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Rivers of Memory (2)

(1) Pishon                   (3) Havilah, Gihon and Beyond

Pishon & Havilah

Pishon… that flows around the whole land of Havilah where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellyium and onyx stone are there.’
                                                     Genesis 2: 10-12

These early names carry echoes of a homeland, Eden meaning pleasure. Havilah means stretch of sand, a dry or coastal land associated in the collective memory with dry savannah, desert or coastal dunes, yet watered by the waterways of our first home. Fertility in the midst of a parched land of fragrant gum trees, precious alluvial deposits and banded quartz. This memory, handed down orally from our earliest understanding of home, is earlier than the ‘Garden’ of Adam and Eve. That was not Eden; the garden was in Eden, a dim, half-recollected image of another land in the west, unnamed and scarcely understood, from which Eden was eastward.

The only thing we are told which might identify Havilah is that there was good quality gold there, and bdellyium and onyx. Gold must be panned or mined and refined. It must be melted, moulded and crafted; bdellyium is a fragrant resin or gum from which perfumes and unguents were made. Onyx is a dark, banded agate, often treated by immersion in sugar or honey solution for several weeks, then soaked in acid solution turning its natural colour to bands of black and white. A jewel in its own right, the dark and light layers lent themselves to the production of cameos. The worlds choicest supply is in Algeria; one of the earliest onyx quarries was in Egypt.

The story of Pishon and Havilla would have been an oral tradition from long before the development of writing. Gold, bdellyium and onyx imply a level of expertise, co-operation and sophistication way beyond what one would expect in such an early society, but this has become a written account. By the time of the development of writing these skills were well developed, and writers have always been ready to add an editorial comment, here illustrating the land of Havilah with products known to readers.

To come, the final part: rivers Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates.

(1) Pishon                   (3) Havilah, Gihon and Beyond

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Rivers of Memory (1)

(2) Pishon and Havilah                    (3) Havilah, Gihon and Beyond

There are personal and race memories: the past, woven into the present in language, in relationships, and in stories. Words and names have roots in history. Etymology, the study of the origins of words, can throw light on the history of humanity. With what we know already, with archeology, palentology, and old stories that predate writing, we can get a glimmer, a tiny vision, of our past.

There were once four rivers: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates.

Pishon

‘A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon…’ Genesis 2: 10,11

In 1924 in the southern heart of Africa, limestone quarrymen in Taung in the Kalahari, found the skull of a female, early pre-human child, who lived and died there two and a half million years ago. Taung is some fifty miles from the African township of Bethlehem, but there was no Bethlehem then, no Taung, no Kalahari. We might not recognise the humanity in her family group with modern eyes, but it was there; tenacious, adaptable. They had survived for a million years and spread throughout Africa in the tropical rainforest through valleys and plains, following the provider of fertility: water. Today we have given these waterways names: the Orange River, the Limpopo, the Save, the Zambezi, and its tributary the Shire into which Lake Nyasa empties, falling, some fifty miles downstream, over the Kholombidzo Falls to the coast. As well as these great rivers there are lakes like seas. Lakes we call Tanganika, Rukwa, Jivu, Rwanda, Mobutu Kyoga, Turkana and many others. Greatest of all is Lake Victoria.

Somewhere here, in what is still among the most densely populated regions of Africa, early humans found their voice, language. We have few clues to the nature of their early speech: just a collection of root sounds common to later tongues, but home must have a name. Crows are said to have two main calls: kia! which signifies returning to their roost, and the deeper kaa! which signifies flying away from the roost to feed. These two cries can be heard in competition in any flock. They are voting. Whichever cry predominates determines the action of the flock.

One of the early root sounds in human language is pi, associated with drinking. Perhaps it came from the lapping sound. Another is a group of sounds all associated with water and beginning with s such as Spu: spit, sru: flow or stream and snu: to bathe, swim, float or flow. These sounds are not a language, they are roots from which language springs. Just possibly they had two sounds that joined meant home: pi-snu (drink-flow) or Pishon.

… the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellyium and onyx stone are there.’

                                                     Genesis 2: 10-12

(2) Pishon and Havilah                    (3) Havilah, Gihon and Beyond

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Dame Julian

Next Julian

When I began the series of pages on the remarkable Dame Julian of Norwich I expected to complete it in June. This was an under-estimate but there is a good side. Having been out of internet and even pen and paper reach for a while (or at least not having time available for good fun reasons!) I need to write this to keep you up to date, which gives me the chance to explain a few things.

Why am I doing it? Dame Julian, or whatever her true name was, was a remarkable woman. Not counting her reputation as probably the first woman to write a book in the English language she lived in one of the most fear filled and accusatory times in history when stepping out of line brought terrible retribution. The time of the Black Death, the only known time when the world’s population fell – and not only fell, it plummeted by up to a quarter (in Britain by up to a half)- fear, suspicion and accusation made it very much a time for keeping your head down, particularly in matters of religion and those two enemies, Heresy and Justice. It was often not easy to say which was worse.

Julian steered a careful course between obedience to the teaching of Holy Church and an intense compassion arising from a series of powerful ‘shewings’ or revelations received during a severe illness in which she received the last rites. Unlike many of her time she survived, which suggests it was probably not the Black Death itself. Also the date of her illness did not coincide with the worst outbreaks in East Anglia at the time.

Mention of the terms shewings and revelations brings me to the problem I faced in what to call them. In these chapters and their headings which are still being written and rewritten I have flitted between ‘shewings’, ‘showings’, ‘visions’ and ‘revelations’. Currently there is an untidy and illogical mix of the terms simply because until I am sure which to use I am keeping them all out there. ‘Shewings’ is the old term and ‘showings’ would fit and mean the same in modern writing, but she also called them revelations which is current today. My only problem with that was a fear of mistaken confusion with the New Testament Book of Revelation. I tried ‘visions’ but that fails on several counts: she had a number of shewings but they were by no means all visual. Julian distinguished between them as rational, spiritual, and as things seen. Visions will have to go. In the meantime take your choice.

None of this truly explains why I am doing it. Not because of the drama of the Black Death, nor that of the trials and accusations of heresy and devil worship that were so heightened by those times. The reason is that in the worst of times she saw the best. In a time of fear and hate they speak more of our Father’s love than anything else I have read. I don’t even write them for you to read, or at least not yet, but they are such a rich source of inspiration that I want them there to draw upon for later posts on this site.

Read them if you will, although I shall revisit and change words and phrases here and there where it seems to represent her meaning better. Regard it as a journey we are taking together.

Next Julian

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Sea Waves

How shall we describe the world?
With what shall we compare it?

The world is like a sea
over which the wind blows.
Its ripples chase the wind and one another,
‘I am a standing wave!’
‘I am a running wave!’
‘This sparkling expanse is our world!’

None know of the depth beneath,
and little of the wind above,
or unbounded space and time
where other waveforms speed.
All fear the shore where they will die.

They are each a focus of the whole:
the depth below, the wind above,
the sea, the shore, the great beyond;
that symphony in which their echoes carry,
which makes the world ring,
where their souls sing
in harmony.

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Harmony

On a clear still morning beside a pond
with clouds and trees mirrored in its face,
and rushes, and a lonely fishing place,
I watched a single dewdrop fall.

It fell from a leaf tip, back into its element
like a tiny buddhist soul.

Lost, I thought, lost in its destiny,
one with its own infinity
and all is still again.

And yet the surface trembled with its ring,
spreading, shimmering the clouds, the leaves,
the rushes and the fishing place;
spreading, reaching for the farthest shore.

And was it felt in the darker depths?
and echoed in that tiny ‘plop’ in my ear?
and in the air, and in the woods,
spreading forever to the farthest star,
seeing eternity
through the eyes of God?

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Depth

You say I think too deeply while the sun is on the sand
and sparkles in the shallows and spreads across the land,
and little fish come darting and nibble at our toes.

You say I think too deeply, but here out in the bay
the sea shelves blue and deeper, and larger fishes play,
and sun comes thin and slanting, and darkens as it goes.

How can I think too deeply when all around is deep?
and echoes as though Heaven is waking after sleep;
or like the night-bird, chanting to incarnadine the rose.

Are the stars still shining faintly in these shadowed ocean deeps,
where the sea as dark as wine has been given for a sign
of the deep that calls to deep in the human and Divine?

Does the wave-sound filtered finely from the sunlight and the foam
carry echoes touched with starlight and a distant call of home?
Though clouded with a doubt is there yet an Avalon
that calls across the waters and forever draws me on?

Are the sunlight in the shallows,
.      and the sand between our toes,
.and the sunlight faintly filtered
.       that darkens as it goes,
and the chanting nightingale
.       with the rose thorn at his breast
at one with all who labour that shall be given rest?

There is a tale that once all roses were white until, one night, a nightingale fell in love with a rose and, singing his love but getting no response, sang ever more sweetly, closer and closer, until, pressing his heart against her stem, he died upon a thorn, staining her with his own spilled blood; since when, all roses of love have been red.

 

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The Bow Shall be Seen in the Cloud…

Once I saw the most remarkable rainbow of any I can remember. It was not double – I have seen double rainbows, and they are certainly a wonderful sight. No, this was a single, ordinary rainbow, if anything as wonderful as a rainbow can be called ordinary. It was complete, bold and beautiful in colour, spread across a broad, dramatic peakland sky, extending over the far tree-lined drystone wall of a sheep meadow which in turn I viewed over another drystone wall.

The bow shone against a backdrop of grey and white clouds amply interspersed with blue sky. The sheep field shone green in the sun and two sheep wandered along the far wall. A fine cloud-mist cooled my face.

I was walking with Kate, a small west highland white terrier, and was brought to a halt by the spectacle. Kate, with the poor colour-sense of all dogs, ignored it and nosed along in the long grass getting slowly covered in goose-grass burrs while I stood transfixed. I paid for it later when I had to pick them off.

It is hard to describe my feelings as I stood for over ten minutes watching the changing moods of the sky and fields. At times the entire bow was seen against a backdrop of clouds except where its earthbound ends dipped to the trees and wall. Occasionally it stood out in places against blue sky which shone through it although the spectral bands could still be clearly seen. Sometimes the field below darkened with cloud shadows and yet the rainbow persisted above. There were no great drops of rain, just the fine cloud-mist against my face from a large irregular cloud that was passing over me. Any moment I expected the greater flurry of rain that often comes at the tail of a cloud, but it did not come. Only the fine refreshing cloud-damp blowing through my hair and lightly in my face.

Behind me a low morning sun gleamed through the silver-gold lining of a grey cloud, that seemed almost stationary compared to the wracks passing overhead. In front, the tail of cloud moved, oh so slowly, toward me. The rainbow was fixed, bright and constant. The sheep ambled to and fro then moving off to my left passed through the rainbow’s end by the wall.

Suddenly a thin cloud crossed the sun and the bow dimmed only to brighten again as the sun penetrated more strongly. Steadily the tail of the cloud moved toward me. The blue sky grew in its wake. The wind tossed leaves through the air and ripples through the grass. Kate lay down, thought better of it and nosed off after some fascinating scent. The clear sky grew until the whole bow was spread out against the blue vault of the heavens – something I had never seen before. Then, very slowly over several minutes, rain and bow faded together leaving a brilliant morning sky.

I pondered that a rainbow can fade in two ways: because the sun is dimmed or because the rain clears, and that I could be struck by beauty while my colour-blind companion saw nothing at all.

I stayed a few moments looking at the scene, then turned to go. To my amazement the rainbow colours returned in a flash. There was no rain, just the sun shining in the drops in my hair and lashes. I carried the rainbow with me.

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Our World

What is our world made of?

Hills and mountains, rivers and seas.

What are the seas made of?
Water and waves, salt and sand;
sand that goes between your toes,
salt that gets in your mouth and nose,
waves that wash on the beach and rocks,
water that gets in your shoes and socks.

What is the water made of?
Rain and rivers that run to the sea
for fishes to swim in like you and me,
for crabs that creep and gulls that cry
and creatures that never see the sky.

But still I wonder, now and again,
the water that comes in the rivers and rain,
that runs in the gutter and down the drain,
that splashes in brooks with a tinkling refrain,
and flows to the sea in the sunshine again –
what is it made of?

Tiny atoms too small to see
build all the world and all the sea.
They make the clouds that float in the sky,
and little children that wonder why.

Show me the atoms I cannot see.
What are they made from?
Where can they be?

Sticks and stones may break your bones,
bricks and beams may build your dreams,
but words, words…
Can one Word build a uni-verse?
a uni-world from a uni-Word?

Show me the atoms I cannot see,
Of what are they made?
Where can they be?
The sea is made of waves.
The waves are made of sea.

And the particles, the particles,
the tiny, tiny particles,
are each the focus of a wave
wider than the widest sea
that stretches through all infinity
and shimmering, makes you and me
and all we feel and all we see:
a universal harmony.

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Mass & Energy

Shimmer, glimmer, shine,
when the sunlight shivers in heat,
and mirage pools flash reflected sky
on the tarmac road ahead.

Shimmer, glimmer, shake,
when the waving ears of wheat
roll like the sea in a summer swell
in field on field outspread.

Shimmer, glimmer, gleam,
when the stars in a milk-white sheet
shine down upon this darkling world
on which their light is shed.

And the shimmering waves that are here and there
in the atom’s uncertain heart,
reach to the ends of the universe
of which they are a part.

The energy of the universe
is bound in the shimmer and shine
of the speed of light, times the speed of light,
times the mass of the heavenly wine
that is drunk anew in the toast of love
that is His, and yours, and mine.

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The Law of Love

There was a wise mullah who, at the end of his evening teaching, would ask his four pupils one question, which they would answer one by one, beginning with the weakest pupil and ending with the brightest. It was a good policy which prevented the brightest from wasting time on easy answers which would leave the others with nothing to say.

One evening he said, ‘Our thoughts today have been many and taxing. I do not want to burden you further, so my question this evening is simple: why do we not eat pork?’

After being invited to speak the first pupil replied, ‘Because it is the command of Allah, both in the ancient scriptures and in the Holy Q’uran, and to obey Allah is the greatest aim that man can have in life, which is why our faith is called Islam, which means obedience, and that is why we do not eat pork.’

The mullah praised the pupil, saying, ‘You have spoken wisely and well, and although it is my custom to praise even the poorest answer for whatever kernel of truth lies in it, in this instance I find no need for correction at all.’

He turned to the second pupil who replied as follows:

‘All that my fellow pupil says is true, but I would add that a pig is an animal that eats in the dirt. It wallows in its own slime and where it wallows, it eats. Allah, who gives us life and set our father Abraham to be our guide in all obedience, gave us this command because He only wants good for those who obey His commands and, for those who do not, they alone shall suffer from eating the flesh of this unclean animal. That is why we do not eat pork.’

The mullah gave even higher praise to this pupil, ‘because,’ he said, ‘not only have you shown that obedience to the will of Allah is the highest aim of man, but you have also shown his tender mercy towards those who obey him and his stern justice to those who do not.

The third student now began his answer.

‘I bow before the wisdom of my fellow pupils, but perhaps I may add something; In many countries pigs are now bred in clean surroundings and well fed, and it has been shown that their meat in these conditions can be, I am told, sweet and wholesome. But our forefathers who obeyed the will of Allah in this matter passed this law on to us and we keep it today. In so doing we give honour to them and through them to The Prophet, may his name be praised, and to our father Abraham; and so we stand with them in obedience to Allah, and this is why we do not eat pork.’

The Mullah paused before replying, then praised the third pupil greatly.

‘You have spoken fully and well, for obedience to Allah, understanding of His mercy and compassion, fear of His just wrath and honour to the Prophet, may peace be upon him, and to our forefathers who kept the Law, are what lead to perfection.

He turned then to his fourth pupil who as yet had not spoken, and said, ‘I think your fellow students have answered wisely and well and to add more to such a complete answer may be vanity. there is no shame if you have nothing to add.’

‘Indeed,’ replied the wisest student, ‘there is nothing to add that would not be mere embellishment and vanity, for obedience to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, and to honour our father Abraham and the Prophet, peace be upon him, is surely the path to that pefection which is our duty.

‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘there is something further I feel I must say.’

The mullah frowned slightly as the student took a deep breath before continuing, ‘This morning the sun rose beautifully over the mountains, it sparkled like diamonds on the sea and now is setting in fiery grandeur in the West. A soft wind blows and the fig and vine leaves tremble at its touch. All this is a gift from Allah like a precious jewel a lover gives to his beloved. How can one so loved not respond? I do not eat pork, but I pray that whatever I do, I shall do it because I love Allah.’

There was a silence for a time; then, without speaking, the mullah slowly unwound his turban, folded it gently and laid it on the fourth student’s head.