A Blizzard of Blossom: Beauty Awakens the Soul to Act

I was watching the cherry blossom falling the other day. It was blowing in the wind around the wind telephone, designed to connect the living with those at the other side of the breath of life. There is a message on the telephone quoting Bob Dylan, “the answer is blowing in the wind”. I saw pink snowing blowing so beautifully around the gardens, while Molly was zooming around, sniffing all the new life. It looked so beautiful, it awakened the heart of my mind and got me thinking about the things we see, in our ordinary lives, when we lift up our eyes, our vision, when we live in hope, not expectation or optimism. When we are inspired by beauty. When my eyes are open and my mind isn't trapped in some disappointment from the past, my own or that done by others, or when I am not blinded by some fear of what might or might not be. When the eyes of eyes are awake I feel so alive and I have vision. I see what is so easy to miss.

As I watched it all I was reminded of this lovely poem “Vision” by May Thielgaard Watts

"Vision" by May Thielgaard Watts

To-day there have been lovely things
I never saw before;
Sunlight through a jar of marmalade;
A blue gate;
A rainbow
In soapsuds on dishwater;
Candlelight on butter;
The crinkled smile of a little girl
Who had new shoes with tassels;
A chickadee on a thorn-apple;
Empurpled mud under a willow,
Where white geese slept;
White ruffled curtains sifting moonlight
On the scrubbed kitchen floor;
The under side of a white-oak leaf;
Ruts in the road at sunset;
An egg yolk in a blue bowl.
My love kissed my eyes last night.

What a beautiful poem, isn't it lovely. When we live in heart, in courage, in love, we can see these signs of hope everywhere. It comes in the little things, that I think of and share upon awakening each morning. Such beauty compels me to act. It is vital to keep our senses open, despite our fears and worries, despite what troubles us. We must keep our senses open, in order to see things. In order to blessed by beauty and to act from it.

“Beauty awakens the soul to act”, said Dante. Well this is exactly what happened to the local poet and friend of the congregations Oliver James Lomax the other day, as he sat in the chapel gardens and wrote the poem which follows. He said he was looking at one of the Cherry Blossom trees in the chapel garden, and noticed “a blizzard of blossom falling from it, dancing in the low wind, it looked like it was almost shedding its memory. It transported me back to the day my Nan passed away from vascular dementia, there was a blossom tree just like it outside the Palliative Care Ward, also rather joyously, there was also a small boy trying to catch Pokemon in the corridor as I left her for the last time. This poem sits between those two images, a moment that brought a little peace and hope to my grief.”

Here’s the poem. I am sorry you can’t hear it in Oliver’s voice:

“To The Boy Catching Pokémon On The Palliative Care Ward” by Oliver James Lomax

The day nan died
the blossom tree was a blizzard

of gentle data
a white drift of unkept names

shifting like a small god
in the hospital garden.

Mine is, a god of flux
today he is a boy

catching Pokémon in the corridor
his hand consecrates the air

drawing a circle in time
where nothing consents to remain.

I watch from the threshold
of what has already gone,

how often will I
cast into the invisible?

For that glamour and strength
for the colour of her being,

drag the unseen closer
as if it might answer.

The blossom keeps falling
into itself, onto itself

a paper rain blinding the page
where the light

I’m trying to capture and name
cannot remain.

Beauty awakened Oliver’s soul to act and he shared this poem as a result of the awakening.

I just love how the beauty of the falling blossom, blowing up in the wind like a pink blizzard, took Oliver back to a time in his life and awakened something in him, something that brought healing to his soul, but also inspired his soul to act and write there and then. By the end of the day he sent me his poem. His poem inspired the service this devotion is based on, as did so many other things and people. The beauty in many forms inspired our souls to act. The answer was most certainly blowing in the wind that day.

I was awakened by beauty that day. I found myself engaged in several rather beautiful conversations. One was with the beautifully pregnant Rose our choir leader. She told me that she and her husband often see me walking around with Molly. It is an image that makes them both smile. Sometimes stopping to talk, but often just passing by, as I spend my days “farting around” as Kurt Vonneghut described it. It was a beautiful evening singing that night, as we prepare for a concert. I had another beautiful conversation with Alex the Flower man who was concerned about a mutual friend. I passed on his concern and the friend was grateful for this. I had several delightful conversations with people going through their ordinary lives that day. It reminded me of the following beautiful words of Walt Whitman:

“I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing,
Laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm
Ever so lightly around his or her neck for a moment,
What is this
Then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.”

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, Laughing flesh is certainly enough to awaken my soul. All this beauty whether natural or human has awakened my soul to act in more loving and open ways and thus pour out my own love on the world in which I live and breathe and move and have my being. It is a powerful antidote to the ugliness and violence that is going on in this our shared world too. Those forces that separate person from person and fails to recognise our shared humanity. It is easy to get caught up in the Hobbesian nightmare. The truth is that this world is both beautiful and ugly. The problem comes from when we fail to see and be moved by beauty and become overwhelmed by the ugly destructiveness that is part of life. Our souls will be inspired to act by something, better it be beauty.

On Tuesday morning Nick posted a video a blizzard of Cherry Blossom blowing up in the wind and it and all that I had experienced in the last couple of days inspired me to begin to write. I found myself caught up in the “Creative Interchange”. It reminded me of some wisdom from Matthew Fox:

“The universe is in the habit of making beauty. There are flowers and songs, snowflakes and smiles, acts of great courage, laughter between friends, a job well done, the smell of fresh baked bread. Beauty is everywhere”

I had enjoyed the smell of fresh baked goods that morning as I walked into Altrincham. It reminded me of Molly and her sniffing all the new life this spring. Her nose seems more alive as each day passes, it energises her. As J. Ruth Gendler claims “Beauty is an energy, not an image, and that energy can go anywhere; that energy takes on an image, a form, many images, many forms.” Beauty energises and awakens the soul to act; beauty awakens the soul of me in so many indescribable ways and it compels me to act in such a way as to pour out that beauty within on to all I engage with.



Beauty inspired Oliver to write the other day while sitting in the garden; it inspired him to give back to the world, despite experiencing current suffering and being taken back to a place of pain, grief and guilt. The beauty of the blossom blizzard inspired his soul to act.

Beauty manifests itself in so many ways in the world in which we live and breathe and move. It awakens all our senses and thus feeds and nourishes our souls; it awakens our souls and it fills our hearts to overflowing. We not only drink from the well of beauty, we also fill it too. Beauty truly is about the heart, about filling the heart to overflowing. In "Beauty: The Invisible Embrace" John O’Donohue wrote:

"The heart is the place where beauty arrives; here is where it can be felt, recognized and shared. If there was no heart, beauty could never reach us. Through the heart, beauty can pervade every cell of the body and fill us. To use a word that feels like it sounds: this is the thrill of beauty through us. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel the absence of beauty in our lives; we have allowed the prism to become dull and darkened; though the light is near, it cannot enter to have its inlay of beauty diffused. Sometimes absence is merely arrested appearance. Compassion and attention keep the prism clear so that beauty may illuminate our life. Prayer of course is the supreme way we lift our limited selves towards the light, and ask it to shine into us. "

Beauty not only awakens the soul, but also fills the heart to overflowing, it certainly compels me to pour my heart out on the world in loving ways. In fact perhaps true beauty, certainly in a human sense, is to act morally. As John O’Donohue has pointed out Plato believed that Love was born of beauty and that it tapped into our basic human drive and desire for Good, that it was not a private or self-indulgent act of pleasure and that “the ability to love beauty has created all the good things that exist for gods and men’. He quotes Pseudo Dionysius the Aeropagite who said, "For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community. Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty. And there it is ahead of all as…the Beloved…toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being."

It is beauty that awakens our souls and inspires us to act lovingly in the world, to pour out our love on the world. How do we do this you may well ask? Well, I believe it begins with our neighbour the very people we interact with on a daily basis. As it has with me once again these last few days

It brings to my mind a passage from Matthew’s Gospel (Ch 26 vv 6-13). It is a much debated primarily because it has been used by some as a justification for tolerating poverty. I believe that to focus on this is to fail to recognise the central message of Matthews Gospel, the abundant blessing of love.

6 Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper,* 7a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. 8But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, ‘Why this waste? 9For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.’10But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, ‘Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. 11For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. 12By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. 13Truly I tell you, wherever this good news* is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’

The power in this story is in its recognition of abundant love. The woman loves and cares for Jesus. She anoints him with oil because she loves him dearly. It truly is an act of loving, nay gracious abandonment. This is in complete contrast to the grumpy disciples who are definitely of the glass half empty brigade. At least they are consistent though as they appear this way throughout the Gospels. The woman though is overflowing with love and wants to anoint those she loves with this. This is beauty in action. This is a soul awakened by beauty and inspired to act lovingly. Her heart is over flowing with love and she wants to pour out this love onto Jesus who will soon no longer be with her or the disciples.

Just as Oliver’s poem did; just as Nick’s video did; just as Rose’s conversation did; just as Alex asking about a friend did; just as Molly sniffing around as the pink blossom blew did; just as we all can do. We can all pour out this attentive love on one another and all life. We can offer care and attention to each and everyone around us. In so doing we will help create beauty all around us. All we need to do is pay attention open our hearts to beauty and act from it.

This brings to mind the following little anecdote by William McNamara:

“I once lived near a mansion where only one of the many gardeners employed had succeeded with every one of the roses. I asked him the secret of his success. He told me that the other gardeners treated all the roses not unwisely, but too generally. They treated them all in precisely the same way; whereas he himself watched each rosebush separately, and followed out for each plant its special need for soil, manure, sun, air, water, support and shelter.”

Beauty is all around us. We are surrounded by it. If we open ourselves to it, it will fill our hearts, awaken our souls and lead us to act lovingly and morally. This is beauty in action. If we create beauty with our own hands we will touch each individual soul we meet and they will grow and flower to their own full potential. We are here to enjoy the beauty that we are surrounded by and to pour out the beauty that lays within us and thus bring it to fruition in the world around us.

As Desmond Tutu has said:

“We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of a sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew…Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful…and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.”

Let beauty awake for beauty's sake. Awake from slumber and awake from dreams. Let beauty awake from deep within us, Let beauty pour from us and be lavished upon our world.

May we be caught up in the blizzard of beauty, may we be blown in such a wind.

Please find below a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

Choose Life: Whatever Path You Follow

I woke up on Monday to two beautiful emails from the daughters of Alan Hardman whose ashes had been scattered in the Garden of Remembrance the day before. Just simple emails of thanks. They didn’t have to do so, but it was rather touching that they decided to. I stepped into the day, began my journey, with thoughts for the day and week ahead. I could have chosen to focus on work that day, but instead I chose friendship, some of which could have been named pastoral work. After taking Molly for a long walk. I went to see Helen Redhead at her mums. She was there with her powerlifting trainer Jason, a larger than life character in every sense. Helen had recently taken the courageous decision to start a new life in Kent, in order to primarily pursue her sport of “Power Lifting”. She had been in Manchester competing in the “British Powerlifting Union Championship” and had won her age group setting two British records. Helen had followed her bliss, took the courageous step to try something new in life. Yes, it had in some ways been birthed in tragedy, following the death of Andrea, but she had chosen to go down a new road and it was wonderful to see her choosing life. I was glad I was able to celebrate with her. She will be back on 18th of July to compete in Manchester, I plan to go along and cheer her on. I didn’t stay too long as I had to get home, to take Molly for a walk and do some work before heading to Stockport cemetery to attend the funeral of another friend John, who had died tragically. It was a moving but deeply sad service. I saw many friends who I have known over the years and remembered times we had shared together. One thing I have noticed about myself is that I am very quiet at funerals I am not involved in. I think some people take this the wrong way, but I think it is just a mark of respect. As I was driving home I remembered something I used to say to John when he was going through a bad time following the end of a relationship. I said to him to not see it as the end, but as a new possibility, “that all bets are open”. It helped him at the time and he would often say it back to me “All bets are open.” Yes, all things are possible, there is always time to change. Sadly, this is no longer the case for John.

My friends Martin and Jade weren’t working on Monday and had taken Molly for a few hours. I had just changed and was about to go and collect her when my phone rang. It actually rang three times, but it was the first phonecall that I would like to share about. It was a young man, at a similar age and crossroads as John was when I first met him. The young man was suffering with fear and uncertainty, unsure about life and which direction to go in. I listened for a while and then I told him about John. I told him that “All bets are open”. That he was free to choose whatever direction he wished. I also told him whatever choice he made mistakes would happen, things would go wrong, may even be a disaster. That this was ok and that he would be ok provided he could learn from the mistakes. He was about to go on holiday for two weeks and then would be returning to begin his next journey. I told him to enjoy himself and then I quoted good old Moses, I said choose life. I even gave him the full Deutronomy 30 v 19 quote:

19I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

I had moved outside in the gardens at the chapel by this time. I was stood by the wind telephone. I was going to sit there for a bit and be quiet before going to pick Molly up. I was thinking about a few souls that have been lost in recent times. I was stood in front of it by now and was looking directly at it while talking to the young man, when I noticed something that broke my heart, the phone wasn’t there. Someone had ripped it from its bracket. This has happened once before. This time though they had not only damaged it, they had taken the old style phone away. I finished my phone call and then just sat down and wept for a while. I then took a picture and shared about it on social media, before going to collect Molly. I stayed for a while at Marti’s had tea and chocolate hobnobs and then we went for a walk. When I returned, I checked out my phone. My goodness me I was overwhelmed by the loving response form so many people. So much loving support and some anger. By the end of the evening different friends had gone to extra lengths and three new versions of the phone had been ordered. Tow have already been delivered to two different friends and another soon will be. So a replacement will be fitted in the next few days, with two spares if this happens again.

The phone means a lot to so many people in the community, as do the gardens at the chapel and myself. So many people have sat in that space and connected with those they have lost. It seems that soon the lines will be open again.

I went to bed that night touched by so many people I know, by their loving care and friendship; touched by how people will go out of their way at times; touched by how in general people choose to making loving decisions, decisions that are primarily about life. I also smiled as I found I had done the same I had chosen life, in all its joy and suffering, in all it’s blessings and curses. I also thought of John and those words “All bets are open”.

It seems a bit of no brainer to choose life, who wouldn’t? Well sometimes we do choose to stay in fear and avoid life. Whenever we turn from our God given gifts or fail to live authentically I suspect we are refusing life. Not that we should give ourselves too hard a time for this, as we can always turn back to life again; we can turn back down the path of life again. No one lives perfectly without ever being held back from fear.

To choose life is to accept life in all its joys and troubles. At John’s funeral there were many people who have courageously come through difficult challenges, two who have recently come through severe and life threatening forms of cancer. They carry their scars, both physical and emotional, but they were there and they were choosing life in every sense. One asked me if I was going to the wake afterwards, I said not. I often prefer not to. They were going, but primarily to ensure that John’s ex-partner was ok. Another decision based on love and care, despite their own suffering.

Choosing or refusing Life is a decision that we all make. It is not always obvious which one to take; fear in its many forms can often paralyse us in our decisions. So much so that we make no decision and thus do not choose life at all. Like the young man I was talking to on Monday, there is a fear that we could get it wrong, that “all bets are not open”, “That all bets are in actual fact closed.”

This brought to my mind the often misunderstood, misquoted and even mistitled classic poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.

I will share it with you:

"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The poem is a gentle satire on indecisiveness. It is not primarily a celebration of rugged individualism and courageously striding on without fear, that many believe it was written for. This is why it is truly an every person poem, as I am sure we can all relate to this fear we feel when faced with such decisions. Frost himself said of the poem “ I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.” The friend was Edward Thomas who Frost had sent the poem to privately in a small envelope, under the title “Two Roads”. Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside, Thomas would torturing himself over the decisions to turn one way or another, or not. Frost equated this indecisiveness with the romantic predisposi­tion for “crying over what might have been.” Frost understood that we all feel this fear, that we don’t always choose life and not to be too hard on ourselves for doing so. He believed that his friend would take the poem as a gen­tle joke and would respond and protest against Frost’s teasing. It seems that he didn’t see the joke initially at least and Frost had to direct him back to his point.

Whatever path we choose it will not be smooth, it will be full of challenges, full of life and if we find it is not the right move, we can always change direction. It is ok to give up sometimes and start all over again. This surely is choosing life.

There will always be some indecisions in life, fear we will get it wrong. The truth is that we will get things wrong. Every day I say or do something, or fail to do or say something I should have. This though does not cause paralysis. Every day we have to make decisions about little things and sometimes monumental things. In so doing we choose life.

To choose life requires discernment. Discernment formed from the Latin word “discernere”, which means to separate, to distinguish, to sort out. Just think of prospectors panning for gold or sifting through the rocks and dirt in search of gem stones. They are separating, they are sorting through the muck for the jewels, they are distinguishing, they are discerning. Discernment is about choosing life.

Discernment is the key to making those wise choices. We need to discover what is of value and what needs to be discarded in our minds. We need to discard the dirt and muck to uncover the gold, the gems, to have clarity of thought, so that we can “choose life”. This is not easy, especially when we think of all that information that swims around in our lives and our consciousness; information like an enormous shoal of fish swimming round and round aimlessly in a small tank and not really going anywhere. Our lives, our heads are just so full of stuff. How do we discern what is healthy, what is right? Well we need silence, we need time away from all this information and all these things that pull us in so many directions. We need time to be still, time to be silent, time to connect to our bodies and our breathing; time to hear that still small voice of calm. A voice less than a whisper, but somehow more than silence. The voice of love, the voice of life, the voice that overcomes fear. The voice of God within.

We need to awaken to our true consciousness in order to make those sane and sensible decisions about life. We need to learn to separate those things that are of value and those that are not. We need to do this in order to hear that voice, that is less than whisper but that is somehow more than silence; that voice that has spoken down the centuries, to those who had ears that could hear it; the voice that spoke to the people of Israel and said “I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse. Therefore choose life”

The choices we make matter. It matters what we are and what we do. I do not think that God chooses this for us. Yes, God offers guidance, “The Lure of Divine Love” but it is up to us to choose the path that we follow. Remembering always that we can always change direction if we find that the road we are on is not one of life.

Let‘s choose life, by choosing the road in front of us. The road of love and the road that will bless all our lives. It won’t be pain free there will be joy and suffering, but above all there will be life.

Please find below a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

Everything Is Waiting For You: The Conversational Nature of Reality

“Everything is Waiting for You” by David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

I was recently interviewed by Ken Garrity on Radio Altrincham. He likes to talk to different personalities in the town. It seems I am one of them. I am certainly someone who spends half his life with people in the town, engaged in conversation. I suspect that half of ministry is about conversation in one form or another, some might say it is the whole of it. That is of course if you understand conversation as being more than merely talking and listening. I shared very openly with Ken, perhaps far more than he expected me to. So much so that he himself shared something very deep and personal, which he had only ever told his wife about before. It was a spiritual experience he once had. We had a great conversation. Somewhere in that space we met one another and the listeners to the station certainly met us. Not in the way either of us expected and no doubt not way the listeners were expecting too. That of course is the beautiful power of conversation, it is far more than the sum of its parts and leads to who knows where.

The next morning I went for a walk around Dunham Massey, I had awoken in great spirits and felt deeply connected to everything, it felt like the whole of life was speaking to me, that I was in deep conversation with everything. I don’t believe I have ever felt a deeper sense of connection. I was very much engaged in what David Whyte has called “The conversational nature of reality”. I returned home in good spirits looking forward to the day ahead. It was about 9am and as I passed the chapel gardens I noticed the telephone hanging from “The Wind telephone”. I took a closer look and realised it had been vandalised. I was quite upset by this. I know that the emotion wasn’t just about the damage to the phone, but a few other things floating around in my psyche. During our interview I had been talking about “The Wind Telephone” with Ken and the centrality of grief in my ministerial journey.

There has been a lovely response to what has happened in the wider community and the “Wind Telephone” will soon be repaired. The connection has not been severed, in fact if anything it has helped in engaging in conversations about love and loss. It has helped folk engage in those courageous conversations, the ones that are often difficult to have. I have noticed in the last few days how much every conversations I have had appears to have deepened in meaning. I don’t just mean the spoken word here by the way, I also mean the conversation with life and what I believe is at the core of life, what I call God.

The poet philosopher and former marine zoologist David Whyte sees our lives as focused on what he calls "the great conversation" we have with ourselves and the great mysteries of life which surround us. He calls this “the conversational nature of reality.” Like Whyte I have come to believe that the essence of any real conversation is attention. It is about paying attention to that space where we meet life and life meets us, I suspect that it is in this space that God truly comes to life, or at least this is what my experiences teach me.

The other day I listened to a wonderful conversation between David Whyte and my favourite interviewer Krista Tippett, I have listened to it before. It is taken from “On Being” and was first broadcast in April 2016. In it he describes his early career as a marine zoologist, and how scientific language grew inadequate to describe his experiences in the Galapagos Islands. Whyte said, “In Galapagos, I began to realize that because I was in deeply attentive states, hour after hour, watching animals and birds and landscapes—and that’s all I did for almost two years—I began to realize that my identity … actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself—and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you start to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.”

Later in the interview he describes the “Great Conversation” as finding this meeting point between self and other, stating that he realised that in fact reality lies “at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.” And that It is incumbent upon people, then, to stop “abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience” and “hold the conversation at that frontier level.” He says that we must enter into what he calls “the conversational nature of reality.”

The anthem of Whyte’s conversational nature of reality is his poem “Everything Is Waiting for You.”, which we heard earlier. Here he encourages us to “feel the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice.” He insists that the frontier of this profound reality of the world can be and is found in “the intimacy of your surroundings,” in “the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom.” The key is in this line. That, “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” That it is about being alive to everything and allowing everything to be alive to you. This is more than just being mindful, it is about being in conversation with everything and everything with you, in fact in you.

He makes a profound statement that humans are the only thing in creation that doesn’t want to be itself, that tries not to be itself and that the key is to become ourselves and this is done through conversation, with everything. Everything is waiting for us, waiting for us to truly become all that we were born to be. The problem for so many of us is that we reject ourselves, that we believe there is something fundamentality wrong with us. Nothing else in life feels, thinks and acts like this, only humans. It is only we who refuse to engage in the conversation. Everything is waiting for us.

For Whyte this began during his transformative experience in the Galapagos. Nature is one gateway into the conversation with reality, which of course we are all a part of, sadly at times we try to deny this. The problem we humans have often struggled with is that we have felt a part from, separate from nature.

Everything is waiting for us.

Whye points out that the conversation takes place in and through everything, even the seemingly mundane. In this poem he invokes the everyday familiarity of stairs, doors, phones, kettles, and cooking pots and he ends by harking back to nature ending with these amazing words: “All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”

He ends by inviting us back to engage in the conversation, to not feel alone and alienated telling us that our true calling is simply waiting for us, it is waiting for us to simply engage. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

Everything is waiting for us.

I enjoyed a wonderful experience of this earlier this week. In deep conversation, walking and talking with a friend. Also during the “Singing Meditation” on Tuesday evening in the chapel gardens, when through getting lost in joy singing with others, in blending voices and sitting out in nature I felt fully engaged in the conversational nature of everything.

The next morning I woke very early and met a friend and walked down to Dunham Massey. It was wonderful to move through everything, the beautiful countryside, for a couple of hours, with virtually no one else about. We were powerfully alert, alive to everything and it seemed that everything was alive in us. We were in deep conversation with one another, but more than that with everything that we moved through. There wasn’t a prescribed plan we just kept moving, down different paths, some barely trodden, in many directions. We talked about life, our own and others, some real depth philosophy, psychology, theology and a whole lot more. It felt like we were comfortably ourselves, somewhere in that space, more came alive. At the same time we fully engaged with the sights, sounds, smells, noise and feel of everything. The ground at our feet had a particularly profound effect it seems. We even had time to bump into one or two folk we knew and continue the conversation.

Wednesday morning was one of those conversations that you never want to stop, well it doesn’t have to stop, it will continue, we just had work commitments that morning. It was though a wonderful example of the “conversational nature of reality” we met one another, ourselves, life and that which is the core of life as we walked and talked as we got lost in Dunham Massey.

Everything is waiting for you. Everything is waiting for all of us. The conversation is reality. The beauty and profound nature of reality is everywhere, in everything, even the kettle boiling as you make that cup of tea for a guest. All we have to do is bring our attentiveness to the frontier between self and the rest of creation, and then enter into conversation with it. We must come out of abstraction and back into the world again as Whyte did when he left the Galapagos island and began his real work.



The spiritual life is about living more spiritually alive. It is about increasing our sensitivity to life itself. It is about being increasingly affected and then becoming more effective in life. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”



I have come to understand that at its core the spiritual life is about relationships; relationships with life, with each other, with ourselves and with God, whatever we understand God to be. And how do relationships develop? Well through conversation, through sharing ourselves with each other, not by losing ourselves, but becoming ourselves through our conversations with the other, lower and upper case. We relate through conversation and thus we grow spiritually, through relationship. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

If life has taught me anything it is that it is all about relationships, everything that really matters is about relationships. The key to all relationships is conversation, of some kind, it is about being alive and alert in spiritually intimate ways.

We have to believe we belong here of course, that we do not reject our humanity. Everything is waiting for us. More than that everything needs us to engage in the conversation of life. Life needs all of us. Everything is waiting for us.

Life is all about relationships; the spiritual life is all about relationships. Relationships with life, with each other, with ourselves and with God, whatever we understand God to be. And how do relationships develop? Well through conversation, through sharing ourselves with each other, not by losing ourselves, but becoming ourselves through our conversations with the other, lower and upper case. We relate through conversation and thus we grow spiritually, through relationship.

Everything is waiting for us.

So I invite you to join with me in the conversational nature of reality. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

Everything is waiting for us.

Below is a video devotion based 

on the material in this "blogspot"

The Wind Telephone: Connecting in Love and Loss

The cherry blossom is falling around us. I saw a car covered in it the other day, my car was too I noticed as I left for home the other evening. There is beautiful pink snow all around the grounds at the chapel, it will soon be gone. The cherry blossom does not cling on, it knows it must let go for new life to follow. For we human is it not so simple. We hold on to life, we hold on to our lives and we hold on to one another. We hold on to love that we have shared with those we have loved and lost. This is grief, the price we pay for love.

The beauty of the cherry blossom causes me some sadness, it makes me grieve, and yet I love the cherry blossom. That said part of its beauty comes in the fact that it only lasts for about a month and then it falls and it is gone. Even though I know it will come again, when it goes, my heart aches for the loss. This is grief.

Grief is about love and it is about the loss of someone or something that we love or have loved. This is why grief comes in so many forms, we lose so much in life. The most aching grief, of course, is caused by the death of those we love so dearly. The more we love them, the greater the grief. Grief of course is not something that you can just let go of, I am not so sure you ever should. We should hold that love close to our hearts. Yes, when someone we love dies, an aspect of them always remains in our hearts, that said when we lose someone we love we also lose a piece of our hearts.

I host a fortnightly grief group on zoom. We used to meet in person, but ever since the pandemic hit we have been unable to do so. The group is needed by those who join us. It helps us feel less alone and isolated in our grief. There is so much grief around at this time. I am sure we have all lost someone we love over the last year and none of us have been able to mark the loss and grieve as we would normally do. We have also been unable to live our lives as we would normally do, there is so much grief in this too. Grief is everywhere. That said if we had not done so how much more death and loss would there have been. We only need to look at India now to see the horror that could have happened had our health service become overwhelmed. I grieve so much for the suffering all around, it breaks my heart.

I have noticed that something that grieving people share in common is this need to still communicate in some way with those that they have lost. People go to places that are special to them and talk, it is common, but not something folk will share publicly. These one way conversations continue on and on. It is a way to keep the love shared alive, even after a loved one has gone.

I recently learnt of a powerful and beautiful example of this in Japan. When the garden designer Sasaki lost his beloved cousin in 2010, he found a unique way to come to terms with his grief, to call his loved one by telephone. He built a white telephone booth, in the style of the old red ones that were all over this county - I don’t know if you have noticed but in the countryside those old boxes often host defibrillators, bringing life to those who might lose theirs - Sasaki placed the phonebox on his hilltop garden. In it was an old Bakelite dial phone, unconnected to any earthly telecom system, his words were spoken to the wind, carried off like prayer flags, blowing in the wind. He did this to keep the memory of his cousin alive, by calling him and speaking to him regularly. As he told the Japanese public broadcasting network NHK, “Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.” He called it “The Wind Telephone”

“The Wind Telephone” was build on the outskirts of Otsuchi a small coastal town in northern Japan. As Sasaki was finishing his project the region was hit by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake on 11^th March 2011. Even though the quake was off the coast and didn't inflict direct damage, it did lead to gigantic tsunamis and Otsuchi was hit by 30 foot high waves, destroying the town and killing one in ten of the 16.000 inhabitants.

Soon “The Wind Telephone” became a place of solace for thousands, it is thought that over 10,000 people visited the site in the next three years, to speak to their loved ones, that were now lost. Some of the dead were never found. It was not only the lost to the Tsunami whose loved ones came, others joined the pilgrimage too, including those who had lost folk to suicide, accidents and in other tragic ways. Many media outlets have told the story and some of the conversations on “The Wind Telephone” have been recorded. If you listen to them you will hear tears and laughter and deep conversations, a kind of unanswered confessional where loved ones speak their hearts into the wind, where their loved one can perhaps hear without judgement. There are voices crying out regret, the pain of loss, despair, guilt, frustration, the search for strength, hope, and the will to carry on without the loved one. Beautiful cries of the human heart.

It seems that there are versions of the “Wind Phone” in other parts of the world. In Oakland California one was constructed by Jordan Stern who in February 2017 constructed one to commemorate the 36 people who died in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire, one of which was his friend. This “Wind Phone” was created, according to the artist to comfort "a field of people grieving in Oakland".

In August 2017 an anonymous art collective in Dublin, Ireland named Altruchas build a “Wind Phone” on “Two Rock Mountain”. It was built without permission and from salvaged materials. Sadly it was destroyed only two weeks after its construction, there were many people who did not like the project.

Another replica red phone box was created by Tomohiko and Kazuko Katsuna. They named it “Phone of the Sea Breeze”. It was built in memory of one of Kazuko's students, an 18-year-old woman who took her own life in 2009.

In January 2020 another temporary “Wind Phone” was created in Provincetown Massachusetts, by an artistic collective. Whilst another was created in October 2020 in California by Susan Vetrone and sculptor Steve Reed. it was constructed in memory of Vetrones mother who had recently died.

Another “Wind Phone was created in response to the loss of life due to the Covid 19 pandemic. In March this year an artist who has remained anonymous built one on the Aspen mountains of Colorado. The artist has remained anonymous because it is forbidden to build shrines in US national forests. That said t has remained as an outlet for people mourning deaths caused by the pandemic.

I wonder how many more of these will be built in the coming months and years. I think we will need them. I am considering writing to the Prime Minister again or perhaps Andy Burnam the Mayor of Manchester, or even the local authority. I think we will need them, or something like them. We decided during our last grief group that Wythenshawe park would be an ideal venue, as one of our number goes there often to talk to lost son. Maybe I will contact the great British sculptor Anthony Gormley, perhaps he could construct them up and down the land. A place where can go individually and or collectively to grieve, to cry out in anguish to connect to live through our grief, to hold on to the love lost and to live our lives. We need to find ways to express our collective grief if we are to rebuild again, I don’t just mean our material lives, but our emotional, mental and spiritual lives too. Our souls are crying out. Yes, we may well be coming back to normality, but there is so much grief in this land and every land and people are still caught up in the horror of all this, just look at India right now.

We need to find ways to connect, to heal, to express our lost love, something that we have been unable to do for too long and there will be a price to pay if we do not. I don’t just mean for this generation but for the generations to come as well.

All of us belong to the largest community on God’s sweet earth, the community of grievers. Grief is the price we pay for love, it is a price worth paying, for what is life without love? It is nothing, it is meaningless, just an empty vessel. The only way to escape grief is to totally armour your heart and deny love. Now who would want to do that, to live without love, to live the life of a zombie?

When we lose someone that we love, it changes us forever. Life will never be quite the same again. We do not rise above the pain of grief, we cannot pretend that it is not there, we don’t simply get over it. What happens is that we are changed by it and as a result our hearts are enlarged by it and we grow as human beings, if the love has truly been realised. You see grief is really about transformation, rather than transcendence, by the way this is the true nature purpose of religion. Grief is not an attempt to explain the loss or even understand some meaning locked into what happened. Instead, it seems to me that grief is more about finding meaning in the absence of an explanation.

How do we create meaning from the loss of the last year or more? That is not an easy question to answer. Well perhaps it begins by creating space for us all to grieve. Perhaps something like these “Wind Telephones” is one way, I am sure there are many others. Perhaps communities like ours can become that kind of space. Perhaps this something for us all to think about, perhaps this is something we can focus on in the months and years ahead, perhaps we could become a space where folk can come and find solace in their loss and grief a place where they can share and express their love.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts and feelings.

It is up to us, it is up to all of us.

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.

 A video devotion based on the material shared in this "blogspot"