The Healing Power of Nature
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 who found God in nature and whose poems exude the power of his belief in God’s presence in the natural world around us. Retirement led me and my wife to North East Hampshire and the beautiful heathland, commons and woods that surround our home.
Cycling the bridleways on my mountain bike, I was overwhelmed by the ever-changing magnificence of this quietly stunning environment. I began inwardly to sense what Hopkins experienced. As I looked towards the South Downs on the horizon I thought of his words from various poems:
’…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 (to quote Hopkins again) ‘have trod, have trod, have trod’ for most of their lives'
Originally posted by: Fred Robins