I had an impulse, triggered by something I can't now recall, to think about flashes of beauty in my life. A few things popped immediately into my head, and others gathered over a couple of weeks. In the middle of that process, Stephanie Dowrick's new book "Seeking the Sacred" came out. One of her foundations in the book is the search for what she calls "reverence":
- "a way of being that allows us to know awe, gratitude, delight and trust", and
- "perceiving a sacred, transcendental or holy dimension to life".
And maybe what I was really recording, given the power of the images recalled, were moments of reverence. Here are 5 of those moments.
Rainbow
When the conditions are just right, with a soft offshore breeze blowing, you paddle your surfboard out and burst through a wave and the early morning sun, still low and sparkly in the eastern sky, throws its prismatic magic at the spray surrounding you. A rainbow orbits your head, out one ear and into the other, a perfect circle. Then winks away, leaving you enraptured.
Planets
Three or maybe four times a year, a portentious constellation lines up when a slender crescent moon and a bright Venus rise together, with Venus dangling below the moon's segment like a pearl pendant. The two brightest things in the sky fleetingly in tandem. That portent hung in the early night sky as the ferry skidded its way from Aegina to Athens and the taste of charcoal grilled octopus and ouzo lingered in my mouth.
Standing high, looking out
There's a look-out where I can stand, with nothing above me and everything below me. A 180 degree horizon with a 90 degree canopy above. The trees in front of me are tall and tufty, but as I look down on the more distant ones they are soft and pillowy like the ripples on a doona. Ridges stretch away in origami folds. The big sky always moving, distinct shadows fluttering over the sward of tree tops. The vast segment my view commands gives me a proprietorial feeling: the massif of Mt Solitary I can almost own.
Swallows
I sat on the balcony of an ancient house perched high on the hillside in a medieval village in Haute Provence, with a wide patch of sky in front of me and a tumbledown chimney punctuating the space. The early summer dusk was just descending, and brought with it hundreds of swallows. The ones like little jet fighters with swept back wings and V-forked tails. They wheeled and darted, silhouetted black against the sky. Banked and turned, rushed past each other. Zipped high, then stalled and fell and swooped back up. Were they chasing insects in the evening air? I couldn't see any. I think maybe their aeronautics were being performed just because they could; just flying with their avian joie de vivre.
Cypress
Doing a bit of renovation and replacing some daggy old quad-mould with fancy heritage skirting boards –a big gap along one wall needed to be patched. I bought a couple of new cypress floor boards to rip down to the right width for the patch. As soon as the saw blade bit into the wood, it released a rich nostalgic aroma, the intense woody-sweet smell from the pine. That smell kicked in a bevy of emotions: the accompanying scent of creation with wood; the long-forgotten memory of playing war-games with my 10 year old mates in the new houses they were building over the road from my childhood home when (in 1963) all new houses had cypress floors and building sites weren't locked up; the joint effort with dad and my brother Peter and me laying the cypress boards in the holiday house, when we were teenagers and the dent you made in the board with the hammer when you missed the nail was still called a "two bob bit". One momentary smell, many moments of subsequent reverence.
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