On the wall, facing me as I sit at my desk, are some words calligraphed on canvas by my friend John Rowlands-Pritchard, the founder of Opus Anglicanum. The words are: ‘At midnight noon is born.’
It is a reminder that at those moments of deepest darkness in our lives a new life is stirring, a new day will dawn with fresh opportunities. Nature has its own wisdom.
I recall how my life’s companion, Hywel Jones, in the first years of our knowing each other, wrote to me after spending a few days with his family in the village of Llangynog in the Berwyn Mountains. ‘The wonderful peace and quiet of the dark that I remember from my childhood is still here,’ he wrote. ‘We must try and spend some time together here, because after dark the mountains and the stillness have a kind of spiritual quality and I am sure it would help us to share it together.’
This is one of the things one learns from the practice of meditation: to wait, not knowing when the dawn will come – but certain, nonetheless, that our inner sun will rise.
