The Leaf Has a Song

From Jackie Rankin

“What can I say that I have not said before?

So I’ll say it again.

The leaf has a song in it.

Stone is the face of patience.

Inside the river there is an unfinishable story

and you are somewhere in it

and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum

and the chamber of commerce

but take it also to the forest.

The song you heard singing in the leaf

when you were a child

is singing still.

I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,

and the leaf is singing still.”

~ Mary Oliver, “What Can I Say”

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After the fall of Rome, the Order of Saint Benedict took on abandoned Roman estates and developed them as monasteries. Here the link between labouring on the land and cultivating the mind became entwined as “the life of the sprit needed to be grounded in a relationship with the earth” (Sue Stuart-Smith). As well as productive orchards and vegetable gardens, a typical monastery would include enclosed spaces — hortus conclusus — for mediation and recouperation. Alongside this, the idea that…