I was reminded of Larkin’s beautiful poem by the buds opening on the trees in the garden and on the hedgerows around here in County Kildare. This time of year moves him from a reflection on loss and grief, to thoughts on being born again, to finally being convinced to begin over again. The message is like something “almost being said”, so we need to create time to see this: we learn from nature and from this season if we are still enough to listen.
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.Philip Larkin, The Trees
Tag: Nature
The Cherry blossoms
You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest
and I smile and am silent and even my soul remains quiet;
It lives in the world that no one owns.
Trees blossom.
Water flows.
Li Po, 701 – 762
Sunday Quote: what we miss
The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”
Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist
In the garden
Everything that slows us down
and forces patience,
everything that sets us back
into the slow circles of nature,
is a help.
Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
photo m tullottes
Sunday Quote: Seeing
It is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain
Mary Oliver, Daisies
Let go
Despite all the recent storms in Ireland, buds are starting to appear on the trees. A lesson in resilience and trust. Most of us are very good at bringing suffering upon ourselves. We turn small issues into problems and then fixate on the worries and anxieties and let them fester and take root inside us. We are less good at simply letting go and letting things develop in their own time.
Sitting quietly,
doing nothing,
Spring comes,
and the grass grows,
by itself.
Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694
photo tim horton
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