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This weekend, like many others, I was out and about enjoying the last of the summer. Staying at a cottage with dodgy wifi and – on Saturday evening – without a TV signal, I missed the Last Night of the Proms. Shrouded in patriotic controversy as it was, as Brexit comes back to the top of the agenda, and, without an audience as it was, another reminder of the pandemic we are living through, I was both disappointed and relieved to miss it. The best I could do, as a substitute, was to listen on my phone to Vaughan Williams’, Lark Ascending. The only thing on the programme that I already had downloaded. The solo violin, ascending and thinning into air like a lark spiralling above the fields was a beautiful reminder of the day I had just enjoyed walking on the coast path, scanning for marsh harriers and red kites, listening for curlews and sandpipers, and searching for the recently domiciled cattle egrets who eventually emerged out of the creek into full view amongst the cows. I like the Vaughan Williams’ piece for its simplicity – and I like walking and birding for the same reasons. They offer a slowed-down rhythm and a retreat from the multi-tasking complexity of the other days of the week. So much so that sometimes, like today, its hard to return to the demands of the day job. I know, of course, that such respite is temporary. And I know too that there’s nothing simple about the countryside – the sea wall protects the marsh on which the cattle graze; the wildflower verge and the hedgerows support the biodiversity I come to see, and the choices made here that shape this environment are no less political than those made in other walks of life in which a balance has to be struck between the immediate needs of particular human beings and the needs of the whole ecosystem of which we are a part. But, for me, the chance to get to the sea is a chance to rest. Its a day to rest from trying to hold up my bit of the universe; from trying to negotiate the moral dilemmas of daily life; and an opportunity - in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of Sabbath - to let myself be a creature, to find myself not at the centre, and to give myself time to delight in things – as God delights in all he has made. The command, to rest, in the Sabbath tradition, though, is not an escape from reality, just to return with a bump on a Monday morning to the real world. Rather, it is intended as a re-grounding in what is deeply real, that we will be better able to balance our lives and choices – not only reacting to the immediate and what revolves around us, but more able, as we head out again into complexity, to let the things that hold us all in being, be nearer the centre of our decision making.