Every year at St John’s Church, Princes Street, Edinburgh we
celebrate Creationtide, from the 1st of September till Harvest Festival.
This is usually about the same time as the Feast of St Francis. Our theme this
year is Nature and Wellbeing. To go with this we have selected a number
of short quotations on that theme. You will notice that we have taken only one
quotation from each author; even William Wordsworth and St Francis himself. We hope
that these, with the accompanying photos, may help you to reflect thankfully
and beneficially upon the wonder of nature. Some of the extracts are intended to provoke thought.
September 1
Saint Matthew, Gospel, Chapter 6 verses 28 and 29:
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they
spin. And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like one of these.
September 2
John Ruskin, Letters to the Workmen and Labourers
of Great Britain: Your garden is to
enable you to obtain such knowledge as you may best use in the country in which
you live by communicating it to others; and teaching them to take pleasure in
the green herb, given for meat, and the coloured flower given for joy.
September 3
Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: The whole
charm of childhood still lingers, for me, in such a fishing-net… With such an
instrument, I caught, at the age of nine, the first Daphnia for my fishes,
thereby discovering the wonder-world of the freshwater pond which immediately
drew me under its spell. In the train of the fishing-net came the magnifying
glass; after this again a modest little microscope, and therewith my fate was
sealed; for he who has once seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear
himself away again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist.
September 4
Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey through trees:
I live beneath the protective boughs of a sheltering ash. The tree springs up
as a single trunk of nine-foot girth for five feet and then divides into three,
each of its branched trunks four feet in girth arching high above me. I love
its natural flamboyance and energy, and the swooping habit of its branches; the
way they plunge towards the earth, then upturn, tracing the trajectory of a
diver entering the water and surfacing.
September 5
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory: Arguably
both kinds of Arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes of the
urban imagination…The quarrel even persists at the heart of debates within the
environmental movement, between the deeper and paler shades of Greens… You
would never know it from the languid nymphs and shepherds that populate the
pastoral landscapes of the Renaissance, but the mark of the original Arcadians
was their bestiality. Their presiding divinity, Pan, copulated with goats and
betrayed his own animal nature in his woolly thighs and cloven feet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring
Nothing
is so beautiful as Spring –
When
weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s
eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through
the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The
ear it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The
glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The
descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With
richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What
is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of earth’s sweet being in the
beginning
In
Eden garden.
September 7
Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside:
Gamekeepers kept alive (as they still do) many otherwise disused woods that
might have been grubbed out; they also kept up the coppicing. But they took it
upon themselves to persecute beasts and birds of prey and to exclude the public
from the woods. This need not have been so. France, Germany, and Switzerland
are equally good shooting countries, and yet ancient woods are everyone’s
heritage; in Britain alone we have lost that birthright, and with it our
knowledge and love of woods.
September 8
Dorothy Wordsworth, Journal November 8th
1802: A beautiful day. William got to work again at Ariosto, and so
continued all the morning, though the day was so delightful that it made my
very heart linger to be out of doors, and see and feel the beauty of the autumn
in freedom.
September 9
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing
attitudes in England 1500-1800: The modern idea of the balance of nature
thus had a theological basis before it gained a scientific one. It was belief in
the perfection of God’s design which preceded and underpinned the concept of
the ecological chain, any link of which it would be dangerous to remove.
September 10
Geoffrey Winthrop Young, A Hill:
Climb
but a little hill: you too may find
The
clouds ebb surely from your clearer mind.
September 11
Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian:
They landed in this Highland Arcadia, at the mouth of a small stream which
watered the delightful and peaceable valley… Far to the right were seen the
dusky and more gigantic mountains of Argyleshire, with a seaward view of the
shattered and thunder-splitten peaks of Arran. But to Jeanie, whose taste for
the picturesque, if she had any by nature, had never been awakened or
cultivated, the sight of the faithful old May Hettley, as she opened the door
to receive them, was worth the whole varied landscape.
September 12
Richard Hamblyn, The Cloud Book: As will have
been apparent during the course of this book, clouds often play a valuable role
in indicating short-range weather conditions, but when it comes to predicting
longer-term climate changes, they are entirely unknown quantities.
September 13
Homer, The Odyssey (Calypso’s Isle):
Four
springs in a row, bubbling clear and cold,
Running
side-by-side, took channels left and right.
Soft
meadows spreading round were starred with violets,
Lush
with beds of parsley. Why even a deathless god
Who
came upon their place would gaze in wonder.
September 14
Leonardo da Vinci, The Artist’s course of study:
Nature is so delightful and abundant in its variations that among trees of the
same kind there would not be found one which nearly resembles another, and not
only the plants as a whole, but among their branches, leaves and fruit, will
not be found one which is precisely like another.
September 15
George Basterfield, The Harebells of Mosedale:
Twenty
desolate harebells
Playing a modest part,
Chime
a tender sweetness
Down in a climber’s heart.
September 16
David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water,
Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany: The brave new world of dykes,
ditches, windmills, fields and meadows, a landscape of “wealth and almost Dutch
cleanliness”, delivered many undeniable benefits [to Oderbruch]...It is harder
today to summon up unqualified enthusiasm, which passes over the costs of that
conquest… The inhabitants, no more than 170 families in the Bruch proper, were
amphibious. They lived primarily as fishermen… For much of the year, except
during low water and winter ice, their only means of communication through the
labyrinthine waterways was by flat-bottomed boat. This way of life was
destroyed.
September 17
William Dunbar, Of the Nativitie of Christ:
Sing,
hevin imperial, most of hicht,
Regions
of air, make armony!
All
fish in flude, and fowl of flicht,
Be
mirthful and make melody!
All,
Gloria in excelsis cry –
Hevin,
eard, sea, man, bird and best –
He
that is crownit abone the sky
Pro
nobis puer natus est.
September 18
John Lewis-Stempel, The private life of an English
field – Meadowland: My daughter’s school carol service, in Hereford
Cathedral… Later that night, I go down to the field, and stand there in the
vertiginous dark, with the lights of the stars above me. The mountains make for
high walls, the stars for candles. There is no difference between the cathedral
and the field.
September 19
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales:
Whan
that Aprill with his shoures soote
The
droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And
bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of
which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan
Zephirus eek with his sweete breeeth
Inspred
hath in every holt and heeth
The
tender croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath
in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And
small foweles maken melodye,
Thanne
longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
September 20
Thomas Traherne, The First Century, number 28:
Your Enjoyment of the World is never right, till evry Morning you awake in
Heaven: see your self in your father’s Palace: and look upon the Skies and the
Earth and the Air, as Celestial Joys.
September 21
George Orwell, Some thoughts on the Common Toad:
I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes,
butterflies and toads, one makes a decent future a little more probable…At any
rate, spring is here, even in London N.1., and they can’t stop you enjoying
it…How many times have I watched toads mating, or a pair of hares having a
boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who
would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t.
September 22
Alfred Wainwright, The Northern Fells: Book
Five is dedicated to those who travel alone, the solitary wanderers on the
fells, who find contentment in the companionship of the mountains and of the
creatures of the mountains.
September 23
Christopher North, The Angler’s Tent:
The
mountains ring: Oh! what a joy is there!
As
hurries o’er their heights in circling dance,
Cave-loving
Echo, Daughter of the Air.
September 24
Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne:
Echo has always been so amusing to the imagination, that the poets have
personified her; and in their hands she has been the occasion of many a
beautiful fiction. Nor need the gravest man be ashamed to appear taken with
such a phenomenon, since it may become the subject of philosophical or
mathematical enquiries.
September 25
John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-door: Wood, sea
and hill were the intimacies of my childhood, and they have never lost their
spell for me. But the spell of each was different. The woods and beaches were
always foreign paces, in which I was at best a sojourner. But the Border hills
were my own possession, a countryside in which my roots went deep…This
attachment to a corner of earth induced a love of nature in general.
September 26
William Blake, Laughing Song:
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
And
the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When
the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of
it.
September 27
Beatrix Potter, The Fairy Caravan: Tuppenny
ran and ran, splashing through the puddles with little bare feet… Tuppenny felt
like a new guinea-pig. For the first time he smelt the air of the hills. What
matter if the wind were chilly; it blew from the mountains… The short-cropped
turf would soon be gay with wild flowers; even in early April it was sweet.
Tuppenny felt as though he could run for miles.
G.M. Trevelyan, Preservation of the Scenery:
The happiness and the soul’s health of the whole people are at stake. The
preservation of natural beauty as an element in our nation’s life is a cause
that deeply concerns people of every sort who are working to maintain any ideal
standards and any healthy life… If natural beauty disappears, religion,
education, national tradition, social reform, literature and art, will all be
deprived of a principal source of life and vigour.
September 29
Daniel Defoe, The Borders of Lancashire and
Westmoreland: Here we entered Westmoreland, a country eminent only for
being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in
England, or even in Wales it self; the west side, which borders on Cumberland,
is indeed bounded by a chain of almost unpassable mountains, which in language
of the country are called Fells.
September 30
Anon, Robin Hood and the Monk
In
somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And
leves be large and long,
Hit
is full mery in feyre foreste
To
here the foulys song.
October 1
Arthur Ransome, The Picts and the Martyrs:
Dick became interested from another point of view. “Like natural history,” he
said. “There’s no good in hating wasps because they sting. What matters is to
understand how they do it. It works both ways. When you understand you don’t
mind so much, even if it’s you who gets stung. Like that mosquito. I forgot how
beastly he was when I was watching him and saw him uncurl his proboscis and
shove it in and start sucking blood up out of the back of my hand… Of course it
was scratchy afterwards just the same.”
October 2
Isaac Walton, The Compleat Angler: My honest
scholar, all this is told to incline you to thankfulness; and to incline you
the more, let me tell you, and though the prophet David was guilty of murder and
adultery, and many other of the most deadly sins, yet he was said to be a man
after God’s own heart because he abounded more with thankfulness than any other
that is mentioned in Holy Scripture… Let us not forget to praise him for the
innocent mirth and pleasure we have met with since we met together. What would
a blind man give to see the pleasant rivers, and meadows, and flowers that we
have met with since we met together?
October 3
William Wordsworth, Ode – Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Thanks
to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks
to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To
me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts
that do often lie too deep for tears.
October 4
Saint Francis, Cantico delle creature
Laudato
si’, mi Signore, per sora nostra matre terra,
La
quale ne sustena et governa
Et
produce diversi fructi con coloriti fiori et herba.
[Be praised , Lord, for sister our mother earth, who
maintains and governs us and puts forth different fruits with coloured flowers
and grass.]
