'There lives the dearest freshness deep down things'

The hedgerows are returning!

'There lives the dearest freshness deep down things' 
....one of my favourite ever lines of poetry ❤️

...and resonant too with Cornish hedgerows :) in all their beauty and lines, colours, shapes, smells, textures and the joy expressed that just 'Is' 🌿❤️

I have a very old copy of poems and writings by Gerard Manley Hopkins and it is treasured... His words leap out beyond the pages, they 'flame out, like shining from shook foil' to me.

God has always meant the same thing as Essential nature, Spirit, Aliveness, Love, Pure Consciousness to me...not an entity or 'object'. 

'God is the permanent underlying substratum of all that exists...permanent, unchanging and self-luminous' - Ramana Maharshi ✨ 
​
- just as Hopkins' nature and the divine x


God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
​
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
​
#felting #poetry #gmhopkins