…and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
Following my last post in which I protested my extreme aversion to “time”, you would be well within your rights to think it an odd thing that I love the seasons, I love the sense of routine.
This is a realisation that I have come to accept only recently, indeed I used to protest against accusations of it from DR, but he clearly saw a different version of myself from the one I did – which would explain why he believed I was worth staying with for so long! The irony and idiosyncrasy of liking one but seemingly not the other are not lost on me, nor too the fact that I have come to realise that DR was right – as galling as it is to admit!
I suspect it lies in the organic, the authentic nature of one over the other – seasons are natural which will come and go and pass through, unconstrained by anything but their own channels of weather and guided by natural processes whereas hours and “time” are artificial constructs often set against the natural processes, set to impose control and order regardless of the native flow. I think of a river, having started as a small brook in the hills and growing into a stream as its channels broaden and its volume increases and as a river constrained mostly by its banks, which it has formed over innumerous seasons of rain and sun, of rising and falling levels. I think of the deep flows of slow water speeding up as it reaches more shallow stretches and of eddies forming in its swirling bends as its route changes, guided by the natural forms of the terrain through which it flows on its way down to the sea. Waterfalls and rapids punctuate its ways as it proceeds with its fish and creatures free to move up or down as their need dictates – and then there is a dam! The water is stopped and becomes trapped and its fresh waters still abruptly and wait for a controlled release at certain points as decreed by others for their needs, the needs of the waters’ occupants unheard, unvalued, irrelevant. The still water algaefies and stagnates and loses its sweet taste and abundance as it bides its time to flow again down through the sluice and on through the channels below. For me that is seasons versus time – one in conversation and accord with its surrounds and the other quite deliberately at odds – for what use to us is water that is wild and uncontrolled and untapped and what use to us is time which is unappointed and unaccounted to be able to direct in this fashion or that. Of course, both hours and dams are vital – but it does not mean that each of us has to like or to respond to them in the same way as others might. Seasons too are not without a sense of peril – they ebb and flow through the year both bringing and taking life, providing and stealing opportunities. The pretty flowers so happy in the sunlight this morning will in time, a time quite soon, die when late Autumn brings her frosts and it will be sad when the abundance has been reduced back to bare earth but, with Winter’s rains and ice and then the returning sun and warmth of Spring, the seeds sown by the flowers of this past year will start to grow again and bring forth a new generation of wonderful possibilities and cheer as yet unimaginable. The chilly breezes and darkness of that darker time will be forgotten once again as the sun returns to our cheeks and the light to our hearts. There will be gloomy days, undoubtedly, but then there will also be some sunny days in Winter; may you hold onto those sunny days in Winter and let them help you through the colder ones!
It has been in many cases the loss of something that teaches me their value. How easily one can take things for granted when they are always just there. In the expectation of their being there one loses not just a memory of anything before but also an appreciation of their value – that is until one is faced with their abrupt loss, the removal of something so familiar one naturally struggles to imagine and to make allowance for something, anything, different. This past week has been a case in point with the storms setting in as Autumn makes herself known, cooling the nights and wetting the days and redressing the trees in a golden hue. The little seeds which I mentioned in my last post – all the way back in May – did indeed grow and they did indeed bloom and turned barren land into a riot of evolving colour through the late Spring and Summer bringing cheer to all who passed by through those heady seasons, this year so wonderfully warm and gloriously sunny. They are still bringing cheer today, a day full of golden light, full of perfect and unblemished blue skies. It is striking that this day is so very similar to those last days that DR enjoyed surrounded by the tall oaks of the Berkeley Centre at Yale, their acorns pop-popping onto the rooftops and the so-loved gardens beneath. This day is so similar to the one which followed, after a thick veil of mist which covered New Haven at dawn as if the world and Nature herself were in mourning, but then the fog lifted and the sun shone brightly once again. The same was true of last year too – perhaps this is Robert’s answer to a St Luke’s Summer, a little gift to each of us.
Personally, there has been a sense of the fog lifting for me, but only these past few weeks, unlocked by time spent with a very dear friend, himself going through unimaginable loss along with his lovely wife. For so many of you that have walked this path before me or are doing so alongside, you will know that the track is not linear and not always clear and is often far from easy. There are stretches where the land is flat and the flowers line the path and the going is smooth but then one finds oneself so quickly back on more challenging ground, sharp crags and barren terrain to negotiate as best one can. I last year posted a beautiful poem, “Only a Year”, which I had found in a delightful little Victorian book of prose and poetry sourced from all the better-known writers of the day, some still familiar to us, some temporarily lost in time until their writings might be rediscovered and their season come again. I had intended to include a poem for two years later to keep something of a pattern going – don’t worry, I do not intend to be still writing these annual posts in such a way in a decade! I consulted my trusty little tome, which like the Tardis contains so much more than one might expect for such a little pocket-sized parcel. I found none. I resorted to Google and it immediately came up with a poem which seemed perfectly to match my search parameters – seemed being the crucial word.
I read the poem and the sentiments it brought were accurate in that it spoke of the first year being occupied with shock and darkness, with the kindness and sensitivity of those around one, of the closeness to the one departed, of the cold isolation and so on. It spoke well of the absence of those comforts in the second year when folk move on but one is still caught, a sense of returning back to the world but of an aching gloomy realisation that the loss was not going to mended – an acceptance of a new unsought reality that could not be undone. It was not gloomy, it was not overwhelmingly positive either and its tone fitted well with the feelings I have carried these past 12 months or so, that I suspect so many of you have carried. A general funk and a going through of the motions with little appetite and little zest and no desire to look ahead, no real need, as in the first year, to look back but only focusing on the now. One is freed of the acuteness of the pain, at least most of the time – bouts still come most unexpectedly but are shorter and can be tidied up more quickly. However, just somehow the poem did not ring true. It was in trying to find the author that the reason for this became shockingly apparent – Google in its attempt to meet my requirement but in not finding an appropriate poem to fit just wrote its own using AI. Now it may just be my personal bias and this may not be something you would feel at all but I immediately felt slightly cheated and disappointed, slightly – ever-so-slightly – violated as if some agent that I had not given permission to was voyeuristically preying on my information. I think my main issue with it though was that a machine, a set of coding, very clever coding granted, had taken an essence of my dynamic, of me, and turned it into something which it would be impossible for it to have any emotional or psychological understanding of which, for me, destroyed any legitimacy to the piece. It was not in truth the best piece of rhyme and spoke of the tired and rather poor “poetry” one so often sees on the Tube or in ads where companies are attempting to portray a cultured or artistic credibility but falling short – because their intention is wrong and is so devoid of true meaning (and often structure!) and thus fails to connect. It is all lazy pastiche. It made me think about the essence of poetry and why it is important and in turn to the nature of our relationships with one another – for I believe there is a direct link between both, for poetry is in essence a desire to communicate a message from one person to another (even if it is just for the writer themselves), to share something of the existential, the emotional, the spiritual and to capture something of the importance of the subject, of their focus, and to share it. For each to have value they have to have authenticity and they have to come from the heart with all our imperfections – indeed because of our imperfections. Good poetry and good relationships do not just receive data and process them into a different format but take in an element of the world around them and mould them into something new, mixed with their own beings and then shared between writer and reader, shared between one friend and another, as a crucial and real point of connection. Sometimes, often, messy and complex and multi-layered and ephemeral in their meaning and their significance for poetry, as friendships, wax and wane in their relevance as our lives move forward and the world around us evolves. Poetry – and I guess this is my main issue with the poem issued by Google AI – allows us a tiny opening of a window into the emotions and thoughts of the writer at that point in time to create a shared moment together out of time and out of the limitations of our physicality, utterly unique in that moment and impossible to replicate or repeat, which is what makes them truly unique, truly precious. Like a favourite book one reads repeatedly through one’s life and revisits like an old friend, one’s reading of it and interpretation is different each time, the characters one relates to and sympathises with alter as our own lives alter and our understanding of the dynamics and sensitivities does too. As so, a poem one reads in childhood takes on a new hue in our twenties and again in middle age and so forth, but it is given legitimacy by the hand that wrote it just as much as the eyes that read it. As with so much produced by AI, this is where it falls short – it is devoid of the humanity and all the messy complexity which goes along with that humanity.
In an age when we expect everything to be on demand at a moment’s notice, when we want our latest series of this or that available for binge-watching immediately and all foods available all year (even if they do not taste as they ought and we are starved of the excitement of waiting for them in their due season), a propensity of the church to make every day a feast day instead of delighting in DR's favourite - ordinary time with a side of expectation for the holidays to come, news 24/7 and anything bought to be delivered within the day, within the hour, and when AI is seen as the answer to so much (and in truth it may well be in some areas – medicine, research… but only to a point!), it is interesting that there is a growing sense of a craving for authenticity and of connection. Modernity and progress have led to isolation and redundancy for so many but there are signs of a movement of re-engagement and of seeking purpose. One of the great challenges for our age will undoubtedly be how to find a balance between the two very contrasting sides, to know and to be able to judge wisely and healthily how far to go – but let us hope that these decisions are primarily led and guided by human connections and not an AI generated version of the same, for there is a fundamental difference. One has soul, the other not.
At a particular time of greatly-imposed isolation, brought about in an attempt to keep people safe from the pandemic, DR and I – as did so many of you – attempted to do what little we could to mitigate and reduce the feeling of this for as many as possible. Originally “two or three of our community”, but then obviously many more – including you! We could not have been more pleased that our films brought so much cheer to so many, just as they brought so much cheer to us, and we hoped very much to share not just the scriptures and a little daily offering but also fascinating facts about our beautiful world and some of the fascinating characters we have all shared it with through the ages. We could not have known what joys lay ahead of connections, so many connections, with new friends from all over. In recent years it has been increasingly difficult to access and to navigate these films through Youtube – which to our mind, quite unlike social media, has been a spectacular and responsible platform for connection and of education for the planet, which is why we chose to broadcast on it. Understanding that folk had been experiencing problems I have been working on what I hope very much might be a solution to many of the issues – I have created a new website: www.gardencongregation.org . Without the help, encouragement and support of two wonderful friends, Matt Morse – who assisted me with making my vision for the designs and layout come into being so beautifully – and Matt Webb – who constructed the site and brought it into being, it could never have been born and I am so grateful to them, through some very challenging times especially and their patience and sensitivity has been crucial, their sense of fun and enthusiasm so appreciated. You will see from the site how truly gifted and talented they both are in their own fields in making my vision a reality!
I so hope that you will enjoy the site and that you will find it much easier to navigate the films and various other items which are available already and which I have planned for the future – this I am seeing very much as “phase 1” with more to come as the seasons go forward. It is my hope that, much as my vision for the broadcasts, that this site will prove to be not just an easy-to-use resource of sorts for those seeking to join together in one place but also as a new home for all members of the Garden Congregation.
In other exciting news, there is to be a new live recording released of the “Angels Unawares” oratorio by DR and James MacMillan and performed by Harry Christophers and his Sixteen from its World Premiere at the Cadogan Hall in June, which you may well have attended, and the score of “The Call of Isaiah” by DR and the fabulously-talented Millicent B Jones is set to be published soon by Stainers! (My next job today is to get in touch with both to give sign-off and check through the particulars of the pieces to ensure I am happy with everything before release / publishing!). Each of these was obviously brought into being by our super and super-talented friends at the Genesis Foundation - John Studzinski and Harriet Capaldi; I will let you know as soon as each is available and how to source them.
For now enjoy the joys of this most abundant and glorious season – and ignore the hours! And I so hope you enjoy the new website – do please drop me a line through the contacts!
With my love and deep appreciation to you and with thanks for all the great blessings of this life, most especially that of true friends!
Fletcher x
And just because...:
