

Our globe still spins its path through all that silent darkness.

Come, show me your god
                                         and I will show you
                                                                   your deepest fears.

Summer FLIES

The summer heat of these long days seems to slide low; hugging the ground, trapping the drifting mesh of insects in a lazy, languorous dance. Not even the flies can find enough energy to fly. They walk up and down my arm and round my nose and ears, tasting the dust and sweat and human-ness of me... and for a little while I become important to the fly and part of its life...

I can remember my winter trips to the church tower, climbing the darkened stairs. The carpet (worn and threadbare), in front of the great wooden cabinet that housed the clunking, whirring clock, thick with dead and dying flies. Throughout those cold months I would very carefully tiptoe my way through this mass of black bodies lest one more should die. People in the village had asked if they could come up the tower with me to see the clock and to look down on the village from above, but I would put them off; unable to bear the idea of more feet tramping through this ghastly hades of flies that was washed weekly with hymns and prayers from below.

I watched them slowly and painstakingly crawl, often with just two or three legs working, clawing their way to apparent safety, away from the threat of my shadow. I recognised their will to live. Often they got caught on the nylon strands of carpet, trapped, sometimes up-ended. And I would rage. And as each week passed, my rage grew stronger. I raged against the brutishness of life. I railed against my understanding of God and a creation that could set me free and yet sink me into darkness. If God was any God at all, he must too be the God of this place?

There were times I silently crawled on hands and knees teasing their limbs from the carpet fibres, gently trying to place them once more on their feet; trying to lift them up to the safety of a pile of unused bell-ringers' mats that had been stacked in the corner; trying to understand; trying to make sense; trying to know how to respond...

At other times, I just sat with them in silence, knowing that one day I too would find my own winter bell-tower and feel life seep (fast or slow) away from me. Would spring sunlight fall through those cobwebbed window slits and fill the world once more with the scent of growing grass?

And then there were times when I raved. I dared to feel the lion's breath upon my neck as I held God to account. I spat back all the comfort that I had felt as a child having been told of the loving ways of a fatherly God. I would not kill them. I would not kill these little bodies of life that had clung to this world, in the dark coldness for months. That did not WANT to die; that WANTED, like me, to live. My shadow, that for so long they had so weakly fought to escape from, would not herald the end their lives.
"Is this what it is to have dominion over the earth?"
 "If these are to die, you do it yourself and you better make damned sure that they don't suffer while you do it."
But the musty stonework echoed implacably to the sound of my voice and anger as I cursed and swore at the heartlessness of life...

... as I move my arm, the flies reluctantly fly off and I recede into the landscape (the hat propped on the garden table, the tree stump covered with ivy, the dog's ball lying on the lawn) and I, once more, cease to exist...
              ... and yet, I am the richer for it.

A fly lands in the coolness that my shadow casts upon the lawn and, unaware of my still presence, cleans itself.

On a GREY January MORNING we BREATHE grandeur

The stem of grass,
crushed beneath a boot
now growing again
arcing over trampled mud
A green spear of light.

A sparrow,
amid the havoc of blackthorn
torn by winter gales,
with a soul far larger
than its song.

And we see the glory,
don't we?
You ...
and me ...
and God.

TODAY i STOPPED the CLOCK and HELD back TIME

         

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            Today I stopped the parish clock
            and while the village slept,
            at the point where summer time
            falls back into winter,
            with one hand, I held back time      
            and let seconds fly
            directionless and  haphazard
            around the steepled tower,          
            like gnats dancing over a summer pond.
            The iron hands stood frozen
            to each moonish clock-face
            at five minutes-to the mute and silent hour.

       

Instead of rounded golden chimes
rolling out over field and rooftop
there was silence
and the pigeons in the bell chamber
slept on undisturbed.
And all I heard was the beating of the wind against the tower
as I rubbed shoulders with God and angels in this place beyond time.


                   For a while I watched the village slumber
                   from the unlatched door high up
                   on the side of the old stone tower.
                   A guardian of this time of no time.
                   The ticking watch on my wrist counted out the untrod
                   minutes upon which no one had yet walked...
                                ... or loved
                                          .... or danced.

                             In that silence,
                             I tasted each moment;
                             Those seconds,
                                      those minutes
                                               and precious quarter hours
                             that those below had yet to live.

Is this what it feels like to be God?

To be standing in the dark outside time?

Is this the eternity of which my soul dreams?

Where seconds are born 

 then slew back upon themselves

to be reborn later? 

Or is this just the world of the wilder things;
the fox, hare and badger?
Those that run as wild as wind
Unaware of the clock not ticking
Or the hands not moving.

                      For an hour, with one hand
                      I held back time
                      and set eternity loose
                      among the streets and alleyways.
                      And the village below me
                       slept on, unknowing.

And my eye travelled up
to the smudge of woodland
on a high brow of hill
Where eternity always breaks in.

* Background music composed, performed and recorded by Helen Ingram

WHEN we WALKED to THE wood

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I CANNOT QUITE REMEMBER
              SO TELL ME...

     The day we walked to the wood... And I followed your footsteps up the steep earthen path, cut by rain and as brown as nature's womb... and when, at the steepest places, you reached out and held onto the same trees that I too hold on to; their slender trunks, wet with dew and rain and life... and you said that you could smell autumn and it made you smile as autumn always does... and we listened to the silence and a rook's call and the sound of rain falling from leaf to leaf.

              ... BUT I know there was more...
                                                      SO much MORE...

Two people cannot share an hour in the woods without experiencing a lifetime brimming over with wonder and joy... and I want to remember and to savour every single moment...

               SO TELL ME...

DID the mist hang in the air like dragons' breath so that the tops of the larches touched a different sky?

DID the chimes from the village clock roll up the hills, as sweet as carols, as soulful as owls, as lethal as quicksilver, shimmering among the beech and sycamore until only the moles and the sleeping badgers could hear it?

DID the crows rake the skies with their ragged wings?

WERE your fingers wet with rain drops that hung like glass globes from each leaf and branch and blade?

DID we dance together to the ancient music that the trees sing? And if not, why not?

DID we really meet the hermit who lived in the brushwood shelter, who smoked a briar pipe, and who sang songs and brewed coffee too bitter to drink? And did we sit with him beside his fire to listen to stories of love and hope and of friendship that is greater than both, while badger cubs dozed between his feet?

WERE there pink mallow and yellow cats ear and wood aven that outshone the sun among those dying leaves?

DID we taste together blackberry and wild sorrel's bitter-lemon bite?

DID we stand together upon the cracked concrete of the old airfield, now welcomed back by the wood, and listen, among the mist and the dripping leaves to the crackle and hiss of wartime music and the thud of distant bombs and the sadnesses they bring?

WERE there crab apples and rose-hips and bread-and-cheese leaves, and did we run our fingers, crimson with blackberries, through willow-herb's matted beard?

WERE your scarlet paths aisled with Lords-and-ladies and around your throat did you wear black bryony's bloody necklace?

DID the clouds part and the sun pour down upon us honeyed warmth so we walked through a dappled landscape where Cain was unborn? And I marvelled at the chalk-blue sky and you blew upon a dandelion-clock that was a perfect sphere and feathered-time drifted from your lips and out over field and hedgerow where the soft-eyed cows grazed.

WERE the fields filled with crane flies that rose with each footfall and heralded our way with elven wings?

DID the wind turn and ravage the world with ice and snow so that your breath burned in warm clouds and your nose turned red? And did you say, "This is Narnia" and I replied, "Yes. And below us lies the valley of Huntercombe where the Walker and the Rider and King Arthur meet." But neither of us could feel anything malevolent about the friendly, dancing flakes.

DID I see joy and wonder in your eyes, darting and flaming like fireflies (though I was afraid to look too closely), so that I too could see the world as you see it?

WERE there Chinese lanterns glowing again like painted planets in the Rectory garden below us and was there an accordion playing and the sound of a woman singing beneath the Harvesters' Moon?

DID dragons come and play at your feet? And each tree limb burst into bloom? And golden leaves and butterflies cascade from the skies? And was the world filled with God's laughter?

Perhaps ALL... or perhaps just SOME of this really HAPPENED...

I cannot precisely remember...
                    So tell me about the day we walked to the woods
                           and I followed your footsteps up the steep earthen track...

Night Walking (Infinitas)

I lifted the latch and went out into the night to see what I could see and discover in the darkness what the darkness would disclose. And I went to the place where the air was heavy with moisture and dripped with the dewy sweetness of night-time flowers and there the waters ran silently, as dark as scriveners’ ink. Above me, Cassiopeia and Cepheus danced their slow dance in frozen silence and Banbury town stained the sky above Sunrising Hill with its amber glow. And as I stood, I listened for a voice, but none came and there was no song upon the breezes of the night.

sicut in caelo…

And so in the faint penumbra of my lantern I turned my eyes to another lonely circle of light glinting in the world of darkness; Andromeda, riding high on the wings of Pegasus. Its flaming glory traduced to a tiny blur diminished by unimaginable distance. Its light had taken 2.3 million light years, the entire evolutionary span of humankind, to reach me. Through what icy darkness had this speeding speck of light passed? This dim smudge that danced in the liminality of my vision contained the mass of one trillion stars in a whirling Catherine Wheel of ferocious light, each astral blazing furnace streaking outwards on its own path to the ever expanding tidal edges of the Universe, just as we on our spinning rock hurtling around our yellowing sun are also on a cosmic voyage into infinity.

The brief flash of our life-spans freezes this speeding moment into the illusion of timeless and motionless solidity, as if this is how things ever were and will ever be to come. The high speed shutter of our perception captures the drop of milk exploding into the cup of tea and, to us, that moment will last unchanging forever while our children and then their children’s children are born, live and die.   

… et in terra

And so in that howling blackness of infinity, I lowered my lamp to the solid security of this world of grit and mud and stone. There, around my feet, glittered a spangle of starlight as dew globes glistened in my lantern’s light. A tiny watery orb balanced and quivered on the whirled ridges of my fingertip. As I looked closer, the world opened up. The world that makes up our world; where spinning electrons circle in wide sweeping orbits around their nucleus in their infinitesimal universes. Solid became no longer solid. It was as if my hand should pass through the brute mass of the tree trunk beside me as if it were a wisp of vapour. And I found myself teetering on the precipice of another infinity; another eternity of space. If I were to fall, I would fall, endlessly tumbling, through fractal chaos, a kaleidoscope of complexity. A world no longer trapped by the rules of physics… or even our minds.

Our world, the world of rock and ice and fire, solid and unyielding, is made from a chaos of freedom; a reeling, floating enigma dancing in infinite space. A world of ‘charm’ and ‘strange’; of coloured quarks, strange attractors and quantum entanglement. A space where the events upon which our world exists last for just a fraction of a chaotic second. But my perception is too slow to hold it; like an ancient oak that tries to glimpse a fork of lightning.        

Here I am, standing on the frail skin of this spinning globe, caught between two infinities; one above, one below. I am a being who is bound by time in a universe of eternities. Is it therefore not surprising that, when I look up into the night’s sky, my heart hears the roar of eternity?

In aeternum

                           

And in this dark breathing night, I feel lost, adrift, in this foaming vastness. Perhaps I am the one of whom Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “the world had disclosed itself as too vast”. In which case he was wrong, for I feel no desire to close my eyes and disappear, to crumble before the brute vastness of the Universe. Its vastness affirms in me a singing, dancing energy that I am more than me and folds into its velvet blackness my heart-song of ‘Why?’

It might be a bad reading, but perhaps the NIV translator of Ecclesiastes 3:11 was right after all, that the divine has indeed “set eternity in the hearts of men.” If so, he reveals so much more of himself than he does of Quoheleth’s god. A mistranslation? Perhaps, but it was the one phrase that kept my faith in the bible, when everything else blew away like threshed chaff and clung in my mouth with the taste of death. And now those words come back to me, resonating in my soul like a struck bell. I am a man locked into temporality and with eternity set – no, burning – in my heart.

Balanced on this thin line of time stretched between eternal infinities, is this why we look so longingly into the bowl of the night’s sky for that which we have yet to recognise? Is that why our hearts sometimes sing to us strange songs and we yearn for that for which we have no words?

Is this why, when I sit alone with the wind and the untamed things at an ancient place, that my eyes fill with water and it feels as if my heart is about to break?

Is this why the glow of amber fills me with hope? Or why the new buds of spring are so very potent? Is this why we repeatedly fail to come to terms with the concept of our death - because, at heart, we are the children of infinity? 

Easter SUNDAY Morning...

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... quite early, and the street was as still as the ghost of sheep on the high hill. But dawn had broken. Oh lord, how it had broken, sending splinters of light into the victorious, ringing, bird-carved, air. Even though snow still lay as white as sea foam on Sunrising Hill and lay under each hedge, ribbed, like the bare, bleached bones of ship-wrecked schooners, the sun had risen high; higher than the turbulent rooks and higher than the breath that billowed in clouds of steam from my ragged body.

I walked abroad in the slumbering village, and as alone as a blushing, rib-full, Adam, beneath a sky of thrush egg blue; as blue as the cornflowers of summers past. Down Main Street, past Quo Vadis. No curtains twitched, though the garden hedges bristled with song. The occupant of each house slept warm and deep under the soft hills and folds of their duveted wildernesses. Jackdaws wheeled and laughed among the sleeping bones of the old oak on Fourways Corner to see the sun beams of that beautiful morning trying to prise their honeyed fingers through the neat, new shutters of the Old Shop and its cymbal playing tin monkey. A blackbird stood as proud as your mother (should she see you now) in the middle of the road. The sun warm on her back. She watched me pass with beetle eyes, a harmless spirit in her eternal eden of sun and ice.

Only two other souls were awake. The vicar who, with knitted brow, played with whirling fingers the organ of the braying heating pipes in the village church. Climbing down from one of the Jacobean, dark oak pews, he fussed some dust into the morning air as the sun poured like Eucharist wine through the great east window and stained the altar cloth crimson and blue and, oh, such golds. Does he know that, when no one is looking, the faded saints and the firemen in their smart blue serge climb down out of their stained glass windows to ring out the hour on the faithful old tenor? Or that, in the church tower (made of rough brick and cobwebs and prayer), the stone angels play hide and seek with the umbrella-winged bats, piping and squeaking, in the belfried dark? Or that, behind his back, at every Pentecost, the yews in the churchyard burst into flame and that tongues of fire dance upon every shaggy branch?

The other is the runner who outruns the dawn, red faced and breathing out dragon's breath, down past the village hall (built in 1929), newly painted, and then past the Post Office, bursting with wool and flowers and unlicked stamps, and on past the shuttered tearoom. But not even he can outrun my nose in this impudent north-easterly wind that has been sharpened by the claws of polar bears, and the clash of icebergs, and carries down these whistling streets the sound of Saami bells, and shamanic gongs and the deep green waters where the blue whales sing. Past the Peacock, smelling of booze and laughter and last night's ashes. Down Saddledon Street to blow on my fingers and the sweet smell of the cattle barn on the frigid air. The old dog at Herbert's Farm snuffled where foxes loped, loose-limbed and laughing, under the frosted thatch and snow and dreamt of the days he ran wild and free over Orchard Hill. A woodpecker drummed out his exuberant life among the sighing trees. The morning whistled and trilled.

As I returned home, my hand on the garden gate, the Park Keeper opened his front door and roared out his approval to the triumph of the morning.

THEOLOGIA

I have never sought a transcendent God,

nor one that sat on sovereign heights above angel wings

on sceptred thrones or in hallowed vaults

that echoed with eternal hymns.

For I have sought

only one,

who

would come and sit with me
and drink tea from a china cup

one velvet, late-summer's afternoon

when shadows stretch across evening lawns.

And who, smiling, would balance

a bumblebee on the tip of his finger

and clap his hands at a stranger's joke.

Music written and performed by Helen  Ingram

What is THAT whispered on the WIND...

... by the stone rings of Avebury?


Deep echoes like the oceans' storm-bells tolling, chiming soft against the flesh of my soul.


Strange music that plays along the wide sweep of downland ridge and makes my heart beat faster. Perhaps our paths are really guided by songways; ancient music, as gold as the dawn mist, that sing to our hearts and call us back to our first roots in this rolling landscape of flint and chalk and wide skies.



Is that what takes us out of the town and out from the urbanity of life; out of the valleys and on to the downs? This way of song that threads its path through the wildness of wind and sheep and histories that are no longer told. Is that what brings me back to this place of deep echoes of the soul?

So what is that whispered on the wind by the stone rings of Avebury?


Where, Tibetan-like, coloured ribbons fly upon ancient branches and prayers swim upon the air. At owl-time when the badger prowls, does God, with steaming breath and earth-stained hands, stand beneath this tree and let these prayers run through his fingers? Perhaps, he too is touched by their hope. That we may follow the laughter on wilder winds.

An audio version of this post

One early morning

One early morning, 

when light was being distilled,

drop by drop, 

from gold,

A ball span 

as as it bounced 

over the dewy grass

and cobwebs spun 

from crystal and water.

Tiny rainbows

sparkled as 

Catherine Wheels of spray

lazily spiralled 

like galaxies being born.

A dog 

covered in smiles

races after it

and plucks it

from the air.

The best dog walks 

are those

where galaxies are born

and you return 

covered with

dew 

and dog smiles.

The SCENT of God

I went down to that damp green place of churned earth and nettle beside the cow pasture and the rectory; the bleached wood of the little kissing gate glistening and greasy to the touch. I had not seen for a long time such a profusion of watery green in that shoulder-high, wild, profligate, tangle of undergrowth; as prodigally abandoned and as sensual as a lifted skirt. 

The rain fell as it had for so long and still its joy was undiminished. To stand there, in the midst of this writhing, dank fecundity was a joy too... 

... to feel the rain on my hands and wrists, leaching up round my cuffs, as I brushed the delicate parasols of the cow parsley, covering my fingers with those little black specks and tiny insects and pollen

... to draw dripping fingers across the scimitar blades of weeping grass and to slide them up the firm plantain stems and over their glistening heads 

... to feel the thrill of the first hot kiss of nettle as I swept my hands through the green depths of their feathery enchantment and traced, with my finger, the snaking lace-work of silvery trails of slug and diffident snail.   

Perhaps it was the proximity of the rectory... Perhaps it was the sweet scent of cows' breath and soil on the air... Perhaps it was just because I was alive and human, but I found myself thinking... 'if God has a scent what would it be?'

I have lived long enough to know that for some it is the cloud of incense and candle wax that anoints the altar. For others it is of brimstone and the refiner's fire...

I thought I smelled it once, in a small welsh chapel, washed with winter sunlight, with wooden floors and the scent of old hymnals and dust. 

But standing there in that riotous wilderness of life, I realised all those were too dry. The scent of God must be vibrant and living and wet; like the scent of sex; like the scent of birth; ... like .... like ... the scent of rain cascading from nettle to dock leaf and of fungus growing on decaying wood...

... and I set out, once more, to follow that rill of laughter across these friendly hills.  

The other week, the Frosts...

... got the magnolia tree that shares its world with mine...

For over a week the flames of its blossom danced at the end of each slender branch; little heart-shaped cups of soft, ice-cream coloured fire. Those passing by, stopped to see this tree that flamed but did not burn and remark, "Your magnolia [as if it ever could belong to anyone but itself] is looking wonderful this year." I would smile, but could take no credit or glory for its beauty.

Then, the other week, the frosts got the magnolia tree and the petals of its blooms became burnt and brown. The slender branches have now become draped in the slimy, brown, wreckage of seaweed wrack; its little fiery hearts, torn and mildewed prayer flags. And now no-one stops to look upon this magnolia tree that shares its world with mine...

... but it doesn't seem to bear the frost any malice. It still stands, holding its broken, rotting flowers up to the sky. Whether pristine or 'spoilt', it makes no odds and so it casts its dead and dying blooms to the wind with as much pride as it  flamed its tight new buds of spring. It appears that it is only humans who privilege the 'perfection' of the unblemished over the scratched and soiled, the tattered and the torn. For few of us find the beauty in the imperfect, the half-formed and the spoiled... and so we hide the marks of our precious lives - those etched lines of time and worry and all those scars (inside and out) - with scarves and make-up and a hundred hurried words that have never touched our hearts and make strangers of friends...

Today, the rain falls on a soft easterly wind. Spheres of water run down each beautiful, burnt, heart-shaped fire. New leaf-growth buds green and glistening as I look up into the raining sky... and I too will bear my frosts no malice.