Earth and Heaven

I've been reading a book called 'Earth and Heaven' by Sue Gee.  Like 'The Hours of the Night,' the other book of Gee's that I've recently read, it's a very gentle book that is full of incidents of meaning and connection in the small things in people's lives.

Here are some passages taken from 'Earth and Heaven' that provide a sense of 'shape and connection' for me:

'To integrate bed and board, home and school, the small farm and workshop, earth and heaven.' - Eric Gill; used as an epigraph in the book.

'...how strange it felt to him now, to be going back there, and how his work was changing, from the little wartime portrait of his mother, to this huge endeavour.  Mother and daughter-in-law and grandchild had entered the world of myth, and he himself did not quite understand how this had happened, nor the full significance of the great bird who spread out his wings beside them, except that the bird, like his mother, went back and back, had always been a part of him, and had had to find a place.' (Gee, 2000, p163).

This passage means something to me because of the certainty with which the artist says that something as simple as a bird has always been a part of him, there is a sense of resonance about it, and for that reason alone it deserves a place in his work.  I want to learn from that in my own writing.

'He thought of a summer dawn in childhood, waking as early as this, everyone else still asleep.  His mother came quietly into the room.  She stood pouring water from a white china jug into a white china bowl.
All that water, all that light.
The mist in the fields was rising, the cockerel crowed.  He lay there watching the dance of reflected light on the wall: leaping, alive.
So many years ago.
Everything was certain, then, and everything had meaning: all through his childhood.  Then John William was killed, and nothing meant a thing.
And now?  Walter walked over the meadow, his bag and the folded stool within it bumping against his side.  The woods on the hill were dark and full, lit by the rising sun.  They stood on the skyline and received the dawn.
We are making a new world.' (Gee, 2000, p172).

This passage reminds me of my own loss of meaning as a result of illness and grief, and the sense I now have that meaning is returning to the world, but small 'm' meaning, not head-on, literal, big 'M' meaning; the type of connection you find in the simple act of water being poured from a china jug.

I suppose for this reason the earth part is more more important to me than heaven.  Or more accurately, heaven being found to be implicit in this kind of earthly beauty and simplicity...