Earth Prayers: An Introduction

This may very well be a beaconing in, a homecoming of sorts, but not at any remarkable point on this journey, however, it is a threshold all the same and one which has been brewing for some time.

Welcome to Earth Prayers, a collection of nature writings from deep down the garden. Mostly written from the table my mother gave me when we moved to this house, a little rusted, but a good spot to lean back and watch the bats as they pass, fleetingly before the dusk truly settles.

Its name, something I’ve been reading¹, and as with so many things, magpied from the books and images which pass through these otherwise too-well occupied days of things I can hardly describe, but make up a totality of fullness I never could have imagined before it arrived, not unlike the migratory creatures I have been tracking appear above these coastal skies.

A place to hold onto these moments so fleeting, in the midst of the disorientation of a human world which cannot help itself but force beyond all limits of humanity and what might be considered humane, I feel myself now, still in the chaos of it. A chance, this place and time, often just before bedtime, to focus my attention on another sort of world whose rhythms can be known and magically predicted, where a different sort of limitlessness is not unbounded but utterly untamed within its fixtures.

This is what holds me, and I invite you on the journey, however winding. We first dive down, on the wingbeat and glide of a swift and up again on the the unfettered rise of the pipistrelles, the sounds of the long afternoons and of the night, the city, and all the space that sits between us and what could be, but also of what we already are and must try very hard not to forget.

¹ To Carol Ann Duffy, whose recent collection this name was taken from and from which inspiration was drawn.