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Good Morning.

Spring is on its way with brighter mornings, and the delicate snowdrops found in icy winds on the fells of the Lake District are now accompanied by what Wordsworth called ‘a host of golden daffodils.’ They return every year, so sunny with their yellow trumpets that they seem to declare an abundant ecosystem.

Wordsworth found solace when he was wandering the fells as he put it ‘lonely as a cloud’ weary of life after his hopes of a new world were dashed by the corruption that followed the French revolution. But when he returned home, the daffodils were more than joy in a difficult moment; the vision was somehow timeless and still in his imagination. The healing they gave was a consistent expression of God’s compassion. A sunny blessing that was, in fact, always there.

Rabbi Moses Cordovero, who lived in C16th Safed in Israel, wrote that the primary essence of all creation is compassion. Not a kindness that balances out the stringent eye of judgement as we see in the monument of Lady Justice bearing her scales above the law courts of the Old Bailey. Compassion, he writes, has more of an oversight. Rather than hold the tension between opposites, it’s true job is to be sovereign, which is to have an investment in the growth and interrelated wellbeing of everyone. It’s the crown of the great eco system. The watcher of legacy. If compassion is related to Lady Justice at all, it is the impulse of love that puts her there in the first place.

Children are born with compassion – they step in to balance out tragedies even though their hearts don’t yet have what it takes to find the vision of a long-term solution. They look to adults to find what Shakespeare called a ‘muse of fire’ which conjures our imagination to be ready for a journey. The child’s hope is that we will find a vision that can navigate towards healing and return to an integrated whole.

But many of us adults are feeling battle weary. Next Tuesday marks a year since the first coronavirus Lockdown. Millions are turning to spirituality, mysticism and nature trying to find something deeper to navigate through these times. All too often it seems that a full and sovereign vision of a natural and inclusive world is hard to find. But just like the timeless daffodils in Wordsworth’s soulful imagination, if we can have faith that the compassionate world is there like a divine spark waiting to be found, I believe we can run with Shakespeare’s ‘muse of fire’ and meet nature’s abundant spring refreshed and ready to find the new world we’re looking for.

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