From Fred Robins – A spirituality suggested in poetry and found in Hampshire.

"My working life was one of performance, seeking excellence, achieving consistent high standards, solving problems and never permitting mistakes to be made. Retirement gave me the time to find poetry. My work-shaped ‘being’ slowly opened up to the beauty of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins found God in nature; Hopkins’ poems exude the power of his belief in God’s presence in the natural world around us. I admired greatly Hopkins’ poems.

Retirement led us to East Hampshire and the stunningly beautiful heathland, commons and woods that surround our home. Cycling the bridleways of East Hampshire on my mountain bike I was overwhelmed by the ever changing magnificence of  this quietly stunning environment. I began to inwardly sense what Hopkins’ experienced. As I looked towards the South Downs on the horizon I remembered“

…and the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder/ Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet !...

…High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing/ In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,/ As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding...

…All things counter, original, spare, strange;/ Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how ?)/ With swift, slow; sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;/ He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

"My very personal feeling is that Nature can and does provide
healing, protection and regeneration to those who ‘have trod, have trod’ have trod: for most of their lives."

Visionary mystics include…Hildegard of Bingen  - www.impulse-music.co.uk/hildegard.htm