Stronaclachar

 

Today Ina and I are heading out yet again to the Trossachs, drawn once more by the autumn colours and this time a walk amongst the birches of Loch Lomond.  Each weekend comes round and I can usually adjust my day off to the Friday or the Saturday depending on the weather so that we can make the most of the shortening days.     Beauty catches our breath again and again as we come round a bend and walk into a cascade of colour, or catch a panoramic view of ridges unfolding, or notice a glade of ferns -a home for the fair folk.  Time and again we find ourselves loitering, noticing, revelling in the gift of this unique moment of cloud, light, shade, heather, bracken and slow turning of the season.   You really can’t move until the show is over.  

I’m reading Henry Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ which as some of you will know is the reflections of a young man in the late 19^th Century who lives in a homemade cabin for two years by Walden pond in Massachusetts .  His precise attention to detail through the seasons and his immersion in his natural setting is a delight and an inspiration.   Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.  It also gave him enough critical distance to look at the life of his peers and the town of Concord with a clear yet sympathetic eye.  He returned a humbler and simpler man who spent the rest of his life in the town and its’ environs of which he would write at the end of his life, that “I have travelled a great deal in Concord”.  His immersion in nature had sent him home with a deep appreciation of the details of life and the richness that can be found in the most ordinary details if we can but pay attention.     After watching nature patiently revealing her secrets young Henry had developed new eyes to see his fellow citizens.

So today as you are reading this or listening Ina and I will be on our way for our weekly nature communion, perhaps to be surprised by the unexpected and possibly to encounter beauty.   Also to grow new ways of seeing so we are able to notice those around us in fresh and kinder ways, sensitive to the rhythms of life and the ebb and flow of our emotional seasons.  Towards the end of the day we will stop off at Stronaclachar and spend time in the wonderful café on the pier with its glass wall and view down Loch Katrine.   As the gloaming gathers on that most fair of Lochs, and as the light rain falls (no doubt!) there comes a re-framing of our troubles and concerns, a gathering up of them into a larger and deeper story.   Almost as if  we are hearing the bass notes of nature which beat on steadily below the treble of our tumultuous life and offering a solider, more substantial place to ground ourselves.   We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Such grounding does not mean going to ground.  Rather it is an exercise in trust that to love is to go with the flow of the universe which is always expanding, always making connections, always moving towards greater unity (to riff Rob Bell here).  This autumn, allow nature, even through watching some of the wonderful nature documentaries or listening to Outdoors, to teach you to see and notice differently, to reframe your troubles a little so that you can hang the treble of your life on the deeper bass notes that run below, right from the heart of God.    And then this autumn become one of those folk who reaches out, who makes the phone call, who shows mercy and random acts of kindness.