World Soil Day

“’Do you pray?’ a good friend asked me recently. ‘I just wondered where you get your hope from?’ It’s a bit of an odd question to ask someone who doesn’t believe in God…

‘I don’t pray in the way that I grew up praying but I suppose I do pray,’ I tell my friend. To sow, plant, harvest and eat, for me, is an act of worship. I kneel to the ground and bow down to the forces and rhythms of the natural world. I honour them with my reverence and offer them my trust. I trust that the cycles will turn and that, even when they don’t conform to my wants or perform as I expect, there is a lesson to be learned from it. It is prayer to move in step with the seasons as they turn and with the weather as it changes, especially in these dark times of the year when memories of light and warmth and verdant growth are hard to conjure. It is prayer to remember and believe that they will return again. It is prayer to trust in the profundity of small acts – of growing and gardening and loving and feeding – and to trust that they are happening in tandem with the many other small acts of wholehearted people, and that they will, and do, add up to something meaningful.

I trust where I sit as being infinitesimal within the great elemental shifts across our planet, a planet that sits within a universe amongst universes, under a sun and moon amongst many suns and moons. I sit within this knowledge and believe it gives my modest acts more meaning, not less. That this knowing shows my existence to be both miraculous and profoundly unremarkable. From this understanding, I feel able to participate in these great flows of energy that move us all to worship at the altar of the forces of nature. So yes, I suppose I do pray. Growing plants is how I pray.”

From Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong by Claire Ratinon

“Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edith Cavell (1865 – 1915), nurse executed for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium, born on this day

“Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it.”

From The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

“My God, so gently life begins again today,
as yesterday and so many times before.
Like these butterflies, like these laborers,
like these sun devouring cicadas
and these blackbirds hidden in the cold dark leaves,
let me, oh my God, continue to live my life
as simply as possible.”

Francis Jammes, French poet (1868 – 1938), born on this day

“”Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day… The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, 101.7b-8a

“Live each day as if it were your last” is a cliché. Plenty say it, few actually do it. How reasonable would that be anyway? Surely Seneca isn’t saying to foresake laws and considerations – to find some orgy to join because the world is ending.
A better analogy would be a soldier about to leave on deployment. Not knowing whether they’ll return or not, what do they do?
They get their affairs in order. They handle their business. They tell their children or their family that they love them. They don’t have time for quarrelling or petty matters. And then in the morning they are ready to go – hoping to come back in one piece but prepared for the possibility that they might not.
Let us live today that same way.”

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Saint Andrew’s Day

“Clear as the endless ecstasy of stars
That mount for ever on an intense air;
Or running pools, of water cold and rare,
In chiselled gorges deep amid the scaurs,
So still, the bright dawn were their best device,
Yet like a thought that has no end they flow;
Or Venus, when her white unearthly glow
Sharpens like awe on skies as green as ice:

To such a clearness love is come at last,
Not disembodied, transubstantiate,
But substance and its essence now are one;
And love informs, yet is the form create.
No false gods now, the images o’ercast,
We are love’s body, or we are undone.”

Real Presence by Nan Shepherd (1893 – 1981), poet of the Cairngorms

International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale”

Refaat Alareer (1979 – 2023), Palestinian poet, killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza

“To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.”

The Divine Image by William Blake (1757 – 1827), poet and visual artist, born on this day

“Every particle of the world is a mirror,
In each atom lies the blazing light
of a thousand suns.
Cleave the heart of a raindrop,
a hundred pure oceans will flow forth.
Look closely at a grain of sand,
The seed of a thousand beings can be seen.
The foot of an ant is larger than an elephant;
In essence, a drop of water
is no different than the Nile.
In the heart of a barley-corn
lies the fruit of a hundred harvests;
Within the pulp of a millet seed
an entire universe can be found.
In the wing of a fly, an ocean of wonder;
In the pupil of the eye, an endless heaven.
Though the inner chamber of the heart is small,
the Lord of both worlds
gladly makes his home there.”

Mahmud Shabestari (c. 1250 – 1320), Persian Sufi master

“The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God’s government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened.”

Ellen G. White (1827 – 1915), co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, born on this day