The air we breathe

Funnily enough, I have been gifted a pair of hydrangeas. They were being thrown out by the shop next to the studios where I was working for the EURO. I asked if they needed a home and the owner said yes. They won't be like those pink ones... if those, in fact, are hydrangeas. I do likr e freebie. I planted the larger one in the garden and the smaller one in a pot, which the squirrels will seek to dig up.

Anyway, the flower on the front page.

Isn't that so elegant?

Ginkgo leaves have a purity about them, now that I come to think of other plant-people who give me reason to stop and stare. As I was looking at this one, I was looked back at by a couple of jackdaws and a squirrel. i thought of them and their smarts but also of a tree whose roots stretch back more than 200 million years.

A tree that saw dinosaurs. I see a dinosaur. Spot the heron?

Now, what I really wanted to write about is something from Mark Vernon's spiritual intelligence book. He suggests that "the spiritual commons" is akin to the atmosphere... in that it is what we all live in. We draw from it, or it pours into us, wonder, connection, awe, wisdom, oneness. It is the all of which we are like waves in the ocean of it. Our sin or our modern failing is our inability to recognise that.

I like this very much.

But when I sat with Kairos, the tree suggested that Vernon's view might be too infused with the concept of the Sky Gods, the higher, the non-material. The Mystical Oak, stressing all that I have been told about the need to ground, to have roots, to look down and in, not up and out, tells me that we are all Terrans, Earth-Beings. Our commons is mycelial, not heavenly. Transcendence resides in immanence, rather than, as for Vernon, the immanent being "only" a wave-form in the transcendent. No, says Kairos, the wonder is in the elements, the life, the processes of earth-beingness. Of course the individual is not the all, but it's not the individual's consciousness and mind that is the transcendent-touched aspect, but the individual's part of the cosmic process of matter that matters.