The Gentle Hum
Listening quietly under the ‘bright sadness’ of a blossom tree and reading the book of nature. For BBC Radio 4. Listen here.
I bumped into my friend Andy yesterday — he was standing, motionless, under a cherry tree.
He is endearingly eccentric so I wasn’t too surprised but I wandered up and asked him what he was doing.
I’m listening to the humming, he said, can you hear it? I invited him to explain himself.
It’s the blossom, he said. When you pass a tree in blossom, stand quietly underneath and you will hear the bees buzzing… as pollination takes place.
Later in the day, when the street was empty, I tried this experiment. It took a moment but there it was, the gentle hum and buzz. It felt good to tune in to some slower news.
I was reminded of the lyrics in a sublime song by the Finn brothers of Crowded House, ‘This gentle hum/ Is just begun…’
In early April we are in blossom tide, peak blossom.
People in parks and streets everywhere are walking into each other. Not because they’re looking down at their phones but because they’re looking up at the riot of pink and white falling on them in the breeze.
The National Trust is inviting us to take a ‘blossom break’ — their research finds that we all feel more positive when we spend time in nature. Nine in ten of the people it polled said the sight of blossom on trees or hedgerows made them happy.
The blossom signals spring and invites our cocooned wintry spirits to bloom.
And yet this beautiful blooming moment is brief — its arrival carrying the ache of its own departure. It is what the word poignant was coined for. A parable for the evanescence of this life.
The blossom coincides with the Christian season of Lent, the journey to Easter, which the orthodox church names a season of ‘bright sadness’
Blossom tide too is a season of bright sadness, as if these pollinating trees know something we don’t.
In the C4th, the north African Christian Augustine described two books of divine revelation — the book of nature and the book of scripture.
Living with the Iona Community in Scotland last year I came across a way of reading this book of nature. It’s a practice called terra divina — a kind of imaginative, walking meditation, out in the wild.
A contemplative way of relating with the natural world — a tree or river, a beach or bird — in which nature is recognized as sacred text. Both transcendent and transient.
John Muir, often called the founder of the modern conservation movement, recommended that we allow nature’s peace to flow into us ‘as sunshine flows into trees.’
Now that’s a sacred text. So today I’ll find myself a blossom tree, stand quietly underneath and listen to the gentle hum….
