The Joy of Flowers

I had a trip to the garden centre, time to begin thinking about what I will be planting and growing this season. As I drove there I saw that the snowdrops are in bloom even though the distant hills are still covered in snow. I always leave the garden centre feeling uplifted by the beauty of the flowers available, especially my first love orchids. The colours, shapes and the aroma make me heady with delight. Flowers speak volumes in their silent beauty. They are part of all the great occasions and festivals. When we marry, the bride carries them the groom wears one in his jacket, When somebody dies we offer them as tokens of consolation and an expression of our loss. When somebody is successful we offer them flowers and of course they are symbols of love and romance.


Those little snowdrops as they poke their little heads above the ground and the snow, call to us to prepare for the coming of spring. The lotus tells us to reach above the muddy tarnished part of life to see greater things. Then we have the rose, with its bud, opening with a wondrous glory of layer upon layer of petals. Walking into a room and smelling the strong aromatic scent of the hyacinth.

They speak to us of how we can brighten the lives of others by bringing a pleasant sense of peace into every corner. They tell that there is nothing that cannot be made better. Think of the poppy, it manages to bloom in the barest of positions. It also reminds us of the frailty of life and how each moment should be grasped and lived to its full.

The gardener tends with care his plants encouraging them to give of their best. He feeds them, waters them and in windy conditions he helps by giving them support. In return they reward him with all that they have.

The artist can capture the beauty that is so fleeting and ephemeral, and allow that beauty to last for years to come. The poet will strive to find the words to express that inner joy that the sight of a flower can bring. Consider the words of William Wordsworth.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Such is the way of the Tao.

Work and Play

The number of times in my life that I have been told,” All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Maybe this is because for the biggest part of my life since leaving school I took little time to play, it was all work. For the first five years of my ministry I hardly ever took a holiday and if I did, much against the wishes of my family, I was always available to return to conduct a funeral. It is equally true that we cannot on the other hand have all play and no work. There has to be the discipline of toil but there has to be room for play. Fun and play are an important aspect of our lives. It can be claimed that it is through play that we open ourselves to the wonderful moments that come to us when we have “switched off.” My friends have always been amused when I tell them that I do all my best thinking in the bath, in fact I used to “write” all my sermons in the bath. I was always amazed that they found this so amusing; after all Archimedes had his “Eureka” moment in his bath, a moment that had long lasting effects on us all. Many of the momentous moments of history have happened to people when they were relaxed and at play.


I know so many people who eat and sleep their work. They have a dedication and are probably very good employees, and good at the occupation they have chosen. Sadly they tend to be people who are less than stimulating conversationalists or people who never set you afire with great emotion.

There are artists. I have met some, who have given all to their art, every minute of every day. They paint or think paint seven days a week. Yet if you take time to read the life stories of the “greats of art,” you will very quickly notice that their lives were full of play and intrigue. So often their best art was very closely linked to those moments of life where they were enjoying life to the full. One example, Edgar Degas, he had a great love of ballet and this love led to some of his best works. It could never be argued that he only loved ballet because it stimulating his art.

Those who follow the Tao know the need to also be participants in play. To be ,”good” to be “great” to be “inspiring” we have to be prepared to leave the borders, to step over the line of work into the world of play. We all have those things in life we consider “crucial” and “important.” It may be though that if we wish to touch the heights of our creative spirit we need to learn how to “play” and so experience Tao without having to “work at it.”

Youth, Age and the Journey.

I have spoken of it before but I repeat. I remember when I thought my parents knew nothing. My father worked as a painter in a shipyard and my mother well she was just my mother. What could they know that I already did not know? It was later, with wisdom, that I knew the truth. My father had not ended up there because he had no brains but because he had eight brothers and sisters and a father who was a coal miner. At the age of fourteen he had to leave school to play his part in earning money to put food on the table. My mothers’ father had been killed in the war and her mother (my grandmother, who strangely I thought knew everything) had struggled to raise two girls in difficult times so she had left school to work in the jute mills of Dundee.


When we grow older it is easy to look at youth and remember when we were just like them. The next step is to wish that we could go back there and take with us the knowledge we have gained over the years. To have the fire of youth and the wisdom of age seems such an attractive proposition. The trouble is we would be aware of all the pain that cannot be avoided. We would be aware of exactly what was ahead in terms of the ageing process. To know there would come a time when I was still fit enough to run up the stairs but to then stand and wonder why I was there.

When I was teaching I looked at the young and became aware of how far they yet had to travel. I saw the adventure, the excitement the new possibilities with the speed of modern development. They as yet did not have the scars and the pains of life. Thankfully they were also blissfully unaware of the journey before them. When I see a baby in a pram I feel all of this, but I also worry of what lies ahead if we older ones do not start behaving differently in terms of our planet.

Life is indeed a journey and we are all at different stages of that journey. What is yet to come is a mystery. We all have greater wisdom that we did in our younger years. But there is still the mystery, that mystery brings with it a sanity we would not have if we knew the future.

The artist is aware of the world with its pains and it joys, its beauty and its disgrace. We have an inner urge to share this with others through our chosen mediums, and we are fortunate in that we have the ability to do just that. We also have an obligation to share it with others. The young may look at the older and wonder what if anything they have to teach but we strive to express in art what we do indeed know. We do not paint only for our own pleasure but to share the gained insight of the years. We also know that the young will one day be the elders and what we have taught them will begin to bear fruit. So we do not share in vain.

This is the way of Tao.

Order out of Chaos

When my children were young they enjoyed playing with those well know building bricks. They came in packets with the appropriate bricks to follow the instructions and to build the model in the plan. My daughter used to follow the instructions to the letter build the model the dismantle it and replace all the bricks into the box with the instructions and they were all kept in order and in place. My son on the other hand would open his build the model then put all the bricks in a large box with all his others. He might build the model again but most often he used the bricks to make his own creations. Two people who had two different ideas about what to do, with a box of bricks.


I remember visiting a carpet making factory in China. We were taken into a room where five girls each had a frame before them with the warp stretched between to struts of wood. They were standing on a plank of wood balanced on a stack of bricks at either end. As they progressed up the weave hey added further bricks. (Health and safety?) Before them on a small table they had a large array of coloured wools strands. They seemed to working from a design they had in their head. It took them six months to make one carpet but at the end of the six months it was a thing of beauty.

The artist stands before a clean white canvas. They have an assortment of colours placed on a palette or other such. Some lay the colours out in a very ordered way, others in a seemingly random arrangement. From this seeming haphazard assortment there emerges on the canvas a pattern or picture that stimulates and excite the emotions of others.

We come into the world, a blank canvas. The time we have depends much on the choices we make, the lifestyle we choose. There are restrictions on us depending on where we are born the circumstances of the family we are born into. But each of us has a palette with which to weave the pattern of our lives.

There are for each of us important moments, when we have to make choices. For the artist it may be a choice of colour or pattern. At those moments it is always wise to take time to consider the possibilities of the outcomes of our actions. Sadly, more than ninety percent of the people I met in prison, as I visited as chaplain, had reacted rather than acted. In the face of the blank canvas we must stop and consider. This is the way of Tao.

Happiness in Order

The young boy arrived home from school to be greeted by his mother. “Well how did school go today she asked?” “It was ok,” he replied. “And what did you do at school today?” “Nothing very much,” answered the boy. “You must have had something interesting,” retorted the mother. “Well we got this story about Moses,” he said. “Moses was trying to escape the Egyptians and they were being chased in the desert. The Egyptians had their fighter jets and they were strafing the escaping Israelites. They had to move fast because the Egyptian tanks were catching up. The came to this big river and Moses got his men to build a Bailey Bridge over the river. When it was built they all crossed and then when the Egyptian tanks were trying to cross they blew up the bridge and sank all the tanks.” “They did not tell you that,” said the mother. “No,” said the boy “but if I told you what they told me you would never believe it.”


How we try to make our lives more interesting. A small exaggeration here and a little fib there. Stories over time get more dramatic, conversations take on an extra turn or two. We do not mean any badness we just want it to all sound more interesting.

A Taoist was looking for happiness. He had thought of all sorts of things that might bring him happiness but to no avail. He sought out a sage and asked him if he could help him to find the answer to his search. As if he was ignoring his question the sage asked him. “Did you have your breakfast this morning?” “Yes answered the seeker, I did have breakfast.” “And did you wash your bowl when you were finished?” asked the sage. The seeker wondered why when he had asked such an important question he was being asked this, but replied, “Yes master I washed the bowl.” “Good,” said the sage,” and did you wash it well?”

It was then that the seeker after happiness realised that he was being told the answer to his question was to be found in the mundane tasks of every day. That by doing everything to the best of ones ability one will find happiness in everything.

I found cleaning up after working long on a painting such a terrible chore. I have a friend who hates painting the edges of box canvases and put the task off till she has a bundle of them waiting to be done. I have another friend who hates sorting out the inevitable bundle of pastels lying around his easel at the end of a pastel work.

Taoism tells us we can and should find value in every task. The chore of cleaning brushes becomes a joy, when you see it as not the end of a painting, but the first preparatory step to the next one. The same with cleaning paint pots away. Cleaning and putting back pastels allows you to enjoy the colours and to begin thinking of when you will use them next.

It all takes effort, but it is so easy to fall into lazy habits and lazy thought patterns, and this can so easily be the first steps to negative thinking. See each thing we do for what it is, and how it is, and do to the very best, then be still and happiness will follow as surely as night follows day.

This is the way of Tao.