Life's Grandeur

If I've done my sums correctly, today's entry should mark three full years of daily blipping on my part. Yes, sometimes it still feels like something I do for the sheer sake of doing it (after 1095 days, "I can't really be arsed today" doesn't seem like a legitimate excuse for bringing the blipping streak to an end, and it will probably take something along the lines of me contracting smallpox to justify having a day off), but on those days when I have the time - and more importantly, the money - it's still a great incentive to get out and see what's what in the big wide world.

Because really, that's what it's all about. As children, we notice stuff when we're out and about, because the whole world is exotic and new. But time ticks on, and we grow up, and the novelty can wear off. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about this process, believing that we should view each day with the same breathless awe that we devoted to our surroundings as toddlers. Hopkins believed that his god was responsible for maintaining natural beauty in the face of humanity's destructive nature; personally, I reckon it's got a bit more to do with a biological imperative to survive in even the harshest of environments across all living organisms, but I make a point not to quibble with dead mental poets. Either way, you can choose to read this poem as Hopkins intended or substitute the words "God" and "Holy Ghost" for "life" as I do; it still rings true, no matter how you interpret it.


The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


If Hopkins was alive today, I reckon he'd be blipping. Because when you pick up a camera and start your journal on this here site, it's that sense of observation and everyday wonder at all of existence that seizes you again, childlike, even in the most mundane of places. And for all that we'd disagree on matters of religion, I'm sure that me and Gezza could both watch the sun rise over another dismal retail park or bypass with a quiet satisfaction, knowing that life always carries on, and that today's blip was right in the bag.