Singing Hymns to Sunrise, and Drinking the Sound with Joy!

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the grounds of Drum Castle, about 5 miles from where I live. I needed sky, trees, fresh air, birds, a different diet from books, indoors and people. Now people I love, but not to the exclusion of time to be alone. It has been a demanding time, with far more output than input, more expenditure than replenishment. What was needed was space to breathe, and look and take in. When I feel the need for solitude and new horizons I take my camera.

For some years now I've used my camera as an aid to reflection, and photography as a way of disciplining mind, eye and attentiveness to the world around. I've found that if I want to pay attention to what's going on outside, it has to be intentional. No point trying to find time. Time is there, it just has to be taken! So, sometimes the best way to start dealing with the busyness going on in my own head is to go somewhere to pay attention to what's going on in the larger, richer world outside the propagator of my own self-consciousness. 

So off to Drum Castle and its grounds. Winter in the North East can provide extraordinary light and shadow. Walking alongside a silver birch wood the low winter sun lanced through the silver shining trunks and darker branches. The dialogue of horizontal sunlight and reflective bark highlighted the network of close-knit, entangled branches.

I sat on a drystane dyke and watched it for a while, a theatre in which the action was sparse and the low lighting was an impressionist masterpiece. The contrast of liquid light and blue sky, of green frozen moss and trees picked out in monochrome, gave the impression of a natural sunbreak, diffusing the light so that it was possible to look without being blinded.

Walking amongst trees is an exercise in humility. Feet trampling on years and years of leaf compost, moving amongst trees that have mostly survived, with one or two dying off and over years adding to the humus, life returning life to the earth. Amongst silver birches there is also the low murmuring of the breeze playing ancient rhythms and tones on the hanging branches. It isn't difficult to walk speechless, and listen to another form of speech.

Where there are trees there are birds. I heard the jays before I saw them. Like their name they are sociable, party birds whose song and call are unmodulated loudness. I walked around the pond which is surrounded by mostly conifers but with some berry bearing trees intermingled. The birds love it in there.

The song thrush (mavis) was busy chasing dinner high up, and appeared on a branch in silhouette. From childhood years I have admired the sheer virtuosity of the song, and the architectural brilliance of a nest shaped like a large cup and lined inside with mud smoothes to a shell and lightly lined with soft grass and feathers. Seeing this one yesterday is precisely why it's worth the bother to go looking for newness, and a reconfiguration of the imagination.

John Clare was a wonderful observer of the world around him, and his bird poems are amongst the most keenly attentive descriptions of birds, their habits and habitats, their songs and their colours. In the early 19th Century garden and field birds were common and part of everyday life, in days long before changed agriculture, chemical pesticides, destroyed habitats and overworked fields, took a toll that has pushed many species to the point of endangered status. Here are a few lines about the thrush:

I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy

Seeing a thrush, high in a tree amongst the berries, on a bright and frosty winter morning isn't something you see every day. Nor is it something you will ever see if you don't go looking. That moment when you see what you are seeing, when you hear what you are hearing and start to listen, when you quieten your own inner commentary and allow the world to get a word in edgeways - that moment is a gift. The photos took a few minutes of standing still, being patient, taking the risk of wasting time if it flew away before a photo was possible.

Those ten minutes sitting on a dyke watching trees filter sunlight, and those five minutes watching a thrush filling up with calories and energy on a freezing morning, those are times when prayer happens without us realising it. The unexpected encounter with a beautiful bird living its life in the simplicity of its needs is as good an illustration of Jesus' teaching on trust as I know. And walking amongst trees you hear the wind and don't know where it came from or where it's going, but like a sacrament of the Spirit we necome aware of the movements and currents of grace in our lives. I had come into the countryside poor and went away rich; I had come hungry and had gone away full; I had come anxious and inwardly dissipated, I came back reconfigured in heart and mind.

Here is John Clare's poem, including the lines quoted earlier.

The Thrush's Nest.

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

Comments

[Dave Summers]

Beautiful! And true.