Shopping for Wonder with William Wordsworth

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

How much of your time do you spend shopping? Is this Lif4Gd?
Is it possible to “shop” for wonder and beauty, perhaps increasing our mindfulness of what is around us? Could that make Lif4Gd?

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

The kinship of the land and William Wordsworth

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?

The Shropshire Hills: taken from the Long Mynd,
looking at Caer Caradoc (top right) and The Wrekin (top left)

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

Have we got it wrong thinking about land is just a commodity? Should we consider the land as an intrinsic part of our communities? What would that mean for social and political policies?
Do you ever consider land “kin”, or even “blessed company”?

I’d love to hear comments if you’ve been inspired to think about Lif4Gd!

Best wishes,

Michael

Long live the wilderness with Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

Do you feel connected to, or separate from, nature? How could you get more connected?
What places of natural wildness and wilderness mean a lot to you? What have been some of your most surprising and memorable encounters of connection with nature?

By all means leave a comment if the post or the questions made you want to share your own thoughts.

Best wishes,

Michael