Living Wittily

This too is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it....

So been up on Schiehallion and spent a wonderful day enjoying scenery, making the long trek up (enjoying is a misleading word here - satisfying, healthy, aerobically effective) - I may walk rather differently tomorrow!

Encountered a couple of mountain hare showing off their moves in the rocks, saw a timid ptarmigan spooked by the crunch of our boots, meadow pipits larking around, a skylark whose song is my favourite bird song ever. Forget Classic FM's obsession with Lark ascending; the real thing is sublime and unimprovable.

Earlier we met a noisy in your face jay behaving like a bad tempered I'm a celebrity get out of here, or a postmodern ned, and later a red legged partridge with 15 chicks moving along the path ahead of us! She is a wonderful mother - one of the chicks had fallen off the path and couldn't get up - I caught it gently and lifted it up beside its siblings, and the mother was right over at me, outraged at the criticism of her parenting skills. 

What a great day.

The Castle of Gight and the Clan Gordon

Went walking at Forest of Gight and came across the ruin of the Castle of Gight, which used to belong to the Gordons. Unfortunately they ran out of money and it was sold to the Earl of Aberdeen in 1797. By the early 19th Century it fell into disuse and ruin. It still has the outline and some of the features of a Scottish Castle though, and I went in to explore having read the warnings and disclaimers - but I was careful.

From inside I took a couple of photos - one looking up the ruined round tower, and the other through a side window that looked like a stone picture frame.

 Here they are:

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A Long Walk up Glen Dye in a Landscape Full of Biblical Allusions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While it's good to be led by still waters, I enjoy the sound of running water, rippling over stones and dark peaty colour after the rain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is as pastoral a scene as you'll find - Psalm 23 set in Scotland, and we aren't all that far from Crimond, the most famous Psalm tune of them all - apart from the Old One Hundredth maybe. By this time Sheila was getting impatient with her tag along tourist with a camera stopping every few minutes to gawk.

 

 

 As a boy on the farms I spent years around sheep at lambing time. I've never lost affection for these gentle, timid animals. And the instinctive protectiveness of a mother placing herself in front of the lamb, between it and danger - see the one peeping through the legs!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I find the sound of water like this irresistible. To sit beside this for five minutes is as good as listening to the most healing music. That story of Jesus and the Woman of Samaria, and the well of water springing up to eternal life; or Amos, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This little poser has no idea of the dramatic backdrop of Clach na Ben. Amongst the joys of the day was watching two lambs further down racing each other round the rushes and rocks beside the river. They must have played for several minutes - and as Sheila said, they were intentional in their playing, and their energy and balance reminded me that these animals have their own beauty.

 

 

 "Mine eyes look to the hills - from whence doth help come? Help cometh from the Lord who  made heaven and earth."

Quite so - and it was a great day walking in a Glen between the hills on either side, reminder of that help.

Morning mist, nuclear disarmament and trinitarian structures

 

Travelling down towards Laurenckirk on a frosty morning, the metal foliage called wind farms emerged from the mist. The gostly grey and filtered sunlight meant the occasional blade reflected the sun - I couldn't time the camera to capture that. I'm still pulled two ways about these massive mathematically precise intrusions onto a natural landscape. The argument about whether they are a viable or effective alternative is one others know more about. It's the aesthetics that perplex me. Are they a blot on the landscape or merely an updating of the pylon lines that criss cross some of our most attractive and sensitive landscapes? I've gotten used to them, but is that a de-sensitization that is mere tolerance of the inevitable and a concession to engineering ugliness as the solution to the energy problem?

Up here of course wind farms are politically contentious. A certain billionaire rages against the loss of aesthtic beauty for the new golf course if these turbines are installed offshore in the line of vision of the privileged golfers who can affford to jet in to the proposed world class golf course.

But whatever the outcome of our search for renewable energy, it seems that in my lifetime we'll have to get used to the sight of machinery that still looks otherworldly, and makes those who've read War of the Worlds a bit nervous.

On another line entirely - I start the course on trinitarian theology next week, and these three bladed power sources, merging in the misty mystery of a Mearns  morning, are pictorial reminders of the significance in human thought and culture of threefoldness.

They also remind me of the early Ban the Bomb logo which was a badge I wore proudly as a teenager - a wee while ago.....

"...all pure art is praise..." John Ruskin

"We express our delight in a beautiful or lovely thing no less by lament for its loss, than gladness in its presence;

Much art is therefore tragic or pensive, but all pure art is praise...Fix then, this in your mind...your art is to be praise of something that you love." 

John Ruskin, "The Laws of Fesole"

 

Victorian rhetoric, the art of the prose poem, the fusion in mind and emotion of contemplative insight and apt, indeed artistic expression - Ruskin is one of the great masters of English descriptive writing. I suspect the quality of the writing is directly indexed to his quality of seeing, and responding to what he saw. Thinking about the nature of the contemplative disposition, I recognise the lure of the beautiful, the frisson of pleasure in the encounter with that which awakens longing.

The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botaninc gardens, and is a case in point

When a moment of transcendence becomes unbidden prayer

I've long given up on trying to understand why some things happen when they do. The theological answer, depending on your theological  view, is that all happens, directly or indirectly, in the providence of God. Where the theology becomes tricky is when we try to make that providence absolute and determinist. I prefer to think of God as engaged with, involved with, invested in, the history and destiny of creation. As to whether that means every leaf that falls is by God's direct will, it does mean that Jesus' image of the attentiveness of the Father who notices and cares for each sparrow is more than exaggerated sentiment.

So what am I to make of yesterday's coincidence of music and ornithology, when immanence and transcendence coalesced in a moment of joy, and a recognition of the marvellous serendipity of small things intimating the vastness of possibility for God to nudge us awake to the beauty of life?

I was sitting in the car at Sandend (the Moray coast), listening to Classic FM and Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending.

The window was down, the waves were breaking white against some rocks further along the shore.

Two skylarks rose singing their accompaniment to the violinist and showing how it should be done.

And the combination of sunshine, blue sky, blue sea and white waves, sublime music and perfectly timed skylark notes, provided an orchestration that became a glimpse of that infinitely wise and fecund purpose that notices the sparrow, and endows the skylark with a song of heartbreaking and heart-healing melody.

As a child I lived in the Ayrshire countryside when skylarks were numerous, their song a daily liturgy of aspiration, and ever since that song embedded in memory and feeling. 

Prayer is often at its most real, not in the speaking of words, but in those moments of awakened memory, wonderful surprise, and impossible coincidence. No wonder poets love skylarks.

Haiku and Holidays in Ireland 3: The Burren and the Drystone Dykes

The Burren is a remarkable slab cake of layered rock that dominates the north west corner of County Clare. We drove round it and through it, walked on it and over it, and meandered at its edges where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Sheila captured some of the flowers in the rocks on the camera - more of these the morn.

One of the features of the landscape we saw is the dry stone dykes and walls. I've always wondered at the skill, precision, and artistic flair of the dyke builder. All shapes and sizes of stone, worked and cut to fit into a straight, stable length of wall, and without the use of cement or mortar. So walls are built, statements of separation, dividing lines of ownership or rights, symbols of ownership and its boundaries.

When I was a boy I used to accompany old Jimmy Welsh, (not the artist in stone shown in the photo), the tractorman and dyker at one of the farms where I grew up. Every summer he repaired the drystane dykes around the fields, and once built a new dyke alongside our farm cottage. I was his helper as a 7 or 8 year old. Never learned his skill, but have since seen the dyke years later, standing neatly, straight and testimony to a skill I hope we never quite lose from our countryside.

Looking at these in Ireland, I couldn't avoid the Robert Frost poem, with its line, "something there is that doesn't love a wall - that wants it down."And I was left with those mixed emotions admiring the skill and beauty of a well built drystone dyke or wall, and realising its function, to keep out, or to keep in. So I wrote a couple of Haiku - not to make any particular point. Just to note that there are important points that walls make.

1.

Hand built drystone walls;

mortarless human constructs,

neat, strong, exclusive.

2.

Hand built drystone walls;

mortarless human constructs,

neat, strong, inclusive.

3. 

Hand built drystone walls;

low enough for shaking hands,

and conversation.

Out and About: Walking in the Forest of Achray

Today Sheila and I gave our walking boots their first dirtying of the Spring. No doubt about it. Up in the Forest of Achray, above Aberfoyle, it was fresh, at times chilly, at other times balmy when the sun shone and we stood in the shelter of the pines. And it was Spring. Walked for a few hours and took time to work the stiffness and reluctance out of our legs, and by the end of the walk beginning to feel my body moving with some kind of rhythm and ease.

Recent weeks of rain means there's still a lot of mud, wet vegetation, but also streams running off the hills and the water crystal clear. Robins, chaffinch, greenfinch, several varieties of tit including blue, great and coal, pheasants shadow boxing amongst the brown withered ferns, and one of my favourite sights, multitudinous varieties of lichen in every variation of green and grey. I love the delicate filigree of these remarkable plants, and wonder at their capacity to cling to rock, bark and anything else that gives a life-hold by staying still long enough for it to grow. One of the most remarkable things about lichen is its capacity to capture the nutrients it needs from the atmosphere, having a 95% capacity to capture and fix nitrogen within its own life system.

One of my favourite prose writers is the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. In one of his descriptive passages he draws a word picture of mosses and lichens, that is amongst the most beautifully observed and expressed passages of natural history writing I have ever read:

No words that I know of will say what mosses and lichens are. None are delicate enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green- the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass - the traceries  of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, aborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace...

Yet as in one sense the humblest, in nother they are the most honoured of the earth children. Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow fingered, constant hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of the cowslip god - far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, starlike on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

Beautiful.  A prose poem, a psalm to the beauty of the world, written by one of the great Victorians. That's why I love Victiorian writers; they knew how to use words to render worlds afresh and anew. And isn't that moss and lichen covered dyke a glorious festival of moorland colours - I took a few minutes simply to enjoy it