BEYOND THE EQUINOX
these dark mobile clouds
racing through the autumn sky
as the soft light fades
Picture taken, 6.55 pm, 27 September, sunset in Gloucester, England.
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: contemplative spirituality
September 8, 2025
NUMINOUS IMAGES: SKY TO EARTH
Recent days have been rich in numinous images. Images that for me mark the divinity within our material reality. Above, the recent full moon: clear light at the centre and a blood moon halo suggesting a link with the earth, later to manifest in an eclipse. The sky is deep violet leaning into indigo. The shaded trees absorb the energy of the sky as well as of the earth. The whole image feels moving and inspiring – an image for contemplation which doesn’t need esoteric analysis. Its simple presence is enough.
The same is true for the images that follow. Immediately below is a day time sky image. The day was frequently stormy, with high winds and hard rain. Dark clouds testify to moments of lightning, loud thunder and tumultuous rain. But the image itself records a period of respite. In a gap between the clouds, blue sky can be seen and the light pours strongly in.
Rain on a window pane is central to the next image. The rain drops are the primary subject. What’s on the other side (a balcony garden) isn’t entirely clear in the picture and doesn’t need to be. I experience a great sense of cleansing and refreshment here – the water of life as it falls from the sky, each drop itself an ocean. I look out from my interior space, two stories above the ground floor, and connect with this bounty.
The two remaining images come from a recent walk on Alney Island – outdoors and on normally marshy ground. The first is a woodland space with its fresh entangled green. The ground still looks drier than it sometimes does, yet I sense health and recovery here. In the second image, I see a re-greened path with benignly rioting verges. Seeing what I see, I follow the green path.
September 4, 2025
WATER ON THE PATH
Walking on a familiar path, I found a trail of puddles in front of me. It felt exotic and refreshing. For this had been a parched and dry place for a many months. I dimly recall a past life of finding puddles a minor nuisance – almost an obstacle. Not today. They brought joy and fascination.
I found myself contemplating these small accumulations of fallen rain: noticing their shapes and patterns, seeing how the water creates mud so easily from dried soil, watching the slight movement fallen leaves in these tiny ponds. The circumstance of the long dry period and its ending made rainwater and its effects interesting and worthy of attention in ways that seemed new and almost strange. I opened myself up and became present to them, before moving on.
On my way home I was caught by a brief deluge. I made a brief video of rain on a puddle. I got wet too, yet it somehow completed my walk.
September 2, 2025
A NEW DAY
the pink clouds of this dawn
illuminate a waiting day:
welcome rain may fall.
August 22, 2025
LATE AUGUST 2025: SETTLING INTO AUTUMN
It is evening and for me autumnal. The sky offers the water a soft light, seemingly pink and grey. The water reflects this back, adding its own hint of mist. It is a tranquil scene.
For the first time this year, I feel a tug towards the Equinox, just under a month away. These canal waters are gentle, but they are drawn from the River Severn, site of the Severn Bore (1). Perhaps the waters are nudging something – maybe the water – in me.
A little later, facing into the declining sun (below) I see the sunset and its effects. I notice the concentrated power of the orb as it appears to reach the earth, and the way in which this energy disperses into the sky. The colour coding shifts from intense white to yellow to red-orange to an orange becoming increasingly grey. I live at latitude 52 north, and the sunset is getting earlier every day, now 8.15pm. Another autumnal feature.
Autumn is also the season of the fruit harvest. This year, many people are commenting that the fruit harvest is arriving early. Below, against the background of a clear blue daytime sky, an apple tree is fruiting. The tree is close to Gloucester Cathedral and may belong to it. Medieval Gloucester was a place of churches and priories. It was also a place of orchards, many of them cultivated by monks and friars. The picture points to natural and cultural continuity, though the fruit are early this year. I am no longer at a point tension between seasons. I am already settled in autumn.
(1) The Severn Bore is a natural tide phenomenon occurring in the River Severn in England, where a large wave surges upstream. It’s caused by the Atlantic tide pushing into the Bristol Channel and funneling it into the narrowing Severn Estuary, creating a more powerful wave that can be up to two meters high and a speed of up to 21 km/h. The Bore travels up the Severn Estuary, from Awre to Gloucester, a distance of 25 miles. It is strongest in the equinoxes (especially spring) and a popular challenge for surfers, kayakers and paddleboarders.
August 17, 2025
PARK TREES IN A DRY SEASON
Yesterday evening I went to my local park and was struck by changes in the trees. I seemed to have walked into a premature autumn. Trees were shedding leaves. To me, the trees in the picture above appeared distressed. Looking at them again now, I wonder about disease as well as simple unseasonal shedding.
In the park, I found beauty too, with new colours becoming manifest. In my part of the world, the latter part of August has always included intimations of Autumn. But 2025 feels unusually dramatic and unusually early. Some trees, like the horse chestnut below, seem to be shedding their leaves particularly fast.
Other trees seemed to be weathering this period more easily, like these medlars now bearing their fruit – bringing autumn into August in an apparently unstressed way.
Standing back, I could see new patterns in the no longer quite so green Greenwood. They illustrate new conditions and are, for better or worse, harbingers of a new time. There will be more changes. I hope that the trees will continue to adapt and stay in place for many years to come. But nothing is certain, in this time of climate crisis and the rise of willed ignorance about its severity.
The sunsets continue to get earlier. I walked into one as I left the park. The sun asserted it’s power in a late stage of its descent. It’s been a hot summer as well as a dry one. I took this powerful, almost too powerful, late summer solar image with me as I walked back to my home.
August 10, 2025
ROWAN’S LATE SUMMER SIGN
Where I live, late summer is often the warmest time of year, and the driest. This is likely to be the case in 2025, already a warm dry year. But in the sun’s apparent annual journey, it is also a time of waning. Sunrise is an hour later than at the solstice, and sunset is forty-five minutes earlier. This change will accelerate from now on.
I do not see waning as negative. There is power and beauty in this ‘waning’. In the rowan (aka mountain ash) picture above, the berries are moving from tentative orange to bright scarlet, an effect of the seasonal changes in the light. Rowan is an ogham tree, linking a group of indigenous Irish and British trees to an ancient Irish alphabet. Its Gaelic name luis means bright or flame.
Looking at the year as a whole, some of the berries will still be holding on beyond midwinter, by which time the tree, which can live for up to 200 years, will be making its annual comeback. At that time, as described in William Anderson’s justly venerated in Green Man poem (1):
The hungry birds harry the last berries of rowan
But white is her bark in the darkness of rain
‘I rise with the sap’, says the Green Man
‘I rise with the sap’ says he. (1)
The resilience of the tree runs throughout its year and lifetime. In late summer specifially, this resilience is manifested in berries at their brightest, against the backdrop of a still blue evening sky.
Traditionally Rowan has strong associations with protection, spiritual protection not least. According to The Green Man Tree Oracle (2), ‘it can also offer insight into danger through the invocation of higher wisdom’. Ancient Druid shamans were said to breathe in the smoke from rowan fires to initiate a trance state that allowed them to predict coming danger.
The Druids also planted rowan, as well as oak and ash, in their sacred groves. But Celtic Druids were not the only people to place a high value on the rowan tree. Our modern word rowan is probably descended from the Norse runas – narrowly translated as ‘charm’ but in fact bringing the wider runic and Norse traditions with it.
When I encountered the rowan I was strongly moved by it. It stood out from everything else. I had previously decided not to take pictures on my walk, but felt compelled to change my mind. I didn’t need ancient lore to feel more alert and heartened. It’s just that the framing it provides added cultural depth. The encounter with rowan put a spring in my step and was a highlight of my evening.
(1) William Anderson Green Man: archetype of our oneness with the Earth Harper Collins: London & San Francisco, 1990
(2) John Matthews & Will Worthington The Green Man Tree Oracle: ancient wisdom from the greenwood London: Connections, 2003
August 9, 2025
MOON
This August moon
Full and Risen
Transforms an urban scene.
(Picture taken at 9.45 pm Friday 8 August.)
August 7, 2025
HARVESTING INSIGHT
Noticing a single corn stalk under our neighbouring birch trees, I wonder whether the seed simply blew in or was planted by an unknown hand. If the latter, what was their intention? I realise that I will never know.
I do know how much I enjoy its presence in this space at this time. I experience it as a miracle inviting gratitude and it has marked the seasonal moment for me, this first harvest of a now declining year.
With increasing clarity I understand that I do not work well with personified and individualised images of the divine. Something seems subtly off, as if I am failing to sound my own authentic note in the Great Song of the world.
I believe that we are given different gifts in our encounters with the Cosmos, leading to legitimately different understandings. When I lean in to the notion of divine personality – even when using the term ‘Spirit’ in that sense – I am not fully living my own truth. I subtly disempower myself and weaken my connection.
For in my universe, when I rest in my own clarity, there is no separation between nature (including culture) and spirit. In the awkward activity of identification and labelling, I answer to terms like animist, panentheist and nondualist.
These words are approximations, with the power to be distracting and slightly depressing. I can find words that point to my experience well enough. But the explanatory words, the more formal and generalised terms, feel clumsy. There’s a necessary level of unknowing that these isms don’t recognise.
When consciously living in spirit, I am neither alone, as a single human person, nor am I with another being. I am simply in a different dimension of embodied awareness, supported and empowered by the bubbling source from which I spring. For me, Nature is more than the ‘nature’ of dualist spiritualities and of the scientific humanism that grew out of them.
As I harvest the learning, or relearning, of this lesson, I renew my commitment to practice and path, once again revising the beginning and end of the modern Druid’s prayer (1). I move from from ‘Grant, Spirit your protection, and in protection, strength … ‘ to ‘In spirit I find protection, and in protection, strength …’. I end with ‘and in the love of all existences, the love of this radiant Cosmos’ rather than ‘the love of God/Goddess/Spirit and all goodness’. These small changes formalise and anchor my understanding. For me, they are an important affirmation, illuminating my path.
(1) Traditionally, this prayer runs:
Grant O God/Goddess/Spirit, your protection,
And in protection, strength,
And in strength, understanding,
And in understanding, knowledge,
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it
And in the love of it, the love of all existences
And in the love of all existences, the love of God/Goddess/Spirit and all goodness”.
NB Providing the options of God/Goddess/Spirit is I think an OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) innovation. The original version, from the late 18th century, simply said ‘God’. Some modern Druids say ‘God and Goddess’.
August 2, 2025
RICHARD’S WOOD
Richard’s Wood, Alney Island, was planted in 1983. It commemorates the 500th anniversary of the Charter given to the people of Gloucester by King Richard III. He was their Duke before he became King. People here have never quite seen him as the stage villain portrayed by William Shakespeare. Or, if so, as only one Royal stage villain among others.
Three years ago I wrote an Alney Island post where I ended by criticising how Richard’s Wood has been developed and managed (1). I don’t think I was wrong, but this time I felt very different, less willing to judge.
It was a hot day. I wanted to be outside. Being under cover in a wood not hard to negotiate was ideal. I strolled into enchantment. I surrendered to the trees and the way in which, together, they covered and held me.
In this state of attention, I don’t think much about botanical facts or lore. I respond to shape, texture, smell, subtle sounds, colour, light, light, shade and wonder at Nature’s variety.
I spent longer in the wood than I expected. I relished every moment I was there. I am now a friend of this space and expect to visit more often.
(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2022/09/06/after-rain/
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