A NEW DAY
the pink clouds of this dawn
illuminate a waiting day:
welcome rain may fall.
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: Dawn
June 19, 2025
BRIGHT MORNING
Early this morning I sat in contemplation of some geraniums in pots, for me a good Druid focus of attention. Purchased and tended by my wife Elaine, who is now mobile and active once more, they shone in the early morning light. This was about 6.45 am, some two hours after dawn, on 19 June. It is two days before the Solstice. Where did the time go?
I notice how my eye is drawn to plants and light effects. I find them nourishing and enabling. This has been a theme in my life for awhile. It is though sunlight and the plant world offer hope and reassurance in a bleak, shocking and disorienting historical moment. Life insists on flourishing. I can insist on flourishing too. I am not distracted from the wider world but resourced to engage with it.
On a convenient lamp post, the seagull seeks an opportunity. This midsummer world is alive.
July 23, 2024
‘MYSTERY’ IN A MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD
“Half-way between the certainty of science on one hand, and the supernatural on the other, is mystery …. Mystery is central to enchanted experience because enchantment is not a rational process of recognition, categorization, knowledge, facts or rationalizations. It is, instead, a pure experience of sensing and being.” (1)
I saw the heron on 11 October 2020, in the first year of the pandemic and just a little after dawn. I had been walking for about forty minutes, beginning in near darkness and experiencing the gradual coming of the light. I described this walk at the time as an “enchanted meander” at a liminal point in that day (2).
My encounter with the heron was unexpected and I responded with “delighted surprise”. Four years later, reflecting on the memory, I note that I was able to experience delighted surprise from within stillness. In that moment I was a still human sharing space with a still heron on a still early morning. So the heron stayed in place, not needing to fly away. Beyond that there was no communing, but this was somehow blessing enough. Stillness of this kind, in contact with our more than human world, allows space for an enhanced bandwidth of experience. It is, perhaps, an opening to what Arran Stibbe calls “mystery”.
On that morning, my enhanced experience was partly displaced into the taking of a picture and also the wider purpose of my walk. That’s fine, a good enough choice. But I wonder what would have happened if I, like the heron, had stayed in place.
(1) Arran Stibbe Econarrative: Ethics, Ecology and the Search for New Narratives to Live By London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2020/10/14/walking-towards-sunrise/
February 5, 2023
RED SKY AT DAWN
It is 7.30 am on Sunday 5 February 2023. Every dawn is different. Opening to this one, I am drawn, above all, into clarity and redness. I feel as if I have just about caught up with myself, after five days in a new home. In traditional language, my soul has caught up with me.
In recent days I have felt more like a slightly dated machine, reliable in getting the job done, though not super fast or shiny. Now I’m aware again of being a person, a living presence in communion with a living world. The key moment was when, yesterday afternoon, I found my Tibetan bells in a shopping bag with some electrical equipment. I feared that they had left me during the move. It was a more than expected relief to re-discover them.
Today, in celebration, I used them to demarcate a morning practice that I hadn’t done at all for a week. I was tentative, in a new and not yet fully established space. But the practice grounded me all the same. It set me up to meet the dawn. It’s been said, I think by Douglas Harding, that we are, essentially, clear awake space and capacity for the world. As today magnificently dawned, it seemed that way to me.
September 12, 2022
STATES OF LIGHT
This is the face of dawn outside my window, just after 6.30 a.m. I welcome the mid September day, appreciating this moment in the year. I like the infusion of pink into grey clouds, and the suggestion of warmth in the old church tower.
I have now grown used to getting up in the dark, and to beginning my morning practice with an awareness of darkness outside. The nurturing dark and enabling light are both part of my experience. A transient time of balance has begun. It feels numinous to me, and a time of great potential. I am energetically alert and alive.
Later, a little before 9 a.m., I am walking by the Gloucester-Sharpness canal. I notice light on leaves, and its influence on the gaps between trunks. The view, here, is over water. But it is the influence of sunlight that makes the greatest impression on me – captured in the picture as well as in real time.
By contrast, the spaces furthest away from the light source are able to show their earthiness, their woodiness and the depth of their green. The light is everywhere, but it is subtle and not over-bearing. It reveals its influence in different ways. Rather than radiating raw power, it allows possibilities in this small, fragile habitat. Contemplating autumnal states of light, as I approach the autumn equinox, I have been shown something about power and its manifestation.
January 18, 2021
ANOTHER DAWN
It is the dawning of 18 January 2021. The stark, bare beauty of the trees is set against a promising sky. Is the world beginning to open up? I can see a leaning in to Imbolc in this dawn, and a loosening in the hold of winter as the year moves on.
I cannot run out into this dawn, as I would like. I am in formal isolation, with a home testing kit for Covid-19 winging its way from NHS/Amazon. My symptoms are ambiguous. Covid-19 may not be the cause, but there is a real chance that it might. Meanwhile people in my 70’s age group are about to get vaccinated. Interesting times, for sure.
For me, the best way of addressing this is day at a time, whilst also assessing possible challenges sufficiently to be prepared for them. From a Druid perspective, I am finding the nemeton of my practice circle a tremendous resource. From the beginning of this year I have had both a morning and an evening circle. The former is built around energising myself and affirming both being and world. The second is contemplative, and built around both walking and sitting meditation. Each lasts for about half an hour.
I notice that I draw on Druid (largely OBOD) liturgy (1) , with modifications, quite a lot – for example, the approach to sacred space and use of the Druid prayer. This locates me within a training and community which add strength even at a distance. There are also aspects of practice drawn from other traditions and others which I have developed myself. The package overall retains a basic simplicity. It is a distillation of my contemplative inquiry – in a sense re-telling its unique story twice a day. I am finding this enormously helpful. I am reminded that the journey is what I had hoped it would be. This recognition holds me up, and is a dawning in itself.
(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2020/08/27/my-druid-prayer/
October 14, 2020
WALKING TOWARDS SUNRISE
Sunday, 11 October, 6.40 am. My plan is to walk towards the dawn of a new day, but I take time to stop and photograph this liminal moment. It is still, on this normally busy road. It makes me almost nostalgic for the early days of lockdown in the spring.
In this moment, there are no cars and no other people. I am fine with the artificial light. I like the contrast of the street lights (bright and focused) with the softer light in the sky, dim yet with a promise of expansiveness. I enjoy the shadows and the presence, too, of outright darkness at this stage of my walk.
It takes me twenty minutes of enchanted meander to reach my next point, pictured above. The scene is inherently more spacious. Water and sky are prominent. It takes notable artefacts to make their presence felt. The main theme of the picture, as I look in a generally eastern direction, is the coming of the light. Clouds do not obscure it. The buildings have become more than silhouettes. There are the beginnings of colour and the detail it brings. I judge it OK to walk on the canal path itself, just visible on my right.
Another twenty minutes and the light seems to predominate, though I am not yet in full daylight. I am on the canal path. Even though the surroundings of the towpath are lushly green, the world I stand in is a little dusky, or dawny if there were such a word. Crepuscular. Looking up, I see pinkness in the sky, white clouds, hints of blue. I feel heartened and strangely moved by the effects of light on the autumn trees. They give me a warm sense of walking towards the sunrise, and encourage me to move on.
The picture immediately above is not part of my plan. It stems from delighted surprise followed by purposeful calm. Knowing about the heron in advance, I would likely have botched my picture in an anxious, clumsy effort to put the bird on record. I always have before. I think that herons fly away from me out of disdain rather than fear. This time I am a quiet human in a quiet world. I stand still for awhile and am almost elegant in my use of the phone. I wait for an intuited ‘right time’ before pressing the button. There is no drama at all. I do not know if the heron even notices me. The whole incident feels like a blessing of the still early morning.
Now, further on in my walk, the sun is on its ascent through the sky and I can picture it indirectly. The contrast between the sun kissed light areas and the shady ones is strong and vivid. I notice that, as the fading trees accept that their season is over, the ‘parasitic’ mistletoe – even the Druid Plant Oracle (1) calls it that – is gleefully green.
Now I am on my way back home. What draws my attention, after a little exploration, is the white owl. To me it looks very present and collected, situated just where it wants to be. It seems also to be acting as gatekeeper for its own arch.
I make stream of consciousness connections. I began my walk on the Bath Road. Bath is less than 30 miles away. There, the Romans turned a Celtic shrine into a city and called it Aquae Sulis (see http://www.romanbaths.co.uk/), acknowledging Sulis the Celtic goddess of the shrine. She was concerned with its waters and their healing potential whilst doubling up as a solar deity as well. The Romans called her Sulis Minerva, and that links her with owl wisdom. The white owl has a rich hinterland of associations for me. It makes the encounter significant. I note that two resonant avian images have met me on this walk into the sunrise, offering avenues for further contemplation.
(1) Philip & Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druid Plant Oracle: Working with the Magical Flora of the Druid Tradition London: Connections, 2007. Illustrated by Will Worthington.
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