The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
– William Blake
Well, we’ve passed the halfway point in August and it’s cardigan weather in Devon today, even a log or two on the fire. It may not stay this way. It’s been so hot for so long the stressed trees are shedding their leaves prematurely and there’s a swathe of orange and brown over the breathless hills. There’s a group out fasting in the woods – older folks – and so last night I joined the guides for the romantically titled ‘meat bucket’ that is often a staple of camp diet. ‘We eat the food so you don’t have to,’ is how we reassure the vigilers. Wandering down through the forest (the very same as in Bardskull) as it started to get dark I felt a certain shift in the air, a moistness, that is always a foreshadowing of autumn. I find it dizzying I love it so much. Members of my family have been strolling in and out of that wood for seventy years.
It’s been interesting being around – even at a distance – a group of older people out on the hill. Thinking about the Blake quote – maybe we all have to be foxlike in our younger years (the sheer hustle of it all), but maybe lionlike in our later. Trust me, I love foxes, I tell far more stories about them than I do lions, but I think we can get a sense of what Blake is on about. A certain majesty, a trust, a boldness. Take up some space in the world for goodness sake, at least your divinely appointed shape. Of course, no one can be a full moon all the time, or a tiger, or as truthful as a river. That’s one of the reasons I love those old shape-shifting stories so much, why women suck in their breath when they hear of the selkie-skin, it’s some primordial recognition of our changeability. But where the Blake quote leaves me is this: when you go the way your soul wants you to go, God provides.
Maybe not in terms of pensions and windfalls, but in livelier, more eccentric ways. More delight, certainly. God seems wildly eccentric to me, and if we are to be more like God, then maybe we should lean into a little of that too. In these words I can hear an echo of my meeting with Mr Duncan in Zennor a couple of weeks ago – the 91-year-old, Yeats reciting, deep listening fellow – he has stayed curious. I am remembering now that I’ve also been writing about Moses meeting the Burning Bush at a ripe old eighty years. Seems I’m circling back on a theme.
Jesus tells it straight – you can’t serve two guv’nors.