Words and Thoughts, for Life
A place
Of significance
.
Where kings
Have knelt
.
Paupers
Have prayed
.
Where life and death
Have been debated
.
And a poet
Still pleads from the grave
.
Where floods have arisen
And abated
.
And new creations
Continually rise up to heaven
.
A place
Passed over
.
By a million travellers
Intent on other things
.
While the pilgrim
Pauses
.
Stays
And prays.
.
Inspired by Shrewsbury Abbey
Do you think that the places where people live affects their personalities? Do the skies “knit our heartstrings right”? This post explores some ideas found in A.E.Housman’s poem “A Shropshire Lad” about place and personality…
In the first poem of “A Shropshire Lad”, Housman talks about
“…skies that knit their heartstrings right
…fields that bred them brave.”
A.E.Housman does not have such enthusiastic things to say about the city dwellers he had met in London:
“In many an eye that measures me
The mortal sickness of a mind
Too unhappy to be kind
Undone with misery, all they can
Is to hate their fellow man
And till they drop they needs must still
Look at you and wish you ill.” (A Shropshire Lad, Poem XLI)
Now I know that this is very unfair to many city dwellers who are decent, sociable human beings…But having lived in both the suburbs of a city and in the country, it is striking how in general city dwellers don’t always tend to relate to each other in quite the same way as I’ve found people do in villages in country towns (having also lived in both of these). I wonder what your people’s experiences have been?
Of course, Lif4Gd would have us all try a bit harder not to “hate” our fellow men, women and children, nor wish them ill. In the UK, knife crime is sadly rife in London. However we also have rough sleepers and drugs issues in Shrewsbury, where I live now.
When I lived in a village in Dorset, I wrote this, inspired by the closeness to the natural beauty that was all around, so different from my own upbringing in Wandsworth in the suburbs of London:
Shillingstone
The crows fly along invisible lines
under a pink stupendous sky
in the peace of the village tonight.
Hambledon Hill stands so still,
and Okeford Hill and Shillingstone Hill
And this is our home, where the Stour wanders
under bridges, alongside meadows
and buzzards circle overhead.
Some Questions to Ponder
I’d love to hear any thoughts readers have.
Best wishes,
Michael
How do you balance daily tasks, the demands of other people, work, leisure, and looking after yourself? This post draws on ancient wisdom to explore a way of answering this tricky question: how do you balance your being for a Lif4Gd?
“Mindfulness” is a popular word today but its roots go back hundreds and thousands of years. I am reminded of this whenever I go past Shrewsbury Abbey, local to me, founded nearly a thousand years ago. There is a beautiful window portraying St. Benedict over the entrance, and Benedictine monks knew a lot about mindfulness.
Maintain
Equilibrium
.
As you balance
Your being
.
Though juggling
Balls of fire
.
Grateful
For those moments
.
Of tranquil
Transition
.
Gliding through
Blue skies of peace.
For me, life sometimes feels like “juggling balls of fire”; Lif4Gd requires though “blue skies of peace”. But how do we find them?
Benedictine monks balanced manual labour with times of meditation and prayer. There were set times of “doing” and “being”. There was a regular rhythm to each day, a deliberate intent to maintain equilibrium. And of course they understood their life from a cosmic perspective.
I start every day with a time of silence. It helps put life in perspective. It creates a space for reading, thinking, prayer.
How do you maintain equilibrium and balance in your life?
Some Questions to Ponder
Do leave a comment if this post has made you think. Lif4Gd was set up to be interactive, and enjoy hearing readers’ thoughts.
Best wishes,
Michael
What, or who, do you love?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s wonderful poem “How do I love thee” was written to a man she fell in love with in her late thirties. This post is all about places we love, and people in love…
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
(from Sonnets from the Portuguese)
I love the way this poem is so extravagant in the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning lists all the different ways her love manifests itself. But maybe love is uncountable: ultimately you can’t quantify love.
Nearby to where I live in Shrewsbury is Attingham Park, loved by generations of owners, many of them happily in love whilst living there. Its grounds include a deer park, and who can fail to love these gentle animals?
Lif4Gd must surely contain love for someone or something. Maybe we should approach each day in love?
Approach each day
in love
.
Love every minute
that creeps into the room
.
Love every hour
that glides outside
.
Love every day
that offers you life
.
Approach each day
with love.
Some Questions to Ponder
Do leave a comment if this post has made you want to share something with other readers.
Best wishes,
Michael
Life brings the craziest of juxtapositions. I was stunned by wonder recently – and it turned out I was just a stone’s throw away from a local supermarket! This post explores what we shop for – for daily groceries, or for daily wonder. And my inspiring writer is a different poem by William Wordsworth, called “Lines Written in Early Spring”:
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Sometimes we catch a glimpse of something so unusual it makes us stop in our tracks and becomes a truly memorable event. I think Wordsworth must have had this experience to make him write this poem. He felt linked with the natural world and it made him think what a mess we often make of the earth!
For me, I had the experience of spotting a very unusual wild bird on the Rae Brook in Shrewsbury – and it turned out to be just behind a local supermarket! It was the ever-excitable dipper (see my previous post Long Live the Wilderness with Gerard Manley Hopkins). And this encounter got me thinking about shopping, and what we shop for.
A wiser man than me said “Man cannot live on bread alone”. But we often forget this, and food shopping, and consuming food, can become a central purpose of life. But is this Lif4Gd?
Maybe we should be “shopping” for wonder?! On the look out every day to be mindful of those special moments of beauty or meaning that give an extra purpose, perhaps even transcendence, to life.
This morning, as I drove to work past a local hill called The Wrekin, dawn was breaking and both Jupiter and Venus were clearly visible brightly hanging in the sky. What could be more wonderful?
Jupiter
And Venus
.
Lighting
The sky
.
As if
They knew
.
A brightness
Hidden
.
From human
Sight
.
And I drove
In the darkness
.
As if my road
Lay away
.
From heavenly
Beauty
.
As if I had
Forgotten
.
An ancient
Primaeval
.
Ancestral
duty…
.
Some Questions to Ponder
Do leave a comment if any of this has got you thinking! This blog is intended to be interactive, and I find it inspiring to follow up comments and suggestions from readers.
Best wishes,
Michael
How do you think of land? Is it something we humans own, or is it actually part of our community? A reader made the connection from my previous post to a book that explores different ways of thinking about our environment (https://thewildernessroad.wordpress.com/2018/12/30/a-sand-county-almanac/ ). This post picks up that theme, bringing in William Wordsworth’s poem “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”.
Wordsworth writes this about nature:
“well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”
Lif4Gd for him involved a kinship with the natural world: he finds there the “anchor of my purest thoughts”, nature is a “nurse…guardian of my heart…soul of all my moral being”.
Around my home town of Shrewsbury lie the Shropshire hills. They are majestic, and I understand the idea of the “kinship” and “community” of the land as I see them every day. They start to feel “a part of you”, and perhaps this is what makes Lif4Gd?
I have owned a dog since starting married life, and of course our pets (and especially dogs!) provide wonderful company. Dog walks, though, have also made me more aware of the “blessed company” of the natural world as I have gone out and about walking:
Thrush hurls her song
in curls and spirals and dead straight lines;
The trees stand as still as time;
the hills look down benignly;
the wind converses enigmatically;
the river merely suggests itself so quietly;
even the buttercups nod their heads with glee;
I feel I am among
such blessed company.
Some Questions to Ponder
I’d love to hear comments if you’ve been inspired to think about Lif4Gd!
Best wishes,
Michael
Are you ever drawn to natural, wild, wilderness places? This post was inspired by a line in a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins – “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” – and also by a surprising natural encounter I had recently.
Hopkins’ poem celebrates wild natural beauty but is quite a challenging read because of the way he likes to use unusual words and unusual syntax. If you want to read it, I suggest you just let the bits you don’t follow just “wash over you” and just enjoy the general impression of the wonderful way he uses words…
THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
.
For me, Lif4Gd involves feeling connected with nature. In Shropshire, where I live, the wilderness is never far away, and is part of what makes life good:
The wild birds inhabit these hills
and I, a walker,
glancing down the valley
dazzled by gleaming lights
flung across the fields like necklaces
I feel connected with the wind
the grass under my feet
God’s sky above my head.
Yesterday as I was walking Rae Brook Nature Reserve in Shrewsbury I spotted a dipper (these are usually mountain stream birds in the UK) dancing around the edges of the Rae Brook. “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” indeed. Nature is full of surprises and offers a deep connection to humanity.
Some Questions to Ponder
By all means leave a comment if the post or the questions made you want to share your own thoughts.
Best wishes,
Michael
Lif4Gd 