Month: September 2023

Poem: Gaia at Ely Cathedral

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I’m sharing this post again, September 2023, as part of the Season of Creation some Christian traditions are marking at this time. So many of us have experienced extreme weather conditions this summer. I write in exceptional September heat, surrounded by welcome green from earlier rain.

I hope you find this post a helpful starting point for contemplation.

Additional note, 24th September. I am delighted that this post has appeared at The Cottage, Diana Butler Bass’ rich and thought-provoking Substack, this morning. I’ve admired her work for many years, and it’s such an honour, and very exciting for me, to find myself in her company today, under Inspiration. It’s a profound exploration of envy and gratitude, and a reflection on the deep drivers of our climate and ecological crisis. It’s well worth reading and allowing it to do its inner work on us. You can do so here.

Original post, published 12th July 2021, emerging from lockdowns:

As we are beginning to venture out a little more, we thought we would pay a visit to Ely, and the vast indoor space of its ancient cathedral. They often have contemporary art there, which helps the old stones continue to sing, giving a new perspective on ancient truths. We knew that Gaia, an installation by Luke Jerram, was going to be there in July, and so we went and saw this beautiful, astonishing sight. The comparative emptiness of the cathedral space made it all the more powerful as it floated above us.

And as the space is vast, and it takes time to walk up to, around and beyond the piece, you do have time and space in which to allow the work to speak to you, to stir up responses, and to pray. I am sure that one of the intentions is to give us all an opportunity to experience something like “earthrise”, when the astronauts first saw the whole of the Earth from space, and how that shifted their perspective, and began to change the way all of us are able to see our home. The staggering, indescribable beauty of the whole called out my sense of awe, which sat uncomfortably alongside my awareness of the damage we are doing to our precious, unique home.

In the setting of the cathedral, as Gaia hangs in the nave under the painted ceiling which tells the long stretch of the Bible’s story, I found the language of repentance surprisingly, and helpfully, came to mind. Repentance both in our more familiar understanding of sorrow for wrongdoing, and desire to amend, and in the possibly more ancient meanings carried in the old texts, of returning home, and of undergoing a profound change of mind – a paradigm shift in the way you see.

Much of my writing celebrates the beauty of the natural world, how lovely, precious, and vulnerable it is. But sometimes, that love spills over into grief. So the old stones, and the old story, seemed illuminated by our current crisis, and, in turn, those ancient words seemed to express something necessary, and powerful, and, in the end, with the potential for hope.

You can listen to the poem here.

Gaia at Ely Cathedral

She seems to float, lit up with her own light,
slowly turning, blue and blooming with clouds
as we walk up, look up, small before her.

While above our steps,
the familiar painted roof
rolls on, telling its painted story,
from the tree, and the garden,
on towards this

fathomless shining beauty,
the ‘all’ that was so very good
in that beginning.
Now as she turns
we see how she hangs
below the story’s last scenes –
the gift of a beloved child
held on his mother’s lap,
held forward towards us,
loved and given and giving,
and the wounded golden king,
who gives still.

And below, below hangs the whole shining Earth,
dazzling, vast with sea,
turning and flowering with clouds
from the southern ice-shine,
melting although we do not see her weep,

And the land, those small green swathes
and swags, are dressed in white too,
a veil of vapour,
while the deserts spread brown
and red above our eyes.

The lands are small, countries
seem tales we tell.
What is certain is this one great
flow – ocean and ice and cloud –
and the unseen winds that bear them
through our blue, breathing air.

And the people stand beneath her,
lit by ice, and hold up their hands
as if to carry her, or hold her,
or save her from falling.

How beautiful it is.
How strange and wondrous
that we should be creatures
who live within so much living perfection.

And as she turns slowly
under the child and the king,
I wonder, what do those
familiar words mean now,
‘the sins of the world’,
as the stain of our reckless harm
seeps through the blue and green,
through all this living glory,

And is there any hope in our
waking up to beauty with grief
and loss, even as dust and ashes
float across the sky,
across us all, late as we are
in our repenting?


And is there hope,
hope that we might be granted
this grace – time
for amendment of life,
to tend the garden
with its leaves and fruit,
shining and greening,
to take part in the work
of loving and healing,
of restoration,
of making all things new.

Looking at Gaia from behind the communion table brought to mind the words of repentance from that service, and I was aware of my sense of what “the sins of the world” might mean was creaking open a little wider.

Poem: Matisse Cut-Outs, and a nod to David Hockney

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Matisse, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, 1952

I shared a poem with you last week – What the space holds. Writing that poem reminded me of the extraordinary Matisse cut-outs, imagining the negative spaces left when his scissors had finished thier task. I realised that I’d never shared with you a poem I wrote about those works…..

Tate Modern in London had a very beautiful exhibition some years ago, in 2014, of these late and astonishing cut-outs. I was deeply moved by what we saw and experienced. You can still buy the catalogue from The Tate – and other places too – if you’re interested. As ever, as a book that accompanies a major exhibition, it is a revealing and insightful exploration of the work.

A thing that struck me was the contrast between the photos of the frail but engrossed artist, towards the end of his life, and the vibrant, joyful celebration of life itself that the cut-outs embodied. The vitatlity of the art he created sang from the walls. Finding it hard to make art in the ways he had before, he developed this extraordinary technique to transform his relatively confined spaces into a paradise of form and colour.

I felt the deep wisdom of this response, this openness to beauty, to nature, to life as a whole. It seemed to offer a brightness that could illuminate our days.

Henri Matisse working on paper cut out. Undated photo. Getty images

Matisse Cut-Outs

The rooms are thick and warm
with people looking, in reverence.
There is a hush
as we move like pilgrims
through doorways
and spaces full of quiet light.

There are photographs of you, in bed,
or tucked in a chair, old and crumpled.
Yet, in your outstretched hand is that
long stick, tipped with charcoal,
drawing, drawing,
or a curling pile of paper at your feet,
unravelling from those black scissors.

When the outside became unreachable
you turned your rooms into a garden,
with swallows dancing on the walls,
and fig leaves, and pomegranates,
mermaids and stars.
You are covering your walls with
bright cut-outs that sway in the warm breeze,
lavender and myrtle, while you breathe deep. 

This is what you did
while pain nagged close,
while death grew closer.
You made the beauty
you could make.
You made joy visible.
You did not stop –
in the shadow of
so much destruction,
so much war-grief –
you kept the charcoal
and the scissors moving,
an Eden at your ending.

I thought again about this exhibition a few weeks ago when I went to the Lighroom at King’s Cross with my daughter to see David Hockney’s Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away). I loved the way the projections immersed you in the work, especially the Spring pieces he’s been developing using an i-Pad. You felt the power and beauty of the trees bursing into life, the brightness of the green, the froth of the cow-parsley. I bought a book as a souvenir, Spring Cannot be Cancelled, which I’m currently reading. It’s particularly good at capturing the mood of lockdown in his Normandy studio, and the intensity of the observations of the arrival of spring that time of isolation and deep uncertainty generated.

I was wondering whether to couple these two art events together, I do hope Hockney has many more prolific years ahead to enrich us all. I do not mean to suggest that he is an artist at the end of his life. But it seems to me there is something in common between these two artists in the intensity, freedom and joy of their later work. There is a real clear-sightedness and poignancy in the appreciation of beauty, and an urgency too. There is a deep embodied wisdom and wonder which pours through to the viewer.

It reminds me of Mary Oliver’s “instructions for living a life”:

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

Exodus poem on Diana Butler Bass

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A couple of years ago, during lockdown, I felt drawn to explore the stories of Moses and the Exodus.

One of these was inspired by Moses and the burning bush, where he takes off his shoes because the ground is holy. This poem now finds itself at Diana Butler Bass’ The Cottage, as part of her marking of the season of creation. It’s so good to be part of this beautiful musing on an important season, to be marking a shift in awareness as we begin to pause and reconsider our relationship with the rest of life on this dear blue-green planet.

I hope the link below will take you to her rich and thoughtful exploration of this theme.

https://open.substack.com/pub/dianabutlerbass/p/sunday-musings-f9a?r=46vqv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

You can find my original post and poem here.

Gaia at Ely Cathedral. You can find out more about that here.

Previous visits to The Cottage can be found ..
The Sower and the Soil
Mary, at your feet
Jesus washes Judas’ feet

Poem: What the space holds

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Gradually, we’ve been reducing the size of the unmown places in the grass. It’s been growing so fast this year, and the flowers have had a second and a third go. The sun and the rain have kept everything flourishing. There are small frogs and grasshoppers, and many bees still. It’s worth going very slowly, giving everyone a chance to hop out of the way, and leaving places of refuge. Little by little….

I wish I’d taken a picture of this patch above in the week before it was cut, when a round shape appeared flattening the stems. We were pretty sure it was the muntjac who is a regular visit to the garden – earlier this year, there was a youngster too. You can read more about the deer in the garden here and here. She is a joy.
I do worry about her crossing the road between the woods and the garden, about the speeding cars – but the only time I have ever seen her trotting along the road, everyone stopped and waited for her to be safe. Kind drivers!

As I sat by her space I imagined her presence. I felt the hum of the cars through the ground. And I thought of all the places where the creatures who used to make a home no longer do – all the absences. I felt the loss, even as I felt the beauty and abundance of this late flowering meadow. And so this poem emerged, in fits and starts. It’s taken its time, has a basenote of loss, and I hope it carries the gentle tenderness of the deer, and the many creatures I feel kin to even in this one garden.

What the space holds

There is a space in the long grass,
a flattened disc of green stems,
while all around late flowers
nod. A curved bowl, waiting,
rimmed with golden light.

Low down, face close to grass,
I hear the hiss of breeze through
stems, the buzz of bees, crickets,
even, perhaps, butterfly wings.
But there is no trace of whoever comes
here, night after night, and circles, and
settles to sleep. Too sweet a hay-smell
for fox or badger, too big for cat.

I open my mind’s eye to the night,
quiet, and across my heart
a dark shape with long,
delicate legs steps gently,
picks her way through the black
shimmer of stems and fills
this space with a shadow –
a shadow whose heart beats and
ears twitch. I see a dream-deer,
breathing, her brown sides rising
and falling as the space fills
with living warmth, with the
softness of deer, with the gentleness
of one who comes by night.

And as I dream, as I treasure
the absent deer, I think of all
the empty spaces
and places, holding now
only memory, fading,
or worse, nothing.
I think of the absences
that there have been
and that are yet to come.


Patterns cut out of sky where flocks of birds,
tumbles of bees and butterflies are not,
but once were. The rivers where
there were fish, who are not.
Places where the beavers and the big cats
and the red squirrels are not, and their spaces
cradle nothing, empty and mourning,
Earth’s arms aching.

This soft round space that has
become a bowl of dreams
does not know if the sweet deer will
return tonight, as car sound
rumbles through the earth.

This bowl in the grass
ringing with her absence, with
the absence of all creatures who
are not here, but who once were,
as I run my finger around the rim,
and feel the tremor of loss upon me,
and through me. May she be safe.
May she and all creatures be safe.

The final lines of blessing draw on the Buddhist practice of metta, or lovingkindness, meditation, which I have found deeply helpful and incorporate into my prayer and contemplation regularly.

When I was writing about the spaces where creatures are not, I remembered a wonderful Matisse exhibition we went to of his cutouts, done in his final months and filling his rooms with birds and flowers. I imagined the pieces of paper uncuring from his scissors and falling to the ground. I wondered if what we would be left with would be these negative spaces, with the birds and flowers no more, or if we would find our hearts opened to care for those we share this beautiful green world with.