Yesterday I was down at the University meeting up with a couple of folk, but mainly spending time on Floor Seven. Just to be clear, Floor Seven is on the top of the building - the floor numbering excludes a couple of floors for ground, basement and and administration level.
If you've been around this blog any time at all you'll know I love this building. It's one of my happy places; a large tinted glass hub of knowledge and information, two of the basic ingredients of understanding and wisdom. The building wouldn't be out of place as the corporate headquarters of some high flying business in the financial sector of a city. That seems entirely congruous.
Inside this building there are books and journals, computers and desks, seminar rooms and a cafe, and people whose profession and expertise is knowledge and where to find it. Floor Seven, the capitalisation isn't a typo, it's a place name in my inner geography. Here there are hundreds of yards of shelves with theology and philosophy. When it comes to wealth, power, status, and making a human difference, education is ahead of finance, and the business of learning towards wisdom is one that should have secured investment towards the future.
Walking along the narrow pathways of Old Aberdeen, at eye level, is this beautiful wall-flower. They populate the cracks and seem to thrive on very little by way of care and nurture from any gardener.
The contrast between this resilient and clever flower and the spectacular glass cube visible over the wall I find agreeably disconcerting. Because as well as contrast there is connection. Whatever else we use our knowledge for, the care and curation of the world around us is, or should be, an undisputed priority.
You can see where this is going can't you? That glance at the flower, eye-catching at eye-level, and behind it the shining glass cube, triggered the memory of Tennyson's lines:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Yesterday I met with a couple of friends, I enjoyed a coffee in the library browsing in the book I had bought in Blackwell's, then a couple of hours well spent amongst the Journals coming away with a number of noted clues to follow up, a visit to our only second-hand bookshop whose proprietors are our friends, and on the way there about five feet from the ground (I know this because that's eye-level for me), a wall populated with flowers, for all the world growing out of the stone.
There are times when it pays to pay attention. To enjoy the conversation; to savour the coffee; to make time to learn new things; to wonder at the beauty waving at us before our eyes; to wonder at the amazing ordinary that is everyday life.
A final thought, well a complaint really - despite the fame of Tennyson's lines, they read today as a graphic illustration of how the Victorians, with all their cleverness and pursuit of knowledge and curiosity about how to subdue the world to human will, gave little thought to what was destroyed in the pursuit of wealth, business, power and status - Tennyson destroyed the flower to ask his question.
The photo of pine cones was taken three years ago, on one of our allowed walks during the Covid lockdown.
I posted it on Facebook with this Haiku, whose sentiments still hold, more than ever.
Whimsical Haiku
Acknowledge beauty,
and pay attention to seeds
which hold the future.
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