Contemplative Inquiry

on a cool morning

a quiet hour after dawn:

sky, water and earth

Our 2026 summer has been dry as well as hot. ‘Unseasonable’ by the traditional standards that for me reference the twentieth century (second half). Some trees are already shedding leaves.

In Gloucester park, there are carpets of leaves on a hard earth. Here, even around 6am, I am in a very different world from that of the hydrotherapy pool – see https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2026/07/21/reclaiming-water/.

In the middle of August last year – https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2025/08/17/park-trees-in-a-dry-season/ – I drew attention to a similar phenomenon in a more advanced state. We are in the second successive year of such dryness. The context of the climate crisis deepens my unease.

On this early morning walk,  I steer away from the politics of adaptation. I turn my attention to the ground under my feet.

I accept this bleak ground for what it is, readily enough. It has its own beauty. I resist accepting it for what it points to. I don’t want things to be this way: I really don’t. When and why and how did I get shunted on to a dystopian time-line ? It surely wasn’t part of the original plan.

But there it is, and here I am, and that’s it. Without anaesthetising myself into resignation, I walk on. I can at least accept being unresolved. For today, that is acceptance enough.

The image above is from R. J. Stewart’s The Dreampower Tarot (1,2).  The figure blissfully in water is the Queen of Souls, the water suit in this pack.

Yesterday I encountered a variant version of this image in an enhanced version of everyday life. My wife Elaine has a love of water, immersion in water and swimming. Her mobility challenges have kept her out of swimming pools for over two years. It’s been a source of sadness for her during this time.

Happily we have found an accessible local hydrotherapy pool that supports people with such challenges. We were able to have a session there with me in a recognised caring role. For much of the session we were on our own and  the pool never got crowded.

Elaine’s obvious pleasure in the water lit up the space for me. It is as if she had reclaimed her element. I felt privileged to be her companion in this emancipatory venture. I also had a fleeting internal image of  this card as an archetypal expression of what was happening in front of my eyes.

When leaving the pool, I checked in with my own body. It felt warm and radiant, energised and relaxed at the same time. We will be returning to the pool very soon.

(1) R. J. Stewart The Dreampower Tarot: The Three Realms of  Transformation in the Underworld London: The Aquarian Press, 1993. Illustrated by Stuart Littlejohn.

(2) The illustrations from this pack have strongly impressed themselves over the years on my life and practice, interweaving with other images of my own. See:

‘WHIRLPOOL’: THE POWER OF AN IMAGE

and

MEDITATION: WISDOM’S HOUSE

watching the waters

in the cool of this morning

a feeling of home

9.15 pm 25 June 2026. 32C/89.6F, after a peak of 38C/100.4F earlier in the day. Elaine and I sheltered in our air-conditioned hotel room for much of the day. (We don’t have it at home). We ventured out towards sunset, which was once again magnificent. But we did not stay out for long. Some people seemed comfortable and were enjoying the evening heat. Our age and health conditions made it more problematic. I for one was became dizzy and ennervated.

This shouldn’t be happening in an Atlantic coastal town 51 degrees north. The heatwave of the last several days should be the final, local, experiential proof of the climate crisis many of us have anticipated since at least the later 1980s.

Depressingly I can predict  that many people won’t see it that way, held in the malignant trance of a manufactured denial. For me, this is the scariest aspect of the crisis: the influence of insanely short term vested interests and a general human talent for not recognising inconvenient truths.

Elaine and I go home today in more clement weather after an overnight storm. It has been a memorable visit, one that had room both for pleasure and a certain weirdness.

Today I’m on the English side of the Bristol Channel/Mor Hafren (1), in Weston-super-Mare. The tide goes out a long way at Weston, and this early morning image is not unusual. The picture faces in to Brean Down, memorably depicted in Dion Fortune’s occult novel The Sea  Priestess.

This is the first time I have been to the English west country coast for three years. It’s longer since I’ve been to Weston. This visit has some of the features of a homecoming. Crows on the beach are a familiar, welcome and well remembered feature.

I’m out early (6-7 am) and there’s limited human activity as yet, though I am glad to see some. At this time I find  a stillness here that includes the town itself, both as it meets the coast, and inland, as it begins to slope upwards from sea level.

I’m gradually reconnecting with a place I have known all my life, discovering how I and the town have continued to age and change. This is the first time I’ve appeared with a walking stick. I’m glad to find that I’m fine with walking on the beach. For me, Weston is a place layered with memory and changing perceptions and understandings. It has depth as well as extension. It’s good to be here.

(1) The names,  geography and something of the spirit of place are described at:

MOR HAFREN

It is 21 June, the morning of the Summer Solstice where I live. I feel refreshed and enlivened by a morning walk that became a solar celebration. I went out at 6.45 am, just short of two hours after dawn, leaning in to the influence of the sun in the here and now  A time when the sun was high in the sky, but the temperature still a friendly kind of cool.

Neither I nor the camera could look straight into the sun. I observed and experienced the sun through indirect effects. This was a physical, naturalistic, rather than metaphysical connection with the solstice morning. I was an inside rather than outside observer and can show my own presence too through my shadow on the path. I was part of the morning, this dance of light and shade.

In some places I saw sharp distinctions of light and shade and in others subtle ones. In both cases I was aware of a nurturing power, that of the sun in this time and place. I know that the sun can be different  – either relentlessly fierce or seemingly absent. I felt blessed that I could experience an hour of gentle solar celebration on this solstice day.