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Posted on 10 August 2007
Wise Blogger Matt Campbell said:
I think I’m falling in love with Britain's countryside
It was epic – biblical, even. From our hilly perspective, we bestrode the narrow world like colossi. Away to our left, a tower rose out of the thick woods flanking the steep rim of the valley. The wind whipped around us. The birds cried, harshly. On the horizon the rainclouds were gathering – but we could still see the great estuary stretched out below us. My brother-in-law paused. ‘It is,’ he pronounced, ‘like Middle Earth … but with a tourist industry’.
And with that, we walked across the golfcourse and back to the car.
This summer, I think I’m falling more in love with Britain and its countryside. It seems odd in the face of news items that flash from flood crisis to earthquake crisis to disease crisis, but even with this backdrop, the natural world has a kind of romance for me. When I get the chance to get out into the world around me I can sometimes feel that I’ve been lucky enough to just glimpse something older, wilder, lurking somewhere beneath the rather boring, mundane world I usually inhabit (i.e. Milton Keynes). The world around me seems more exciting – full of hidden inspiration and potential … if I just had the wit to grasp hold of it, and the tenderness to not crush it once caught.
These musings come as I prepare to be part of a gang of writers and editors involved in launching ‘Wise Traveller’ on an unsuspecting world at the Greenbelt arts festival in Cheltenham over the August Bank Holiday – part of my role is going to be leading festival-goers around the surrounding hills on a series of what we’re calling ‘meditative pilgrimages’, which will include sampling something of the books and their ethos. If we’re fortunate, together we’ll be granted another small sample of the wild, divine genius lapping somewhere around the edges of the world we think we’ve got bored of … rather conveniently, the festival’s theme this year is ‘heaven in ordinary’.
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Comments
Posted at 10:17:48 on 28 August 2007
Kate Beaton made a Wise Comment:
I've just come back from the Greenbelt Arts Festival where I had the opportunity to go on a Wise Traveller pilgrimage - amazing stuff indeed! There's something powerful about stepping back from the frenzy of life's usual pace and seeing another perspective develop. I saw a big world and yet how I and my fellow 'travellers' were very much connected to it and for a fleeting moment witnessed the wonder of creation that is above, around us and before us. We can indeed glimpse heaven in ordinary!
Posted at 17:53:18 on 30 August 2007
John Marshall made a Wise Comment:
The country side itself and a lot of sun over the race course and hills of Cheltenham are winning me over to Matt's sentiments. Our journey back to anaemic MK via the Cotswolds proves that our country side can be beautiful and interesting. But does the location always matter. The highlights of my year have occurred on an English race course and an Arab Israeli town, both in many ways are unremarkable. (In fact, the town could probably fit in the area of the racecourse!) What made these occasions special and significant was the very intense and 'real' relating that went on. Most of this relating was with 'new' people, people I had just met and they me. But both on summer camp and at the festival it had a realness and earnestness that our every day lives so often lack. Some of the conversations were about organisations aims and plans for the future, some were hanging out chats with friends, others involved persuading teenagers to be creative etc. Some encounters, did not involve words but just each others presence was enough for something special to happen. The camp and the festival have left me realising how often we can choose to live out our lives in boring and isolated ways. Maybe we claim that not mixing with people protects us, and for some there maybe a degree of truth in that, but really the isolation makes us 'dead' to each other and we get used to this non-living. We need God to be there, and he always is, to free us up and dare to relate to each other again as people. And all we have to do is be together and be real. Life may never be quite the same again.
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