Behold, behold

"To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often paradoxically, by getting lost......

Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword in the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees. In As you Like It, the banished Duke Senior goes and lives in the forests of Arden like Robin Hood, and in Midsummer Nights' Dream the magical metamorphosis of the lovers takes place in a wood 'outside Athens' that is quite clearly an English Wood, full of the faeries and the Robin Goodfellows of our folklore.....

The Chinese count wood as the fifth element, and Jung considered trees an archetype. Nothing can compare with these larger than life organisms for signalling changes in the natural world. They are our barometers of the weather and the changing seasons. We tell the time of year by them. Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through winter."

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

Roger Deakin

This post is for Good Friday. The hymn is traditional to the somber liturgies which take place on the day the Church recalls Christ's death. Actually, it is one of my favourites, and has been stuck in my head for weeks. I have deliberately juxtaposed the work of Roger Deakin here because, for all the sadness, tribulation and horror of the crucifixion, Good Friday is a liturgy of renewal. To enter into the wood of the cross is to pass into the realities of this world: it is where you travel to find yourself, often paradoxically, by getting lost......The cross is the barometer of my spiritual weather and changing seasons. I tell the time of year by it. It has the capacity to rise to the heavens and connect me to the divine, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm me through the cold and dark of winter. Behold....Enter.....