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'I will carry this little book in my pocket... I will read the words on London buses and in Dartmoor woods. These across-species conversations are more than reverie, they are participation.' – Martin Shaw, author of Smoke Hole and Courting the Wild Twin 'This is a book of profound imagination. Read it and you will know that we humans need to be humble and learn from the greatest teacher, Nature.' – Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence & Ecologist 'Once, we were one form among many in the garden. We learned to hear the voices of the mountains, the rivers, the sky, of silence. The mice spoke, the trees spoke, the stars spoke, the deer and the fox spoke, the snake spoke – and from these words we made being. These words formed great cities and their machines ever clamouring, and we let the silence slip and the words of the whispering world fall away beyond the mirror of our making.' (From the Prologue.) These eighteen meditations, amplified by Jerry Shearing's striking illustrations, offer luminous words enlivened with the weight of much listening. Through these 'conversations', Peter Owen Jones offers a pathway to reconnect with nature. Just a few sentences a day will provide sustenance for the soul.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
CONVERSATIONS WITH NATURE
Peter Owen Jones
Edited by Imogen Lycett Green
Illustrated by Jerry Shearing
Clairview Books Ltd., Russet, Sandy Lane, West Hoathly, W. Sussex RH19 4QQ
www.clairviewbooks.com
Published by Clairview Books 2022
© Peter Owen Jones 2022
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers
The right of Peter Owen Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 912992 44 7
Cover by Morgan Creative Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Visakhapatnam, India Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, Essex
For Helen Merrilees
Contents
Foreword by Martin Shaw
Prologue
The Khamsin Speaks of the Storm
The Windflower Speaks of Flux
The Fox Speaks of Exile
The Mayfly Speaks of Impermanence
The Mouse Speaks of Courage
The Olm speaks of Khthonios
The Bear Speaks of Carnage
The Robin Speaks of Death
The Heron Speaks of Sadness
The Daisy Speaks of Receiving
The Turtle Speaks of Communion
The Jasmine Flower Speaks of Enchantment
The Hawthorn Speaks of Aphrodisia
The Painted Lady Speaks of Reverie
The Starling Speaks of Dancing
The Oak Speaks of Sanctuary
The Moss Speaks of Intimacy
The Pond Speaks of Peace
Glossary
Foreword
These luminous words have the weight of much listening about them. Just a few sentences a day will fill us with protein. This is the domain of direct encounter: no arid philosophising but a great nose for what Dylan Thomas calls the ‘green fuse’ of everything.
Conversations with Nature has a surprise when you really start to attend to its disclosures. A high moral bar. To engage with the sandpiper and the bear, the storm and the seed means to work on the fundament of our character. Or to get worked on. It’s inescapable. The book has an excavation of conscience at its centre. We remember something we once glimpsed. But not by receiving a scolding, but rather by a consistent announcement of the heart. It’s an old secret that most of our soul lives outside of our body, and some rare dialogue is being witnessed here, a psyche seeking echo-location with the tawny owl and the field mouse. Peter bangs into the stuff of life and finds it tremendous.
Like the turning seasons he spares us not the wild flower meadow or the lightning storm; I find myself returning again and again to these words:
The house of peace is built from the flints of suffering.
And the embers of peace Peter blows upon are not some privately curated equilibrium, but a peace between every living thing. That’s a mighty commitment to something radical in agency, a glimpse of Eden. That’s a peace unlikely to be realised in one lifetime. We feel the years now gathered in Peter, and I love the earned weight of his experience – his sorrows and substantial joys – that are all so present here. Everything is invited to the table.
Many of us have dry mouths and this is succulent wine. I will carry this little book in my pocket with chocolate and a hip flask. I will read the words on London buses and in Dartmoor woods. These across-species conversations are more than reverie, they are participation.
W. B. Yeats once said, ‘I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made.’ Wonderful and typically mystical. Peter finds his face in the world; he locates sustenance in communion with turtle, foxglove and love-struck pilgrims hooting at the moon. Inside all of these things is a universe within a universe. He has gifted us something subtle and dynamic, much of which could be carved on a breastplate in the chaos of our times.
Martin Shaw
Prologue
Once we were dust, a single cell. Here, illuminated in the void. We travelled through many forms, through unknowing, through becoming, many deaths, many births, learning to feel, to respond. We travelled through water and out onto the land, we took our first breath as we all still do. It has taken billions of years for each one of us to reach here. To reach this splendour.
Over this time, which is no time, we learned to see ever outwards into clarity. Between the leaves, the lines of water light, into the grasslands, into the great white winters, into amber and carnelian, into paths and tides and stars. We were one form among many forms in the garden. We learned to hear the voices of the mountains, the rivers, the sky, of silence. The mice spoke, the trees spoke, the stars spoke, the deer and the fox spoke, the snake spoke, and from these words we made being. From these words came fire and paint, fields and memory, the past, the present and the future. From these words we made homes and kingdoms, weapons, mandalas. These words formed great cities and their machines ever clamouring, and we let the silence slip and the words of the whispering world fall away beyond the mirror of our making.
Peter Owen Jones
July 2022
The Khamsin Speaks of the Storm
You are born into an empty house. And slowly at first, seeping through the windows, come the words of days, the words of crows and gulls, the language of leaves. In time, faces appear, the faces of flowers, the face of the lion, of the deer, the faces of butterflies and fish. And you may dance with the lemurs and hide your very soul in the hills, in the seas, in the arms of the grove, but I will find you.
I will follow you into the roots of the oak and tear her down. Find you resting on the banks where the clear pools gleam and strike the lightning in. I will rip the nest from the tree. I will send in the sand to ruin your fields, to suffocate your wells of hope. Throw the raven onto your path. Turn the rain to grit and take the roof from the thickets and scatter your fawns for the wolves. I will bring the quarrelling sparrows into your night to haunt your towers in the land of stones.
I will be there to greet you as you walk away from the fresh earth on his grave. I am at the door as she betrays you, hands you the cup of foxgloves and nightshades. I will drive you out from your rooms and walls into ditches, into winter, into the wood of thorns and dress your wounds with the sap from the poppy until you beg to be cut again. Until you know this place as your own. Until you know the lion of revenge as yourself. That the constant rain of sorrow comes to sweep your house clean.
Watch the fires, see how I feed the kites and the crows, that when the oak falls I lay a bed for the light, for the willow herb, there is new grass for the fawns. How I carry seeds and the birds to new lands, fashion new pools for the shore, that the flood is feed for winter’s fields.
And I will not be calmed by the innocence of spring, the swelling of summer. Even the rocks I will break into pieces, the earthquake will open the burrow, the fire drive you into the cave and there we will meet and speak of sorrow, of bears and crows, of love and the end of all things.
The Windflower Speaks of Flux
Yesterday is not a tomb. There is no wall between what is now and what was then and what is to come. It is one. A petal apart from the flower has no meaning.
There was rain. I closed my petals and rested. In the dream, the cloud moved on, the starlight returned and as the air warmed, there was a new song, new scents, a new breeze. Everything is moving. Now the ants through the stems, the brief wing of birds, leaves shaping shadows, the unseen sap ever flowing in the boughs. The gleaning bees, the heartbeat of night and day. Everything is moving.
Look into the mirror of the pond, the reflection changing with every ripple of wind. The moon moves the tides, the tides move the sand, not one of Mundaka’s waves is like another. The thrush does not build the same nest, neither does the gull fly the same line. I cannot know the murmuration by counting the starlings. A flower opens when it will, the Pampero blows over the land, changing the colours of the hills. The warblers come and go as they choose. The moths and the bandicoots trawl the night. There is always arriving, there is always leaving, the turning of birth and death, the running of joy and sorrow, everything is moving.
You and I are born on the farthest shore that life has reached. We are sons and daughters of this unfolding, of this churning, of this revolving, this transforming. The egg becoming the song, the tree becomes the seed, the cliff is becoming sand, the rain is becoming the wave, grass becomes milk, it is ceaseless. This revelation. Do the rivers ever rest? Are the clouds ever still? The soil is seething. To say that the rose started here and ended there is of no consequence unless I received her becoming. I have this day, I have this breath, this dance with the grass, with the wind, with the red-crowned crane, with the star, with you.
The Fox Speaks of Exile