In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean. . .
SO OPENS Derek Walcott’s masterpiece The Schooner Flight. Walcott was himself remaking, reimagining, the opening line of Langland’s Piers Plowman: “In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne. . .”
This month should, indeed, ideally be idle, and blessed with soft sunlight, though with the early shifts of climate change we cannot be sure. It will be idle for me in the sense that I have a full month’s break from my many peregrinations as a speaker and a poet, and some time set aside both to read and write poetry, and to float for a while on my little boat.
I hope that my readers also have a little idleness in August, a little otium sacrum, or holy leisure, as the old monks called it. Time not only out of parish, but also, more importantly offline, and possibly even off-grid. Time to receive, to bathe in God’s largesse, the lavishness of his sunrises and sunsets, the innumerable, all too often unnoticed beauties he offers us everyday, all flowing from his pleroma, the fulness-to-overflowing of his generosity.
I wonder what St Benedict would have made of social media? He was certainly the one who gave the spiritual life a social dimension, a corporate expression, and moved the Church from the solo heroics, the isolated eremitical lives of the likes of St Anthony, to the hospital and welcoming communities founded on his little rule. I don’t suppose he would have banned social media altogether, but he would certainly have encouraged us to fast from it a while, and “idle August” might be just the time for that.
Even if we stay at home, we can still find ways to leave our work behind, if it’s only in a walk to the bottom of the garden. We can practise sabbath, even if it doesn’t happen to be a Sunday. We can leave our tasks in their places, waiting undisturbed, like sleeping cattle, till we are ready to return, as Wendell Berry does in that wonderful poem from his 1979 collection of sabbath poems:
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Paradoxically, it is this very ability to let go, to leave one’s tasks for a while, that offers the clarity and renewal that allow one, at the proper time, to return and take them up far more fruitfully — though if one were to make that the only reason for leisure, it would cease to be leisure. When we are truly apart, truly entering our given portion of God’s eternal sabbath, we are not thinking of our tasks at all. Nevertheless, when we return, we return as one who has remembered and refounded one’s purpose, heard afresh and learned again to sing one’s given song. As Berry puts it so beautifully at the end of that poem,
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
Malcolm Guite is keynote speaker at “Finding Inspiration in the Psalms: A Church Times one day festival”, on 2 October in York. Full details here.
