January - Winter of Content

January - Winter of Content

A time of sweetly sad memories,

    a dark evening, a piled high fire,

    embers curling and fiery tongues

    licking wood, hissing and sighing.

    Coffee hot in the old mug, a hand

    covering mine and the voice,

    long absorbed into the song

    of the planets and the ever circling

    bright stars, speaking warm

    and serene in the spluttering

    candle light and winter rain.

    

‘I will love you and care for you,

    I will walk with you in dark times

    and in light, your pain is my pain,

    your joy is my joy, and we have,

    my love, time enough before us.’

    

The veil of our temple was rent

    but no earthquake shook the land,

    no blackness blotted out the day.

    As long as the sleeping sun rises

    and memory stays fresh and green

    I will live in him and he in me.      

    For the gentle warmth and light

    of the nascent Spring cannot

    be overcome by lingering darkness

    or the bitter cold of winter sorrow,

    and now is our Winter of Content. 
                                                                Naomi

The uninvited guest - at home with Serpula lacrymans 

In the end … it won’t matter how much you know, but rather how much you love.       John C Morgan

I locate, at last, the fugitive soup spoon.  It peeps coyly out from under the fireside chair which is backed up against a wall.  Two orphan kitchen wall cupboards are stacked up against the chair  and the heavy coffee table nestles up to the cupboards. The carpet is carpeted with boxes of food and kitchen tools leaving me a six inch corridor in which to manoeuvre between table and sofa.  I begin to ease my way through, and poke at the fugitive cutlery with the handle of an umbrella. The spoon shudders and disappears further under the chair. I throw the umbrella at the chair but only contrive to sweep a vase off the coffee table which falls with a shattering crash onto the marble hearth.  I throw myself onto the dust shrouded sofa and, cursing, regard the domestic building site that now occupies my flat.

I have been sharing my life with an unpleasant minute organism called Serpula lacrymans.  Or to be rather more accurate, my flat has been sharing its life with a particularly dangerous pathogenic fungus whose sole function would appear to be the destruction of other living organisms. In my case, or in the case of my house, the destruction of  wood floors, frame and fittings left uncurbed, would lead eventually to the collapse of the building. To prevent this, Serpula has to be radically eradicated, involving the stripping of internal walls back to bare brick, the ripping out of all infected timbers, the application of noxious chemicals. Meanwhile my kitchen furniture lives in the living room and all the bathroom fittings have migrated to the garage - a quarter of a mile up the road. 

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” wrote the Teacher, but I searched almost in vain for some benevolent purpose for this particular pathogen in what some regard as an  intelligently designed world.  Did God at the end of the third, or perhaps fifth, day of Creation look at Serpula lacrymans and see that it was good?  Or did an unbidden micro organism, in a moment of the Creator's creative absent mindedness, slip unnoticed into the Creator’s net?  

                                                                                                                                           

Serpula lives secretly in dark places; it sucks the liquid heart out of heathy timber leaving only a fragile desiccated skeleton in its wake; it may lie dormant for years then suddenly burst into a life of insatiable thirst as it travels without impediment through brick and old mortar. While today my builders tend to call it ‘house cancer,’ its existence and the damage it caused were first mentioned in the Book of Leviticus when, sometime between two and a half and three thousand years ago,  it was diagnosed as a “a fretting leprosy in the house: it is unclean.”  It might have destroyed my home; if it is not wholly eradicated, it still may do so.

Until very recently any beneficent purpose for the existence of Serpula  remained a mystery.  And that perhaps was its purpose.  It warned of the myriad intricacies and baffling paradoxes of the natural world about which we as a species know so little and it humbled us in the face of that which we did not understand.  Yesterday I found a News Item dated July 2011 from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.  A consortium of scientists from 10 countries has reported - under the headline “Dry Rot Fungus (Serpula lacrymans) Can Produce Biofuel”- that to pursue its task of breaking down wood so that it may drink and continue to live, the fungus uses a newly discovered enzyme which binds itself to wood cellulose fibres and then breaks them down. “It is this process that makes it possible to produce biofuel out of wood.”

On whether or not biofuels are generally a “good” thing or a “bad” thing for the environment, the jury is still out.  It is as likely that Serpula and its newly discovered enzyme will be shunned, as that it will be warmly welcomed as a source of easily produced power.  But this is the first indication I have found of any  scientists’ enthusiasm for Serpula lacrymans. Whatever the outcome of the current biofuel investigations, I marvel at the newly recognised capacity of this minute and mysterious organism to help  power up my computer and cook my dinner  -  I may even come to love my uninvited house guest.

Naomi

Young hope and an old dream

Young hope and an old dream

We sat on a bench, my new young friend and I, looking over the Bay,

he with feathers checkered brown and grey, fawn and cream, 

 the tips of his new black wings not yet distinguished

by the butterfly mirrors of grown-up white.

He stared long at me with his small dark eye, quietly snapped

his curved dark beak, and turned his sleek gull’s head

to stare far out into the shimmering horizon.

There he saw, I fancied, a seething shoal of forty hundred herring, 

bounty enough to feed his flock for a season and a day.

I saw there a Man, who walked across the the tumbling waters

with two small fish and a basket of loaves, 

and love enough to feed the whole sad, hungry world.

Naomi

Canterbury Cathedral - the Corona chapel

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,

Stirs the dumb spirit; no wind, but pentecostal fire

In the dark time of the year.                                       Eliot:  Little Gidding

 

At the farthest eastern point of the Cathedral there is a circular chapel long known as the Corona Chapel. Its shrine once held the crown of Tomas Becket’s head sliced off in 1172 by one of Henry II’s murdering barons.  It became a place of popular pilgrimage, the air sharp with the the fragrance of incense and the vault echoing with a million prayers of the faithful.  But in 1537 its treasures were plundered and the shrine destroyed by Henry VIII’s iconoclastic Commissioners.  Empty now, it serves to remind us of those other myriad brave souls who lived and died serving God and loving their neighbours.  With its jewel stained windows, its airy emptiness, its soft light and gentle peace, it has become place of thankful remembrance and quiet contemplation.   

Here are especially honoured the saints of our own time, among them Martin Luther King;  Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated because he fought for the rights of the poor;  Maximilian Kolbe, Franciscan priest, took the place of a stranger sentenced to death by starvation in Auschwitz;  Maria Skobtsova Russian aristocrat, poet and nun, assisted Jewish refugees to escape Nazi occupied Europe, died in a Ravensbruck gas chamber in the place of an unknown Jewish woman;  Edith Stein, Jewish philosopher and Carmelite nun, gassed in Auschwitz.

Theirs was a noble and disparate company, faithful to their God and prepared even to die for love of a stranger.  They took no account of race or colour, in times of need they did not question creed or unbelief.  If their enemy was hungry or sick they cared for him; if a stranger crouched in the dark shadows of depression and despair, they took his hand and guided him into the light.  They saw only that God had walked beside them along the paths of injustice, terror and shame, and He did not discriminate between the unworthy and the righteous. 

Canterbury Cathedral - December - The Corona Chapel

In this quiet chapel, where the welcome smile
of a winter morning streams through lapis glass
lighting up sun gold slim pillar and wide stepped stone,
I meditate on the saints and martyrs of our time,
commemorated here where once Becket’s crown was laid.
Archbishop, poet, philosopher, minister, priest and nun, 
long cherished in the hearts of all whose lives they embraced,
their loving spirits bright mirror of the divine.

They followed their Master far up the dangerous mountain path,
along the edge of the precipice, across the roaring torrent,
into a city of sad madmen, tyrants and thieves.
There, to reject neither the summons to deathbed or prison cell,
the trembling outstretched hand, the empty pleading eyes,
but to nourish the broken and the hungry soul,
to touch with love the outcast and the untouchable,
and break again the alabaster jar and anoint the weary feet.

They went to Bethlehem to greet the Christ Child’s coming,
they sat in the Temple amongst the wondering doctors,
in the wilderness they prayed for him and at his baptism rejoiced,
they walked and talked with him beside the Sea of Galilee,
they wept for him in the moonlit agony of Gethsemane
and in his footsteps trod their own Via Dolorosa.
He, their Child, their Teacher and their Lord.
Verbum caro factum
Venite adoramus Dominum

Naomi

Jane : A Shining Encounter : 1942

The forenoon was warm and the leaves around his new enclosure 

nodded like tired dancers in the lazy September breeze.

Lying in the sweet scented grass, his eyes closed

against the cloudless sky, Ming remembered 

the Jiajin Mountains of Sichuan, the place where he was born,

and the wide groves of tall bamboos

where he and his brothers had played and run free.

He remembered the cruel ungentle men who had seized him,

torn him awayfrom the den in the trees, the bamboos

and the wide flowing Chuan Jiang river.

Into a box he was pushed and onto a ship he was loaded,

across a vast ocean and to a great grey chill city he was taken,

imprisoned in a cage with bamboo a plenty,

but no brothers to play with, no mountain slopes to roam.

He sighed and slept until a persistant noise intruded on his sunlit dreams.

Blinking sleep heavy eyes, he saw a small creature wriggling

through a gap in the heavy wire fence, contorting its young body

around the jagged edges like a Chinese Cobra

emerging from its rocky lair in the foothills of Sichuan.

The panda stiffened, nervous of this invasion into his solitary world,

but the elfin child, with hair white as cotton in a field, smiled.

Like a magnet in a jar of pins, the hole in the fence had enticed Jane

from the safety of the rug on the grass into a magical land of dreams

where, as moonlight pierced the shadows of the night,

the nursery toys danced and sang beneath the glistening stars.

Her eyes fixed on the huge toy now come alive in the sunshine morning,

she clasped a large rock bun made moist with apple and honey,

trotted through the long grass and held out a petite hand.

In that moment of offering quiet and unfearful, she watched bewitched
as the great black furry paw moved slowly down to her small palm,
and gently, oh so gently, from her he took the sticky offering. 
Then “Time to go now, sweetheart”,  her father’s voice,
benign and clear as as a moorland beck in an empty evening,
summoned her quietly back to the rug on the grass
and the scruffy old toy with black patched eyes.  

Wearing a cloak of angelic innocence, face bright with undiluted joy,
her heart consigned the shining encounter to memory,
 which even her mother’s trembling anger could not destroy.
For thus would her perfect trust have been shattered,
and lost for ever the remembrance abiding in that moment
when the spinning globe hesitated on its axis,
earth and heaven combined, and the world stood still.
 

Naomi

The Great White Owl

 The Great White Owl

‘Let me fly with the great white owl,
give me strong poison’ she said,
‘and I will drink a draft
of blessed oblivion.
My strength is all but past,           
my time here now is done.’
But he had no strong poison
to give her, and she wept
that she must live another day.

‘Let me fly with the great white owl,
fetch me Nembutal’ she
entreated, ‘mix it with
honey and sweet white wine,       
and I will draw close at last
to death’s kindly sleep.’
But he had no Nembutal
to fetch for her, and she
cried out in her misery.

‘Let me fly with the great white owl,
bring me a gun’ she begged,
‘that I may find an end
to this  living death.’
But he had no gun
to bring to her and she turned           
her face away from him
that he might not see now
her ultimate despair.

‘Kiss me once’ she whispered,
‘and kiss me once again,
this be our  sweet good night.
Smother me with a pillow,
hold me close in your arms           
until all my breath is gone.
Give me a final blessing,
as you set me free
to fly at last with the great white owl.’

He kissed her once, he kissed
her gently once again.
He took up the pillow
and held it to her face,
clasped his arms about her           
until her struggles ceased,
and her soul’s soft whisper
bade him a faint adieu.
‘Go fly my love’ he said, ‘it is your time.’

Quietly he laid her down
grateful for her passing,
and looked out into the
long night’s mist grey ending
as the great white owl flew
with her departing soul,
while angels and morning
bright stars sang in chorus
and Love held out his arms in welcome.
                                                   
                                                  Naomi

Herring Gull Walk

Herring Gull Walk

Up the Square they came,
two herring gulls
out for a morning stroll,
heads nodding
and toes tuned out,
feathered hands clasped 
behind feathered backs,
like fellows of The House
taking a matutinal turn 
in Christ Church Meadow,
dissecting the niceties
of Kant and Schopenhauer.

Down the Square went
a warble of finches,
rose-pink, green and gold,
decorous like convent girls
dressed in their best,
Children of Mary going
to Sunday Mass, who
nodded and curtsied
to the scholar gulls,
then fluttered away
to the old bandstand,
hoping for hip-hop and rap.

                                   Naomi