“Even the predictable turns into surprise the moment we stop taking it for granted”
David Steindl-Rast
So a local walk that has been made many times and is completely predictable … isn’t, when you are consciously being alert and mindful and grateful for what is around you.
David Steindl-Rast’s saying is so true!
Glancing at the local, familiar landscape, The Wrekin seemed lit up by the golden views of harvesting…
And just looking up at the sky reminded me to wonder…
And then on the path in front of me was a beautiful common darter…
It was a case of the surprising predictable that wasn’t predictable at all!
David Steindl-Rast, in his book Gratefulness, goes on to say that in the surprising there is also the element of the gratuitous. Humans didn’t make this beautiful earth, or the clouds.
So the least we can do is wonder at, and appreciate, its surprising predictableness!
The Wrekin looms out of the darkness on a Shropshire morning in March 2021.I drive past this iconic hill Monday to Friday every week,and sometimes it just speaks of life, for good, to me, as it did on this day…
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
Does it matter if you live in city or country? Does it affect personality and character? What’s your experience?
If we live in a city, how can we contribute to Lif4Gd locally? Is it necessarily easier to live a Lif4Gd in the country?
Lif4Gd 