Surrendering To The Sky

Wandering around Newtown yesterday I couldn’t help but continually photograph the spire of St. Stephen’s Church.

The church was built in 1849. What I love about it is how it reaches up into the sky. Spire is Anglo Saxon in origin and means spear. It is as if the spire is trying to pierce its way right through to heaven and let all the gods in.

There is an impression of strength, of tenacity but also of vulnerability. The tip of the spire is so exposed up there. If there is any godlike wrath floating around, it will be an easy target. But perhaps if it is fortunate enough it will be successful and reach out, right out to the hand of God.

Ah, the things I think about on a sun-filled late autumn day.

But I’m not the only one.

Looking up is contagious.

Before long many of the people in the park by the church were looking up at me looking up at the spire.

You can’t deny the feeling of the celestial in invokes.

No matter what you believe.

You can stop the surge of hopefulness that floods through you at the sight of it, built to forge some kind of connection to heaven.

One young girl, with blue black hair, in a floral patterned long dress said something I will never forget.

It’s as if it is surrendering to the sky.

There are poets who appear among us as surreptitiously as leaves cast down by the wind.

We see their chipped nailpolish and crooked smiles and expect nothing from them.

And they give us a gift filled with the rays of the sun.

Inspired, I walked, seeing patterns and forms in doorways and on walls that suggested this urban landscape carries with it a fascination with the divine; with what lies above.

Maybe the point of it all, the relevance, the almost inaudible music that shadows us like a soundtrack to our lives, is to give it up.

Give ourselves up.

And surrender to the sky.