Wonder and fulfilment are still available – ‘a happiness there is, and it is my desire to enjoy it,’ as Traherne says: there will need to be very good reasons if we are to refuse them. Sickness and pain may debar some, but most of the obstacles are the acculturated expectations of peer pressure and the media in which we cravenly, even unthinkingly, acquiesce. Wonder and fulfilment are not for retirement or countryside mini-breaks; they are, or can be, the texture of everyday existence.
Coleridge knew the crucial value of child-like ‘easy wonder’: ‘To carry on the feelings of Childhood into the powers of Manhood, to combine the Child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the Appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … that is the character and privilege of genius.’ And that is what STA attempts, seeing these shapes and patterns of colour afresh every time, acknowledging the complete otherness of every creature and at the same time its kinship. It never merely segregates with names and bits of information, missing the fullness of the present moment – nature has nothing but present moments.
This sense of coursing through reality, as a swimmer cuts through the water and feels it fold around her, is most palpable to me when walking up in the hills, away from distractions and snags that catch the mind, filling it with thoughts of emails unanswered, calls to be made, and imaginary conversations.
‘Being present’: diving into a reality without words, descriptions, names and the pre-conceptions we attach to them. [Footnote: in recent years, mindfulness has become a widespread clinical and popular therapy in the West. It’s a very welcome development. My espousal of awareness has much in common, but there are differences too. While mindfulness encourages us, and helps us, to ‘be present’ and aware in one’s everyday life, it seems (though I apologise if I am misinterpreting it here) to offer consolation rather than affirmation. It suggests that a close focus on the activity of the moment, almost regardless of what that activity is, will suffice. There seems something slavish about this. Our intelligence becomes surplus to requirements, as does our creativity. Our haecceity is disregarded, so that we are less than ourselves. STA, by contrast, is not a tool to help you cope with a stressed life, like a power-nap or an espresso. It is not a therapy. It is a focus on reality, and a rejection of the social and acculturated fantasies which cause most of life’s stresses. There is quite a danger that STA will make you very unhappy in the short-term if it reveals to you that the work you do to earn a living is essentially unreal, and that you are living Ruskin’s false life (see ch. 11 'God Bewildered') rather than his true one. STA is not a balm for a life lived badly, but an exhortation to live life well. We do not need consolation any more than any other creature. We just need to appreciate and participate more fully in reality.] My mind is clear, open and receptive, able to work unencumbered and unfouled; my senses are alert. ‘He is most like God who is sensible of everything,’ yells Traherne above the wind. There is an unmediated, unanalysed awareness of my affinity with the beings around me: we are made of the same stuff, experiencing the same forces, co-participating in the universe. Earlier I wrote of feeling plugged in to the world. Perhaps a better, certainly a more natural image is that of a flower. (I warned you there would be clichés.) The universe is the sun and we open to it not merely to receive its light but to reveal our stamens loaded with pollen. This is the flower’s consummation. Every part of it is geared to this – the fulfilment of its haecceity – and the same goes for us.
STA is not generic ‘Nature-loving’. ‘Nature’ is just a human word. ‘What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree,’ writes J.A. Baker. This intensity is rooted in the particularity of all our myriad sensations – the blast of the wind in your ears and on your skin, the firmness of the ground, birdsong, sheep calls and the scent of bracken. This (not signing up for newsfeeds) is engagement with the world.
O the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where –
Methinks it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled;
Coleridge, The Eolian Harp
‘I cannot cause light,’ writes Annie Dillard; ‘the most I can do is to try to put myself in the path of its beam.’ In the same way, we can go out on the hills (or on the streets), constantly aware, with a tremulous sensibility and a responsive mind, and put ourselves in the way of epiphanies. We stay up on the ridge in ‘the wind on the heath’, alert and open to whatever is coming, not sheltering in the foxholes of opinion and habit.
This is not passivity. Auguste Sabatier describes it (albeit theologically, for that was his profession) as: ‘the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence’ (and I pity anyone who is so puffed up with his knowledge that he disputes that nature can be considered a ‘mysterious power’). He calls this ‘prayer’, of course, and if I’m using ‘praise’ there’s no point in quibbling about definitions – it’s the act, not the glossary, that matters. After all, as Kathleen Jamie writes, ‘Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of our web of noticing, the paying heed?’
you are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
‘Ardent, focussed, alert, respectful’. Renoir’s description of Cézanne at work encapsulates awareness, and illustrates why ‘praise’ is a better term for its fruit than ‘enjoyment’ or ‘celebration.’
But we must be careful not to fall into euphoria (and, yes, I know how silly that sounds). I crashed my car once because I was so euphoric at the beauty of a sharp winter’s day, that I took a bend much too fast, hit a patch of ice at speed and wrote off my car. Thankfully, no-one else was around, and I narrowly missed the trees that might have finished me. The moral of this little story is not a miserabilist ‘Well, that’s what you get for being happy.’ It is that I was happy in the wrong way. I was ‘ardent’ but lacked Cézanne’s ‘focus, alertness and respect’ and was so intoxicated with exhilaration that I lost awareness of my surroundings. In STA jargon, I had acculturated my own experience. [Footnote: Yves Montand made the same mistake driving his lorry at the end of Wages of Fear. That I was inflamed by the beauty of nature and M. Montand by bagging a load of cash now that all his mates were dead, does not exonerate me. We were both just pleased with ourselves.] If I had been truly appreciative and aware of reality, I would have been ok (though the few weeks’ recuperation did allow me to enjoy the beautiful view from my bed).
I like lying in bed. From there I can see a view of which I never tire: the low pigsties of the old vicarage opposite, part stone, part whitewashed, with a few bright bricks in one patch, black-painted doors and an undulating roof whose stone tiles green in the winter; then up to a mist of scrub with a few tall trunks of ash and sycamore thickened with ivy and, through their tracery, glimpses of the sky. One walnut branch snakes over the sties. The sun rises behind my house and shines on this scene, suddenly gilding it and as suddenly retreating, but it is beautiful in all weathers, in leaf or out, whirled by the wind or completely still (with sometimes just one leaf stirring – the strangest phenomenon. Is it a micro-tornado, or a caterpillar or spider which rocks it back and forth?) I could stare at it for hours. It is literally wonder-ful time, and it is only the naggings of capitalism and the need to earn money which make me feel guilty about the passing time. We need not fly to India or Antarctica to see wonders – indeed, it would be much better for the wonders if we didn’t. [Footnote: travel does not automatically broaden the mind. Unless you have a mind that voyages, there is precious little point in having a body that does. Shakespeare did not, I think, have a narrower sensibility than a cruise ship captain. Hitchcock used to say that you could set a film in an elevator with the right characters and plot. There is certainly rich material for contemplation in this room – the living creatures (myself, cat, spiders, woodlice, bugs and bacteria), the inanimate objects made out of once-living creatures (curtains, bookcase, books). I have sometimes wondered about a cycle of stories telling the lives of each of us, all Balzac in one room. La Comédie Universelle.] ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin’ – Christ at least would agree that I’m spending my time more wisely in admiring creation than commuting.
And what I say unto you, I say unto all, ‘Watch!’
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