My Beloved Spake and said unto me,
Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear upon the earth.
The time for the singing of birds is come. ..

The Songs of Solomon.: the Bible chapters that were largely avoided by our old Scottish preacher and his sons but were taken up by the (Irish) man who came after him (all when I was a young child). I did not realize until I began to gain an overview that the core of our religious ’teachings’ in the early years were actually the letters of Paul. We were not actively encouraged to read the Bible for ourselves; ’lessons’  from the old book (King James Version always and only) were best left to be ’opened up’ by someone for whom they would be ’illuminated’ on our behalf. Those someones were our preacher grandfather, my father’s father, his sons, including my father, and other near ’disciples’.

This entire verse; Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One.. poured into me one early morning, before dawn, out at Wester Ross in the Scottish Highlands. I got up from my bed and took myself out along the wild clifftop in a North Atlantic storm. In the driving wind and rain I began to loose great boulders from the earth and roll them with all my might over the cliff’s edge. They hit the roiling sea with a resounding crash, and I did it until I lay spent in the coarse wet boggy grass of that land, soaked to the skin, with a feeling of utter freedom. The ’house’ , the religious structure, that I had been born into was too small to contain my Spirit and I had to literally knock out the cornerstones of this constricting structure, that I might breathe, that I might find my bearings, that I might grow I guess that was around the time of my ’Saturn Return’(!), just around the time of my father’s death.

 “God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.”   Meister Eckhart, 13^th Century mystic

Like my father before me I found my deepest solace and unbridled joy in the vast wildness of Nature. Singing in a sea cave was another grand release/relief in this rite of passage moment-in-time; a cave into which I swam on another stormy day, climbing out onto a rock dripping wet. I never grew cold that day as I sang, song after song, inspired and held by the timeless beauty and spirit of the place.

 When the doors of perception are cleansed you will begin to see the unseen world.    Deepak Chopra in Way of the Wizard

Who knew then that I would make my home on the West Coast of California and my Cathedral would be the ancient Redwood trees. And the man who had the vision to imagineer the Golden Gate Bridge had already crafted the words that say it all:

 THE REDWOODS

Here sown by the Creator’s hand,
In serried ranks the Redwoods stand.
No other clime is honoured so.
No other lands their glory know.

 The greatest of Earth’s living forms,
Tall conquerors that laugh at storms.
Their challenge still unanswered rings
through 50 centuries of kings.

 The nations that with them were young.
Rich empires with their forts far-flung,
lie buried now, their splendour gone,
but these proud monarchs still live on.

 So shall they live when ends our day,
When our crude citadels decay.
For brief the years allotted man,
but infinite perennials span.

 This is their temple, vaulted high,
And here we pause with reverent eye,
with silent tongue and awe-struck soul,
For here we sense life’s proper goal.

 To be like these, tall true and fine.
To make our world, like this, a shrine.
Sink down, oh traveller, on your knees,
God stands before you in these trees.

 Joseph B. Strauss, visionary architect & chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge

 We are fortunate that the Redwood has the genetic ability to sprout at the roots otherwise this unmatched treasure of nature would indeed have been lost to us.Walk and sit amongst these trees, listen to their ’chorus’ and join the chorus of ’two-leggeds’ who work to preserve the old trees for life, for the living, and for those yet to be born.

 "The unborn are countless and we are the guardians of their potential" (Alex Wildwood, A faith to call our own)

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." Jame Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916 ~ Chap. 5)