Meeting a place

Speaking with trees and stones encouraged me to think about speaking to a place. A place where human history and nature are entangled. I chose the ruins of the church and the spring.

One window of the ruins overlooks the spring - not that you can see the spring under all the plants.

One window may have been a door that was filled in with a window.

One window overlooks a young oak tree... there are no oaks nearby so I wonder if this was planted...

There is an alcove with the only remaining bit of carving.

While I was there, I was thinking about "ding an sich". That means the thing itself... I remembered two things. One: reading Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature in which he says that you can never know the ding an sich. All you can have is a representation of it or ideas about it, facts, beliefs, sensations. The ding an sich is always radically other. Neither we nor any other living thing can know or have real access to the ding an sich. It is always only ever what we, as it were, make of it.

The other thing was that I had watched an insect while sitting with a tree and the insect was doing something - I can't recall - and I thought, "I will never KNOW what is really happening here, what that insect is doing." And then I thought about all the zillions of things that are happening all the time that we cannot know (what this one beetle is doing right now) and can never predict (the exact position and orientation of this leaf and point t in time).

What struck me was the magnitude of radical otherness. The huge unknowability. The scale of mystery. And I realised that wonder, awe, the sacred is the recognition (at some level) of unknowability, of mystery.

That brings me back to the church. The spring. The mystery of where the water comes from. Springs are sacred. Maybe there was an oak grove here, where people paid reverence to the mystery. Maybe that young oak is a relic. Then along come the Christians who either assimilated the natural mystery or tried to overwhelm it. So they built the church. Why else build a church so far from a village? And the church was the place for two sorts of mystery - natural and Christian. Time goes by and the Christian faith loses much of the mystery. Instead it's about ritual. Instead there's the claim that the ding an sich is all there, in the text. That words and thoughts can contain the world and understand it.

That being the case, why have a church away from a village? It no longer makes sense. It is no longer about the old mysteries but the new order.

And this has returned the place to mystery.

I watched masonry bees flying into their nest high up on one of the walls.

I watched blue tits and long-tailed tits land on the blooms of hogweed and eat from them.

I watched swifts flying high high high above - always hunting heading south. For some reason.

I watched a beautiful beetle with a blue carapace and red wings explore the stones.

I thought about ding an sich. How our minds can never contain the mystery. The thing itself is vibrant in the world, and our minds are, truly empty.