The little Skylark.

The Skylark.

Those who want to conquer the world

and make it conform to their own desires

will never have success,

for the sovereignty of the world is a subtle thing

He who tries to shape it spoils it.

I seek your forgiveness this morning, or whenever you find time to read this, that I have for a moment become overcome with a sense of emotion and a feeling of the loss of things that once we took for granted.

I was walking yesterday on my own in silence and thought when a beautiful sound brought me from my thoughts into the world around me. Above my head soaring high two skylarks.

In a blink of a moment, I was back to being a young lad. I was down in the little field at the end of the houses where I lived in a little place called Dollytown.  It was a little refuge of mine where I had built a little shelter from branches and grass. I was lying looking up at the soaring Skylarks signing in the heights. A precious memory of a moment in time I have never forgotten.

Here I was hearing the same song all those years later. It is a song we are hearing less and less in the countryside because intensive farming and the habit of ploughing to the very edges of fields have meant the almost complete loss of these little beauties.

I came home and went onto the internet to search for skylarks. It is hard to believe but what I found was a picture of a rocket. The headline said, "The unsung hero of Brittish Space."  We had developed a rocket with all its potential to do all sorts of things and felt it was right to call it the Skylark.

We have gone on to develop even greater rockets. Rockets that can spy on our enemies. Rockets that can from, a little office in some far-flung place be directed to cause havoc to places and people at the touch of a switch.

We have developed these so that we can with one such machine wipe us all from the face of the earth in seconds.

We who try to be sovereigns of the world have in many ways spoiled it as the author of the words above written 2650 years ago.

I could not resist making my little effort at drawing this little bird that throughout my life has brought me wonderous moments of visions of flight and song.  As I sat and did my little sketch of the Skylark I listened to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, "The Lark Ascending." I invite you to seek it out and give it a listen, might it do for you as it did for me, along with the little Skylarks of my day, fill you with a deep sense of peace.

It is so sad that in our rush for so many things we are in fact losing the very beauty that makes life such a joy.

Yes, I am a romantic and a dreamer but I thank those two little birds for the best three hours I have had in a long time.

I hope you take up my challenge and listen to that music and just for a while close yourself from everything else and just be at one with yourself.

Have a marvellous and peaceful day.