My early years were spent in rural Ayrshire. My father was a dairyman and I lived my entire childhood at least three miles from the nearest shop and school. Oh, and we didn't have a car till I was at secondary school. Amongst the compensations throughout my life have been a love of the coutnryside, a lifelong passion for Scottish wildlife - flora and fauna, and a number of memories maybe not many folk my age will now have.
I remember discovering a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge and being utterly and almost tearfully delighted at the delicacy of shape and colour. To my young eyes this is what a jewel looked like - fragile beauty, grey mauve at the top, tapering to white at the point and traced with several dark elongated commas and question marks as if someone more clever than Faberge had randomly painted a one off egg for the life-remembered pleasure of an 8 year old boy in wellingtons jeans and almsot certainly a big wooly jersey!
So when I come across this poem by Mary Oliver I know exactly what she feels.
With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is So Delicate and Humble
I do not live happily or comfortably
with the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
the news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
having felt something more wonderful
than all the lectricty of New York City.
...........................
Maybe somewhere in such memory there is for me the explanation of why I have always felt a deep resonant joy that Jesus saw connections between the birds of the field and air, and the creative care of God. Was that egg still beautiful if no one had ever seen it? You decide. Some day I may attempt the impossible and try to capture on tapestry that jewel of a moment, that awakening of childhood wonder at the random beauty of life's promise, a yellowhammer's egg, laid in a woven cup lined with moss, sheep wool, and feather.
Comments