A MAY’S EVE GIFT
Such casual abundance
In each passing moment:
A May’s Eve gift.
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: Wheel of the Year
April 27, 2025
TOWARDS BELTANE 2025: BLUE SKY HEALING
Thursday 24 April was a landmark afternoon for my wife Elaine and me. We were able to walk, sit and have coffee in Gloucester Docks. Such ordinary and taken for granted pleasures – until April last year, when Elaine broke her hip. Later, as her bones slowly recovered, her underlying heart problems were triggered at the turn of the year, setting back her overall recovery.
We are in a different place now. Elaine’s physical recovery, and her recovery of agency, are creating a new reality. The picture above is generally tranquil, yet includes the energy of a seagull in flight. The sun is getting warmer. We can relax a little, and celebrate, enjoying the promise of a new season, in the run-up to Beltane 2025.
Now, contemplating the image of a still boat against the background of Alney Island in its spring abundance, I feel grateful for the moment and grateful for our lives.
April 17, 2025
A NEW LENS
Yesterday I bought a new phone. I find this process stressful and have been putting it off for a long time. But now I have the phone, I can celebrate a new camera. These pictures were taken between 5.30 and 7 pm yesterday evening, when the sun didn’t set until after 8.
My celebration of the camera, here, was also a celebration of clear light and a more abundant greening. The spaces are familiar, but their specific manifestation and my specific experience were, as always, new. My feelings were those of simple gratitude, pleasure and appreciation.
Above, I enjoyed the varied colours and forms of leaves, and the effects of sunlight on them. Below, I noticed the abundance of leaves and catkins on a birch tree.
Towards the water margin, I saw tangled green fecundity on the ground, and the freshness of full rich spring, at the same time utterly magical and yet so familiar, so taken-for-granted that it is easily passed without noticing.
Still closer to the water, and looking out over it, is another familiar scene, this time with contrasts of light and shade and emphasising the energy of rippling water.
Finally, big sky and the power of blue. I was especially drawn to the apparent division of the water. It looks like a tidal effect in the canal, but I am not sure of the cause. Within my contemplation, I am happy with the mystery.
April 2, 2025
CONTEMPLATIVE DIARY?
Recently I have wondered whether to change the name of this blog from Contemplative Inquiry to Contemplative Diary. I won’t, because the inquiry focus has been very strong over the years. It is ancestral to the diary approach and a deep influence upon it. Some of the older inquiry posts continue to be read. The most popular is A Parable About a Parable first published in July 2018 – https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2018/07/31/.
But most of my current posts are not like that. They tend to be more informal, more embedded in daily life, more obviously situated in time, place and everyday personal experience. My most recent post, Spring Forward – https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2025/03/31/ – is a case in point.
This shift in emphasis developed in the years of the Covid pandemic and is characterised by living the Wheel of the Year day-by-day (rather than festival by festival) in a specific location. I use my own photographs much more than in the early days of the blog. For me, these changes fit with a name like Contemplative Diary.
Yet the diary approach is itself a fruit of inquiry. It has emerged as I become relatively less concerned with fundamental questions. They are now settled for me as far as they can be in this life. My current work comes out of an individual life practice grounded in modern Druidry, with a firm ethical basis and a light touch in formal ritual and meditation. All of these are illuminated by the sense of a divine presence from which the world, including me, is not separate.
Contemplation and inquiry are still at the heart of my work, in simpler and more relaxed forms than was right for the early years. The diary approach marks an emerging phase of my contemplative inquiry, rather than a break with it. Where it will take me going forward, I cannot yet say.
March 31, 2025
SPRING FORWARD
I’m on my first canal walk in a while. The picture above shows a small inlet into the bankside woods. It is Sunday 30 March, the first day of British Summer Time. I am encountering a long sunlit evening and feeling energised by the experience. I am drawing power from the clarity and strength of the light.
Sunset will be around 7.30 pm. The pictures above and below were taken a little before 6. I am glad to see blackthorn, a wood said to be used for wizard’s staffs, proclaiming the magic of spring.
A little later, I focus my attention on a vivid yet tranquil blue sky, presiding over the canal scene below. I have the same powerful sense of of clarity and strength in the light, and of drawing energy from it.
Later on, at about 6.45 pm, I find a softer, gentler quality of light as I walk homewards through the woods. Looking down, I see it on my path.
Looking up, I see soft light on slender branches and the foliage below them. It feels like celebration.
My final image is of sunlight reflected in Gloucester Docks, both on a warehouse window and on the water. The sun is low now and beginning to set. Rather than pointing at it, as it descends, I point away from it to honour and record its power in another way. This marks the completion of a rejuvenating and regenerative spring forward walk.
March 20, 2025
SPRING EQUINOX 2025
Blessings of the season! The picture above was taken at 6.46 am, a little over half an hour after sunrise here in Gloucester. It is 20 March, the day of the Spring Equinox, which will be at 9.01 am this year. It is traditionally a time of celebration, a point of balance as we move into the light half of the year and the promise it brings. After a tough, and largely housebound year, I dare to hope that Elaine and I will be able to widen our horizons as her healing continues.
March 11, 2025
EARLY SPRING: AFFIRMING LIFE
I am connecting with spring and its urgent affirmation of life – its green shine and fecundity. It is the sunrise season, the season of early growth. For me, where I live, the immediate pre-equinox period often generates a strong feeling of dynamism and emergent potential. I am in sync with the awakening earth.
Elaine’s return from hospital and the enhanced clinical support she is receiving are helping me to live this season more fully. In our joint lives we are both feeling more agency in shaping a new phase in our life together.
In this moment I feel refreshed and optimistic within my Druid contemplative path. I have adjusted my formal practice so that I have two practice sessions in the day, both of them roughly twenty minutes long. The first, at the beginning of the day and standing, is affirmative and dynamic. It includes body and energy work and a theme of healing and rejuvenation. The second, at the end of the day and sitting, is contemplative. It includes breathwork, a mantra meditation using beads, and prayer. In the modern Druid manner it includes a commitment to the collectively imperilled qualities of love, peace and justice. This shift is having a renewing and reinvigorating effect on me, as befits the season: another way of gratefully affirming the gift of a human life.
March 9, 2025
BLOSSOMING
Celebrating a moment as sunlight floods the room. I am happy to point my phone camera more or less at the sun. It is not the done thing and the result may be odd. But it does reflect my experience of the moment itself.
My wife Elaine has just come home from a week in hospital. It was a necessary week, and she is the better for it. Nonetheless we both have a slight sadness that it coincided with the best and brightest weather of 2025 so far, while our attention was otherwise engaged.
This moment is one of celebration of her return to an apartment wearing its warmest and brightest face. It is a contemplative moment, extending in time until it morphs into gentle action. We go outside. Elaine basks in the sun, recuperating and healing.
I am energised and curious. I move closer to the blossoms I saw through the window and take a picture. I am grateful to be reunited with Elaine and freed from my own worst fears. I am grateful for a spring that is now offering both brightness and warmth. I am glad of this day.
February 26, 2025
WINTER’S END
4.30 pm, 25 February 2025. Sunrays are caught in willow branches. The sun is a little stronger today than it was in full winter. The willows have begun a tentative greening. But there is much shadow in this picture. The day has begun its decline.
The world retains a winter feel for me. I aware of the change in my local park, but I do not altogether trust this spring. In the moment of taking this picture, I see a world in shadow, softly darkened. This is partly because of where I have chosen to stand. It is the image I seem to want.
In the brighter picture below, I show daffodils growing among dead leaves. Daffodils are iconic harbingers of spring, yet not my sole focus. Both pictures were taken intuitively and without any mentally registered intent. It seems as if something in me wanted to make a statement.
I know and accept that I am in the winter of my life. In the wheel of my own life, I can’t quite see how my winter will move into spring, certainly in any personal sense. Dissolving into interbeing is easier to imagine.
My customised Druid liturgy names winter as the season of dying and regeneration. It has associations with law and faith. I understand law in a karmic or ‘natural law’ sense. But it can also be an acknowledgement of the nature we see around us. Faith, in part, concerns the willingness to accept dying and regeneration without knowing what they are like. In my last post, I discussed (1) ‘being nobody’. My current reflections take this suggestion a step further. Evidently, I still have much to learn.
(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2025/02/21/being-nobody
February 12, 2025
SHADES OF GREY
I am standing in a favourite spot, enjoying the expanse of water in front of me. I am missing the sun. I have been missing it for awhile, as the bright days of early February disappear into memory. I am living among shades of grey.
Standing in this space, I feel both sadness and reassurance. The late winter has turned gloomy and I am somewhat depleted. Not much energy or bounce. At the same time I continue to feel held, powerfully, within this landscape and my life.
Looking now at my apparently monochromatic picture, I see subtle variations within the grey. I am drawn to the ripples and reflections in the water. I am aware of the shapes of buildings and trees against a background leaden sky in which a seagull is flying. There are life and movement here, and their promise that the wheel of the year will continue to turn.
Contemplative Inquiry 