I’m just back from spending most of a weekend in the woods (Barrhill woodland Festival 2022) with the Cluaran part of Wordsmith Crafts. We created a “Land of Legends” where people could listen to epic stories, learn to braid cord friendship bracelets, and test their skills with ancient games. This was part of a wider range of activities all set in a wonderful woodland.
The festival is a gift, a promise waiting to be realised. Most of the events were free to take part in, and all people needed to do was make the effort to walk into the woodland. Those who chose to enter into the promise were able to recieve a rich harvest.
Our activities worked within the woods to help people enter an imaginary realm where time became fluid. The past became present. In the present we could glimpse squirrels in the trees, taste the ripe bramble, and drink in the leafy greens and ruddy browns of the wood. A feast for the physical senses awakening the awareness of the senses we have which make human being more than simple physics.
This song was sent in by Alison. It is part of a growing awareness that something has gone badly wrong in our human relationship with our environment. We have assumed the earth is natural resources to be exploited, or in a more positive sense farmed. We have forgotten that we are dependant on and part of this environment.
Sometimes a gift is given and is a remote exchange of stuff. At other times a gift is the physical component in a deep relationship of mutual exchange and promise. The relationship is the environment within which gifts can be harvested.
Back to the song, can we keep the gift? Not if we smother it in plastic and break it. Much of the time Christians focus on God’s promise to us, and the moral aspects of that. But without an earth to grow in, without bodies for our spirits to live in, or animal souls where our eternal souls incarnate are we only experiencing a reduced version of the gift.
Can we keep the promise, are we able to? Perhaps that starts with re-discovering a relationship lost through developments like urban living, and industrial farming. In our theology by remembering the the significance of the risen Jesus eating fish with friends. In our heritage by rediscovering the green men built into the doors of churches looking out. In the woods, remembering wholeness and bathing in the deep green love that we loose at our peril.