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Good morningÌý

I’m thinking about Home this week, because we’ve been clearing out the family house, getting it ready to sell, nearly fifty years after we moved in.Ìý

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During a break from loading books into boxes, I was standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the back garden.Ìý In that moment I was so held by the past that I didn’t see the garden as it is now, but as it was when we first came.

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It was a thrilling wild place for five children who’d come from the town.Ìý The grass was shin-deep, and the garden was heavy and green with trees. To the left of the kitchen stood a tiny shed, with blue flaking paint, which might have been a stable once.Ìý Brambles and shrubs grew over one another all the way along the low stone wall next to the farmer’s field.Ìý We squeezed through scratchy, dense undergrowth, climbed the trees by different routes, and fell into clumps of nettles.Ìý We played football and hide and seek, and explored the hills and woods in a gang, staying out till tea time. We were the generation who were told to go out and play, and in my memory, outdoors was as much our home, as the house.

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The naturalist John Muir, who died 100 years ago, emigrated from Scotland to America as a child. He was a man who made his home in wild places.Ìý He would go off to the mountains, ‘the heart of things’ as he wrote, for days and weeks on end.Ìý He believed that human beings were restored to their best and truest selves in the unblemished natural world - ‘God's wildness’ he called it.

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The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, used different words:

‘.. For all this, nature is never spent.

There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things’.ÌýÌýÌýÌý

Amen.