Years ago a friend who took himself and the world a bit too seriously used to talk about his "inner climate". It is a phrase capable of carrying a fair load of emotional baggage.
Living in the North East of Scotland, you quickly realise that the skies are big, and the cloud formations, the receding horizons and the variations in the shades and qualities of light, all combine to create a huge range of diverse impressions and differing ways of looking at the world. The changing moods of the landscape can move rapidly and dramatically from shafting winter sunlight that harmonises with inner happiness, to a late gloom that gives visible form to whatever foreboding lurks beneath the everyday activities of our living. In other words, sometimes the mood of the weather and landscape mirror the inner climate; but sometimes they determine how we are feeling, or yet again are reminders that our inner climate is neither fixed nor permanent and can change rapidly and inexplicably.
This past week, for example, has included dark days and sunny, and these can be mixed and alternated into several variations in the same few hours. I often become aware of this when I look at photographs taken while walking and watching. In woods, along the beach, around where we live, the skies, the landscape and the weather act as an external commentary of the world, that interacts with the inner landscape and weather of our mood and our inner journey.
These two photos of the sea (above) was taken around mid day, when the skies were leaden and laden, and the sea reflected that shadowed grey, emphasised and interpreted by white waves tumbling towards the shore. I was aware while taking that photo, of the confluence of symbols; vessels waiting offshore for their next contract, or their place in the harbour; the offshore wind-farm turning turbulent wind into reusable energy; clouds heavy with possibility; the sea restless and rhythmic. On this occasion the whole scene encapsulates one of those key moments in our lives when we see things clearly, and feel them deeply, when outer world and inner world coincide in mood.
At the start of a new year, where will the energy come from that will enable the fulfilment of those hopes and plans we all need to pull us towards our future? And those clouds, which remind me of a verse from a remarkable and far too easily overlooked hymn: Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds you so much dread, Are big with mercy, and shall break, With blessings on your head. And that wave breaking hopefully towards the shore, an ocean of life and energy concentrated, for this brief moment of its existence, in a movement of breathtaking sound and sight;and that faithful rhythm sounding like the heartbeat of the "Love that moves the sun and other stars".
Walking the beach with a camera is for me a way of praying, thinking, and sometimes unexpectedly, inner climate change. We all have our places, or times, when God is more or less present. This past year especially, the sea has been a place which refuses merely to reflect my mood; sometimes it does, but sometimes being by the sea has been a place of healing, solace and inner climate change, when the clouds have been interpreted and the sun has broken through, and the horizons have been lines of hope and possibility.
God's boundless mercy is, to sinful man,
Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams,
T'is ne'er known, or else seen, to be the emptier;
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fill'd full, than when full fill'd before.
(Robert Herrick)
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