No sound is dissonant which tells of life.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’

Dear reader,

While all the poems I share with you are personal (how could a poem not be?), this one is especially so.

It came this morning from the swell of grief that I experience on these Sundays. Co-parenting arrangements mean that every other week I say goodbye to my daughter as she goes to stay with her mother. It came from that, and the bittersweet comfort I took from reading a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem (‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, which I would highly recommend reading, along with its context). While Mary Oliver is my favourite poet (with special mentions to Berry, Rilke, Cummings, Hopkins and Hafez), Coleridge is perhaps the poet with whom I feel the most affinity of soul. He was a man of fells and heartache, and a man who was so struck by beauty that his Anglican faith couldn’t help but be infused with mysticism, even panentheism – seeing the divine light and hearing its song in the natural world.

My poem – a meditation on the grief and love of parenthood – dips itself into his style, and, as with much of my work, Romanticism generally. I hope it blesses you.

Gideon

While missing his daughter, the poet reads Coleridge

Again we say goodbye, and though it is beyond count
of times we have done so, still the aching drench of it
lessens not, and deepens further
that coldling hollow within.

Knowing I must give air to my grief
to the air I take it, pen and paper with me, hoping
that the green of moss under dappleful canopy,
or the blue of jay-wing glimpsed through branch-tangle,
might compose a few lines with my sorrow.

Here in this garden – this garden rich with streams of blackcap psalm
and beech leaves trembling songfully in the breeze;
this garden of May-blooms to catch my pain on – here
we watched the dozing fox; here we planted rose and lavender
and I gave you a fallen rhododendron flower.
Here we would take our bikes in the cool of morning
and ride in bliss around the lawn.

Where are you now? Not here.
Not here, your arms clinging to me and head buried in my chest
in all the happiness I ever needed.
Now I must swallow joy in the joy you will have with others;
a smile stung with loss yet smiling nonetheless
because I know that somewhere is the sound of your laughter.
You are not here, yet my love for you keeps me in the thick care of light
and will do so for as long as my heart beats
and longer still – through whatever eternity my soul is blessed
to take the knowing of you into.

Why is it we cling? Though you will always be a part of me,
you are beyond me; though I would keep you forever,
you are not mine to keep; though I will pour all I can into you,
it is in the knowledge that you are so much more than anything I could give,
and that one day I will be but a memory for you,
as I remember you now.

I bless you today, here alone in our garden. I pray
that you will see the peacock butterfly
and the cinnabar, and many golds of dandelion. I pray
that you will know how held you are,
even as, again, I have to let you go.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. Poetry and ideas about God and other lovely and necessary things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a contribution of any size, I’d be incredibly grateful – it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

Start by moving out of yourself.
This will take years, and countless steps through shadowed valleys.
Learn to wear the glimmer-strewn air like skin.
Tattoo the inevitable coming of your death upon your eyes
so you can see what matters, and what doesn’t.

Life will wound you impressively
and leave you rattled with delight.
There will be pleasure, grief, wonder, terror, joy, worry, peace –
sometimes more than you ask for, sometimes less than what you deserve.
You may end up remembering some of the hardest days of your life
as some of the best. So forget about being someone else.
Embrace the you-ness of it,
then weave yourself into the each-otherness of it.
There’s a glowing flow you could find yourself in
if you quit burrowing into your own head.

Make a habit of doing things that are useless –
that have no value in any economy outside of your blood’s.
Like listening to the rain falling on parched ground,
or jotting down a few lines of poetry that you might throw away,
or re-reading that novel that you’ve already read three times.
Go for walks that don’t go anywhere.
Let your hands and the muscles in your face
map out new ways to create light;
be more generous than anyone expects, including yourself.
Dig out your grandmother’s recipes and make a mess in the kitchen.
Share. Eat. Reminisce until it stings less, or more.
This is what makes the angels envious.

There’s no secret –
no seven step method that will take you somewhere better.
There are people you love spending time with;
there are things you love doing;
there is a world waiting to be participated in, to be repaired
and co-created.
What other information do you need?

No one’s going to come up with better ideas than kindness
and presence.

You don’t have to surrender to the limpness of this age –
to the numb dull glare and noise of it.
Morality will give you back your bones;
imagination will make them move.

Life happens here. There’s a song of the real
that’s longing to be heard. Listen to it; attend to it; give thanks for it.
Be now, not if or then or when –
contentment isn’t waiting for you on the other side of accomplishment,
it’s inviting you into the everyday.
So do something holy, like folding the laundry,
or collecting different types of leaves.
Repair your neighbour’s bike. Prune the rose shrubs. Write a letter.
Put on that record that you haven’t listened to in ages
and dance around the house, or cry in a heap on the floor.
Meet a friend and tell them about your deepest fears and dreams;
tell them about the latest episode.
Be where you are by keeping your phone somewhere you’re not.

Give your soul room to breathe
by making your world smaller:
the allotment, the library, the five-a-side football pitch.
Dwell in your days, not someone else’s –
stop making dictators of strangers; stop letting yourself be dragged around
by an algorithm. Create something the way you want to create it,
embrace the struggle of it –
the friction that makes the spark that lights the fire.
Be deliciously imperfect; slow it all down;
be a helper, not a grasper;
remember that the ladder doesn’t lead anywhere.
Wrap yourself in your duvet and sink into the cosyness;
or get up just to hear the first breath of dawnlight
in the company of the chaffinch
and a mindfully made coffee.

Smell the flowers while they’re here.
Tell people you love them while they’re here.
You have less time than you think;
you have all the life that you need.
This is it.
I could tell you about love, and how it’s everything –
but I think that’s what I’ve been doing.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a contribution of any size, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘You weren’t born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.’
—Martin Shaw, Smokehole

‘Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real…’
—Rainer Marie Rilke, ‘You are not surprised at the force of the storm’, from The Book of Hours

Dear reader,

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I’ve ditched the ‘Seven’ from the title of this ‘Paths of becoming’ series. I keep thinking of new words and ideas to rummage around in, so I’ll just stop when it feels like the right time to do so, rather than adhering to an arbitrary number.

If you missed the first three reflections in the series, I’ve included links to them below, though reading them out of sequence (or picking and choosing whichever ones take your fancy) is absolutely fine. Thanks as always for spending time in The Green Chapel; and if you’re new, welcome – it’s great to have you here.

Deepening

I spend much of the year thinking of the deliciousness of May: its ebullience; its soft opulence and urgency; the way it bursts with Yes, Now, Life. Here spring is at its lusty height – flower season, mating season, stretching-towards-the-sun season; everything leaf-glow and come-hither energy. Now, the air seems to say, is the time for motion, and for taking the hips of your lover.

We crave such lushness. Of course we do, charged as we are with a desire for more. We want our lives to be full of May; we want life, and more abundantly. Bright songs. Greening air. Growth.

We tend not to think of what comes first, or after.

For all this vivacity requires a depth of rooting. To germinate is to first reach downwards into the soil. Sprouting is consequent of root; budding is reliant of earth.

We’ve all heard of personal growth. Many of us will have chased it, or at least be told we should chase it. What we don’t hear much about is personal deepening; yet that is where a life of fullness begins. To become, we need to get into the ground of things. Soul is fathom, not peak; it is the going further in that allows us to open out. We need to be rooted – rich in underland knowledge, sunk into loamish fundamentals.

One literal translation of the word ‘profound’ (from the Latin pro fundus) could be ‘forward to the deep’. You have left the surface level behind, but not upwardly.

Growth in the natural world is not an end in itself, but one part of the wheel. It comes from a desire for life; yet by necessity it has balance and limits. Over-growth is antithetical to harmony. A plant will never extend itself beyond its resources; and when the growing season ends, it collapses back into its roots.

The spirit of our age, however, is something quite different.

These are depthless days: skimming and ground-blind. Everything is rush and electric. We have been made into surface drifters, flotsam in our own existence. Life as a series of thirty second videos; life consumed, not created; life documented for display, not experienced; life held numbly in our heads, not spread out upon the feasting table. Hollow. Shallow. So ceaseless and neurotic that there can never be profundity.

We didn’t put ourselves here. You and I and us are not to blame. It is a spirit, an energy, an idea that has so unrooted us: a swaggering coven of gods who have been given too much power – growth, greed, and the drugs that they have laced our water supply with: distraction, convenience, materialism, individualism. The hunger to acquire, accumulate, hoard, possess – an insatiable lust for the storehouses to never stop growing.

And what is the harvest? These gods are obese from feasting on the blood of the earth; from draining our joy and contentment, even our grief. Inequality, injustice, environmental breakdown, the collapse of mental and bodily health, the death of community: all this can be traced to the worship of more. Greed driving unchecked growth; or, in other words, a tumour.

All this ruin stems from the misguided belief in the illimitude of existence. We want to extend, instead of rooting into here. We have reached peak everything, and so arrives the tidal wave of meaninglessness.

We can’t have everything we want. Such a desire precludes us getting anything we need.

Well, to hell with growth. How can we deepen?

‘To understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.’
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland

Deepening is characterised by presence, slowness, observation, raw honesty. It is an unstriving, an acceptance, a becoming of here. It is a lessening of self; a realisation that the largeness in which we live is the same largeness that is within us, and is thus not something we have to manufacture or acquire. Deep calls unto deep.

It is also, like so much of our becoming, not something that can be planned for. Depth is not aimed at or achieved, it is taught – more often than not by teachers who are uninvited, even unwelcome. Pray for a deepening and God might wince, knowing what you’re in for.

Sudden loss and heartbreak. Disaster. Plans gone awry. Rejection. Redundancy. Shifts in belief. Changes that you never asked for.

Such things can be triggers for deepening, if – if – we don’t tighten up. If we listen. If we quit reaching, striving, shouting out desperate attempts at answers. Instead of trying to solve the problem, we attend. We fall back. We go to ground, press some tendrils down into soul-matter. We root, and so become resilient.

I recently tried digging up some old bracken from my garden. If you know what well-established rhizomes are like, you’ll know that I eventually conceded that that part of the garden would remain theirs.

It’s hard to be insecure when you’re rhizomic. Such below-the-surface interconnection can’t be thwarted.

Deepening is a finding out (and, ultimately, accepting) who you really are, not who you’re expected to be or even who you want to be. It is thus a boundary making – a setting of beautiful limits, and so, you might have gathered, markedly counter-cultural.

Those who have deepened do not grasp at; they do not cling; they do not preen or gloat. They weep openly; their smiles have a luminosity that comes from knowing how precious a gift a smile really is. There’s a richness to their texture; think oak bark and weathered skin. They know both their light and their shadow, and that wholeness includes both. Cleverness and self-centred ambition don’t sit well with them. They can see the fruitlessness of a word like successful. They know when to stop, to pause, to rest; they know they’re not in a race. They’re tenacious, but only because they’ve failed so many times.

Depth has not interest in efficiency. It is rugged, not grandiose; subtle, not bombastic. It knows enough to know it should never shout about what it thinks. It is careworn, but cares more because of it.

Depth thinks a lot about May. It desires it, and inhales it gigglingly when it arrives. And it does so all the more because it knows what has come before, and what will come after.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
-An angel has no skin.’
—C.S. Lewis, from On Being Human

Dear reader,

The first of this year’s roses bloomed in my garden today, peach and salmon-pink, fragrant with summer berry. I’ve been waiting for it – checking every morning since the buds first began to swell under spring’s greening breath.

The abundance is building. The air is warm today, and drips with blackcap and goldfinch. The light has changed – a strength of sun now filtering through waves of fresh leaf, landing dappled and new upon the pages of my journal, my skin.

Yet somewhere nearby a screen is lurking, hungry for me, desperate to pour the shriek of news or the mind-smudging banality of ‘content’ into my eyes.

What a mess we’re living through. Why did I have to be brought here, to this time of earth-death, and artificiality, and nations led by old men rabid with greed and ego biting chunks out of the world?

Why does this heart that feels as though it was made for so much more have to trudge through screen-swamp?

If only I lived in nightingale and wildflower time. In the butterfly days. There are still some of them around. Even as I look out of my window now, a pair of common blues are dancing around the rhododendrons. But if any of us were to be transported to a garden or meadow a century or more ago, we would likely fall to our knees in astonishment. I have been to a country where there is no industry or industrial agriculture, and wept at the thickness of wild there.

There are less than half the insects today than there were just fifty years ago. And that’s a picture that’s mirrored across the spectrum of living things. Except us, but to what extent are we really living? Living requires being present to our lives – something that’s increasingly being denied us.

It’s not easy to love such a careless world.

But then I smell the rose. I listen to the flute-song of the blackbird. I stare at all the new green in the trees. I make up a game with my daughter. I meet up with some old friends. I make a salad.

We could wish for a different world. But this is the one we have. The one we need to fight for, rest in, adore. For there is still, if we pay attention – if we pay attention – a lushness here. There is much in this world that isn’t good, but it is full of goodness nonetheless, and we can choose to attend and add to that goodness. There is beauty, and wonder, and always the possibility of love. Always the invitation.

So I will continue to rebel against despair and ennui, and go out instead to coat my being in earth-colour. I will continue to look, move and make until my skin fits my soul as it should – lively of flesh, unflinchingly communal, airways heady with petrichor; sweat-sheened, subversively joyful, nerdy in wildflower and bird knowledge.

No matter how much the earth is thinning, I will continue to love it. I will love it all the more. I will grieve, rather than fall to depression. Even if I can’t reverse the trend, I can at least refuse to follow it. I can give myself to here, to now. Because that’s all we’ve got.

Poems

Ecology

It is becoming clear to me
that the health of my bone marrow
has something to do with cornflowers,
and constellations, and the way that a dragonfly moves.
I cannot help but now believe
(and I have explored the options)
that the motions of my soul
depend in some way upon the moon,
and the weight of clouds,
and the migratory pattern of swifts.
The flow of my consciousness is reliant
(I am increasingly certain)
upon the cleanliness of chalk streams,
the societies of protozoa in the soil,
and of the course the wellbeing
of my neighbour.

You could say that heaven is lustful of flowers

It is flesh that we want;
God has no interest in being only a mind.
Resting in the shade of a mulberry tree, Christ
would listen to the sea
as it breathed upon the shore.
Often, he would go alone into the hills
and watch the bees
dipping themselves
into the lips of the blue lupine.
As the sparrows and warblers sang the dawn,
he would cook breakfast for his friends –
body bright with the smell of wood smoke and bread;
easy in the sound of idle, happy talk.

Nearby, but always too far, the angels
would look on in envy, longing to know
the sacrament of taste, the worth of busy hands,
wishing they could hear the flowers opening themselves
saying come to me, and drink.

Harmony

The psalmist declared
that if we were silent
the rocks themselves would cry out.
But they’re not waiting for us,
he just wasn’t listening.

Listen.
Clearly I am not the sum of my prayers,
that is unless Christ looks nothing like
what we have been taught.

Believe me, Christ
looks nothing like
what we have been taught.

Earlier in life
I would go out each night
to look at the stars. You cannot stand
beneath the chasm of the sky
and not fall out of yourself.

Are we not listening?
The original sin was believing
we could be separate from everything else.

The word diabolical means
to throw apart.
The word disaster means to become disconnected
from the stars.

Listen.
Awe is a kind of salvation.

I really don’t deserve all this –
to be able to show my daughter Jupiter’s moons
through the same lens I first saw them.
We don’t deserve it: this, all of this,
but here it is.
Doesn’t that say something?
What are the stones trying to tell us?

Alone, we are godless.
Of course we’re all miserable,
told over and over
that the individual is absolute.

The devil bathes in the first person.

Slowly we are reversing the incarnation.
Slowly we are loosening the threads of connection –
spending more time looking into screens than eyes,
making nothing, severed from all being and becoming.

Listen. You belong here –
under the moon-song, the tree-song,
the rising-sun song.
Listen –
it’s all the same song,

and if we pay attention,
we might find the harmony.

All poems ©Gideon Heugh, Naming God (2023)

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again—a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment.’
—Mary Oliver, from ‘Skunk cabbage’

Prelude: Your last breath

All those ways in which you’ve died.
All those tombs that your heart your body your soul have been locked in.
The darkness. The forsakenness. All those days
tempting you with despair.
The weight of the stone; the memory of what you thought
was your last breath.

The rose shrubs

They are saying that Christ is risen; but the man himself
is being coy about it—is not, unlike so many, making a fuss
about the reason. There he is, tending to the garden, waiting
(patient as you like) for someone to join him,
to smell the soil, to have a quiet conversation.

Tombs can be so cosy.
Doubtless he thought so too, knowing the conclusions
that some would draw out like a sword.
Still, when feeling that caress of light on his skin
he decided (and who knows if he hesitated?) to move.

And you?
Will you leave, or stay put?
After all, it can be easier
to keep your eyes closed
or your back turned
than to face the chasm
of an open door.

The angels bear no devices. They’re okay
with just sitting in the green shade, doing nothing
except wondering, daydreaming, imagining new life.
You could ask them, if you like, what they’re thinking.
They’d only smile, or maybe point to the rose shrubs,
which are coming into bud,
and which a lithe body with bright eyes is leaning over,
with (so it seems) not a care in the world.

April

April, and the weary eyes are being eased
by blossom-light. In the woods,
the ground is prepared for enchantments
of cowslip and bluebell. Christ here
is the dandelion clock, the vixen licking
the blood from her cub, the high wind
bringing the long-wintered home.

Spring does not ask for your faith,
only your presence.

Here is the month of the green tide turning,
the stem and bud’s urgent sky-yearning,
the awakening earth again proving
that resurrection is no fluke.

What a little lovely beginning

You wake to music of light
   the trees in stillness blessing and
      Christ—full-feathered and throaty

in chorus with the morning
   birthing wonder and necessity
      glory what a little lovely beginning.

Reflection: A better story

I wish that Christians would stop trying to prove that the resurrection happened. Not because it isn’t important, but because it’s more important.

Because if the story is true—true in the more-than-fact, deeper, deepest sense—then reducing it to the level of mere event is to miss the point. If all we’re doing is trying to lay out the bare bones, we’ll never find what’s alive and pottering about the rose shrubs in the background. I’m sure you’ll know that religion can obscure as much as reveal God, and often does. Shouting about over the literal truth or otherwise of the Bible is a good way for its subversive whispers to be drowned out. When we close our fists around an idea, we might think that we’re holding onto it, when really we’re trapping it, and ourselves. You’ve probably heard a version of the Easter story that’s either unhelpful, or, worse, toxic—

If the Easter story is only about something that happened two thousand years ago, then it’s not a helpful story.

If it’s about getting a ticket to heaven and instigating a system of belief, then it’s not a helpful story.

If it’s about God coming back to life to prove that he’s God, then it’s not a helpful story.

If it’s about God punishing God in order to make God less angry with us, then it’s a horror story.

But maybe there’s something else. Something more hopeful. Richer in its soulfulness, more cosmic in its scope. More human, more mythic and therefore more really real.

Maybe the story is saying that the deepest forces of the universe are not against you;
that the gods are not angry with you; that rather than closing in judgement, their arms are spread open wide in the posture of radical inclusion, compassion, and acceptance.

Maybe it’s saying that divinity isn’t shining lofty on a throne, but walking bent-double among the brokenness, curling up in the dark hollows and thus hallowing them.

Maybe it’s saying that the answer isn’t violence, or hatred, or dominance, but love, and the sacrifices it asks us to make.

Maybe it’s saying that the final word is always grace. And that we’re therefore part of something more expansive, hopeful, and wonderful than we could imagine.

And maybe it’s the revelation of a pattern. The truest, deepest pattern that there is. The pattern that says that despair is antithetical to the undercurrent of reality; that there always another chance (those ways in which you’ve died; those tombs that you think you’re locked in); that we can come back from anything; and that not only are endings never really the end, but that they can be generative—they can beget new beginnings. That we can survive even this, and that in disintegrating we can be integrated into something more.

Maybe the story of Easter is that the secret name of every death is life again.

Coda: Spring

All that is good is growing.
Yesterday and so many yesterdays
it seemed dead. But now
the deep God stirs in her earth,
and seed and root remember sky
and brightening make their move
towards it. Life rubs its eyes, spring
no longer a dream to sustain through the colding days
but a reality born of sunlight and bluebells
and the sure refrain of the chiff chaff.
All that is good is growing,
even when it was ending;
the darker season has had its time
and will do so again,
a knowledge to make these thrill bloomings
all the sweeter. The return of the swallows
is only marked because they left, and will leave,
but today in the fields the lambs are becoming sure of their feet,
and green is dancing once more in the trees,
and in the gardens there is a tenderness
showing itself in the eyes of the flowers.
I see that I am not dead,
nor is the hope that I was once or twice born into.
I see the meaning in our burials—
that despairing we might rise for air
and unexpectedly find it, and explore it
with lungs made new by thankfulness.
Even though the last stands of cold may cling to us,
along with the seizing memory of winters past—
all those dyings of our hearts—even so, today
and so many todays:
all that is good is growing.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

Poem: ‘Remembering’

So this is how you heal –
not through the slick mechanics of effort,
not by waiting for time to numb the memory of your pain
while the glinting days pass by – no, you heal
in the cold grasp of a March morning;
you heal when you are woken early by the blackbird,
and for the first time since your heart slipped
beneath the brackish water of grief
you are able to get out of bed before you need to.
You even open the door
and step out into the dawn-grown air,
which though still rasping with the dregs of winter
carries the soft thrill of melody.
It is what woke you; it is what is waking you.
For a few moments you are held by gasp
as the sky is pronounced with heron, back from the pond
and the cool swallow of silver fish, or going – always larger
than thought. On the damp, mossy ground
are the scattered petals of magnolia, wind-stripped
in the angry night. Still,
you notice the contrast of pink white
against the green; still, the morning breathes in
and the light has all the space that it needs;
you discover one within you too,
one that can pay attention to the song, that remembers
how to hum along
to the music.

Healing

How do we heal?

Quietly. Subtly. Eventually. One day. One step. One breath at a time.

We heal with presence, attentiveness, remembrance; with the simplest of pleasures becoming pleasurable again. The myriad blues, pinks, and golds of dawn. The feeling of your favourite hot drink in your hands. Touch. Taste. Glimpses of commas and foxes basking lazily in the sun. The garden sweet in the purple of grape-hyacinth. Deep sighs that aren’t all sadness. Dunnock trill. Your favourite film. Your favourite album flowing through you; the way the glow of it eases your ligaments.

We heal when we stumble upon the courage that was always there – the courage that rises to the surface when we realise in fullness what matters most; when we find that one gorgeous and necessary yes that allows us to say no. A ‘yes’ that could be as simple as living.

We don’t neglect the grief. Lament is part of it, too. We recall all the things we miss; pass their names like liturgy over our trembling lips. We hold them close; we let go. We heal in curves and unusual angles; in hidden corners; in long stretches that seem endless until they’re not.

We heal by getting out of our selves; by casting off into that larger flow. Know your mind, your heart, but don’t wall yourself into them. There is so much colour out there waiting to bleed into you. Be bodily with it – fingers in the earth, feet on the trail, hands passing around the bread. You’ll need solitude; you’ll need the communal.

We take that step towards life. And if the step is too much, perhaps we simply turn ourselves a little. A growing posture; a memory of soul stirring.

We’ll try to be shamed out of it. Attacked for it. Judgement will be held like stones, but someone else will come along and trace words of deeper knowing into the dust that will clear the way for your return. We heal by being here. By looking. By choosing. What is within our grasp is not nothing.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘Dissolution is the only thing that allows the soul to go to a deeper place.’
—Richard Rohr

Dear reader,

Just two devotions deep into this series and already I’m reflecting on a word that wasn’t on my original list. But I realised that I’d tried to avoid the unavoidable; that, perhaps subconsciously, I’d wanted to touch on this in ‘Awakening’ and then move on. But that wouldn’t do it justice. This is one of the things that, if you move through life for long enough— if you’re on that journey into soul—you cannot escape. Yet, in one of those bitter ironies of being human, it is the one thing we would want to escape.

So, let us meditate on the necessity of dissolving.

Gideon

Dissolving

In an ideal world, experience would be a pearl—searched for and found in the mother-clutch of azure saltiness.

In an ideal world, wisdom would be warmth—a feather of dawn alighting on our grateful, unruined hearts.

Our becoming would grow out of book-musk, or the woody sayings of an elder, or the wide vista of a mountain top. It would be achieved, route-mapped, asked for and gained. Our inner lives would be changed by planning and good intentions; we would be led into our depths by comfortable resolutions and well-produced podcasts.

There would be no blood on the fingers of myth. The gods would be handed our prayers and smile benignly. The path would be clear; growth an inevitable consequence of abiding by the way.

We would be made by the moments we live for—the ones that take our breath away. Not by the ones we have to live through—the ones in which we struggle to breathe.

In an ideal world. A different world.

In our world, we swim out for the pearl and are crushed by a wave; churned; pulled down towards the sea worms.

We go out at dawn and plant a seed of growth, and out of it sprouts not a flower, but a creature of horn and gob who starts gnawing our treasures. What do you make of this? he says.

We follow the light into the trees to find their gnarl has shredded it, and now we are in a world of green dark and roots waiting to coil around us. Wild eyes stare out at us from hidden holes, lips smacking with the lessons their hunger might teach us.

Soulfulness needs the almond reek that rises from a hip bone broken in the night. Experience is what you find when your brothers tear your clothes and throw you into a pit. It is what is sucked into the space that gets hollowed out in us by the desert days. Wisdom will approach us only when we don’t get what we want and figure out why that’s important.

When it’s dark, you have to rely on what’s right in front of you, instead of being blinded by abundance. You learn what it is you really need. Chin up and strut will never find the ground-gold. The dove told Christ who he was, but he had to go into the wilderness and talk to the devil before he could become it.

If you’ve lived enough of a life, you know this already. At least in part. You peer into the cauldron of things that have shaped you most—that brought you face to face with something beyond the ego—and words like hurt, failure, fall, humiliation and heartbreak bubble to the surface.

Loss draws god-circles around what actually matters. Our grief-groans conjure up the dark matter that gives mass to our souls. In our shattering, the cracks that Leonard Cohen spoke of are made; the ones that let the light in.

The song of becoming is all-encompassing. It needs both the minor and the major key.

I wish it wasn’t like this.
I wish I could have learned another way.
I wish my poetry could have been born out of an easy life.

But that’s not how it works. Here we are in our smithereens, with the angels merely saying, ‘Let it be.’ This is somehow part of the pattern of things. Life, death, life. We dissolve, and out of that dissolution something more tangible is made. God is death, and what death becomes.

This is not the same thing as saying everything happens for a reason, or that everything will be okay—that we need to smile and bear up. Some things are just awful. Meaninglessly awful.

What it does mean, however, is that there can be an after.

It won’t happen, however—the after—without our attention. We have to, when the time is right, when it is safe, look at the wound; put our our hands amid the sting. We won’t heal what we don’t face. But if we transform our pain, our pain could transform us. Concentrating. Softening. Opening. And so the collapse ends up initiating us into a more soulful perspective. The brokenness ends up sharpening our sense of the real. In the pit, you find something that the pearl-swimmers and ambitious mountaineers miss.

An immature person either hasn’t been through much in life; or they have, but they have failed to reckon with it yet.

It’s a long and sometimes lonely task, going through that tangled forest. I have had to fight in recent years for the piled up losses not to add up to bitterness. I have had to be wary of my weariness sinking so deep into my bones that it becomes structural. What is life telling me? That I’m not done yet. That I have things to learn, things to let go of, weatherings that could yet become a map. My grief tells me that I’ve loved enough for it to matter, and that the mattering matters. The sting tells me that I’m alive—that life is fragile and therefore worth cherishing, worth going further into because an easy life is one without great love or great richness of depth. The art, the music wouldn’t make as much sense.

You wouldn’t know how sweet the dawn really is.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
Like a lover
at first touching?’
—Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud

Prelude: new muscle of green

Spring is becoming, and the sap is on the move.

Dear reader,

Spring’s arrival does not always coincide with its official start – the hyacinths aren’t paying much attention to the calendar. Yet, this year, the beginning of March and the coming of the Worm Moon seem to have pulled the new season up from the ground.

Though its signs have been with us for a few weeks now, Monday was the first day that I felt spring: its intangible but definite air of chirp and rise; the soft lip of its urge; Cummings’ leaping greenly spirits; Hopkins’ juice and joy. It is unignorable.

The earth is rousing itself out of its slumber. A call that, at times, we might feel within ourselves.

Thoughts acquire new muscle of green… the infinite
made urgent.

In my last post, I wrote about the possibility of transformation, and believing in change. I touched on the idea of returning to our souls. Of becoming. Repentance – but not in the way you might have heard it spoken about in religious settings; not the flail of judgment, but a call to come back to who we really are.

It’s a theme I’ve wanted to explore in more depth for some time, and the delicious entrance of spring seems like the perfect opportunity to do this. For if ever there was a season to let our imaginations lead us onto new paths – to dream of what might be possible, and then start moving in that direction – then spring is that season.

But where do we begin? How do we become?

At around the time of the winter solstice, when we began our slow swing back towards lightfulness, I wrote down seven words: seven paths of becoming.

Awakening
Accepting
Releasing
Softening
Imagining
Incarnating
Remembering

As we continue to move through the spring, I’ll being offering a short meditation on each of these words – a series of devotions to help shift our souls into a posture of spring and, perhaps, renewal and return. I’m aware that there is a beautifully broad spectrum of religious/spiritual beliefs among you, so I want to reassure you that although this is adjacent to Lent and the coming of Easter, this isn’t going to be a ‘Christian’ series. Hopefully it’ll be a human one.

The exact words and the order might change as we go, as this is one that I’m feeling my way through, rather than planning in detail. And with that caveat, here’s the first meditation.

Awakening

‘The soul wants to awaken. Every day we are called to the present moment of our lives.’
—Alan Lew, This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared

There are many ways to be asleep.

Unconsciousness can look like aimless drifting, and it can look like blind obsession. It can look like numbness. It can look like busyness. It can look like exile, or wilderness. We may have an itch in the back of our spirit that something isn’t right; we may be totally oblivious.

You’re minding your own business; you’re noddingly wearily along; you’re dreaming, but the dreams are just incorporeal fantasies. You’ve been stuck for so long that you’ve settled there. Or maybe you’ve just never been shown that there’s another way to be.

A harmful cycle of behaviour. A pattern that you’ve always followed. A belief that’s kept you in a box. In a tomb.

There are many ways for your eyes to open, for dawn to break over you like a cold wave.

A sudden change in circumstances. A slow, barely perceptible shift in mindset. A word of honesty from a friend; a shock of insight from a stranger. The north wind becomes a south wind. The ground gives way and we reach out to find that something was there all along. The sky collapses and reveals something new. Love becomes grief becomes love.

A discovery of courage. A veil lifted. Realisation. Revelation. Facing the real. Awakening.

It might be a trumpet blast, or a whisper. It might happen in one breathtaking moment, or take years. Either way, the call will come. I promise you, it will come. It might be easy to ignore, or incredibly difficult. But it can be ignored; it can be pushed aside. We might expend great effort doing so in order to stay comfortably asleep.

Transformation won’t happen without your involvement. A decision; a commitment; a turn.

Maybe it’s too painful to contemplate. Change often is – even good change. Sacrifices may have to be made. Strange instructions followed. Leaps of faith.

There is grace; always grace. Maybe you ignored it last time. But the call will come again. And again. Although, it might not come forever – we cannot know when our days here will expire. Love won’t stop knocking at your door, but how much longer are you going to be around to answer?

The choice is there. Will you open it? Will you wake up?

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

PS Apologies for the less-than-great sound quality on the voiceovers recently. I don’t always have access to a good mic, but I’m working on it. Gideon x

‘Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.’
—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

‘Do not be afraid, you wild animals,
for the pastures in the wilderness are becoming green.’
—Joel 2:22

Poem: Lines on the brink of spring

After all of this absence;
after you were forced to endure
so many days of frailing
and stone; now, now—
the flocks of light
are preparing to return home.

There is rumour of a hungry glint
in God’s eye; you breathe an anticipating air
and can sense the temples of green
yearning to become again.
The sap is stirring.
The bulbs and the blood are ready.

Soon all will be carried by song;
soon the woods will drip
with the violet and buttered dew
of bluebell and primrose.

There is hope that within this turn
you will remember the creature within you—
the one who prays for a garden to grow
and hears something whisper
Yes.

©Gideon Heugh

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Dear reader,

I am writing this from the midst of implausibility.

These words come to you from a desk that I struggled to imagine seeing again so soon. I am sat in a study looking out at a garden that I would not have believed could be mine even a few weeks ago.

A nuthatch is scuttling up an oak tree that was planted a hundred years ago, when this cottage was built. Two brimstone butterflies are flitting about the swelling buds of the rhododendrons. A bumblebee sleeps in a cup of crocus; a shock of cerulean blue becomes a jay drifting between hazel and chestnut. Moss warms in the sun. Heart aches within a chrysalis that it can now dare to dream of one day leaving.

A year ago I lost my home—the one that my daughter grew up in; the one that I had worked so hard and waited so long for. Our little house at the end of the road on the top of the hill by the edge of the woods. It was perfect, and it broke my heart to leave; an inescapable consequence of redundancy and divorce. I will never forget walking from empty room to empty room, body convulsing with sobs as I said goodbye.

The desk went into storage, and the bookshelves, and my daughter’s bed with the heart carved into it. The life that I had dreamed of and created crumbled into dust; into ash.

Ash. A week ago, I went through the rites of the Ash Wednesday Holy Communion—an ancient ritual to mark the beginning of the Lenten season: that time of stripping back, letting go, repenting.

Repent. It means nothing religious. It means change your mind. It means come back. Come back to the soul of things. Come back to the really real.

It means remember who you are—reconnect with that unbroken, unbreakable spark of goodness at the core of you.

To begin this process, we are reminded that we are going to die. And not just that final snuffing out of our flesh, but all the ways we die in life. The homes we lose. The loves that leave us. The dreams that burn up in our hands even as we try desperately to hold on to them.

Fragility. Mortality. This is where hope begins. Not in saying ‘everything is fine’, or even ‘everything will be fine’, but in accepting that life can be tragic.

Dust you came from, and to dust you shall return.

Ash. Dust. Dirt.

Dirt. What if we called it soil?

Soil does not seem like a living thing. It is made from death. It is consequence of break, fall, rot. Yet good soil—soil formed by the layered years of dead matter—thrums with life. Billions of organisms live in just a teaspoon of healthy soil, feeding off the decay and transforming it into fecundity. Out of these civilisations of rot, trees and flowers and crops grow.

Soil is composed of endings, yet this is what makes it able to generate beginnings.

We came from soil, and to soil we shall return.

Repent. It means return.

What will grow from the layers that we lay down, or that are stripped from us? What will the ash from the burnings of our lives fertilise? Maybe we’ll never find out. Maybe it will be just a single flower in a landscape of grief. Maybe a single flower is enough. Maybe it will grow; maybe its seeds will spread far beyond our limited vision.

It is no small thing to ask someone to believe that change is possible. Not with the way the world is. Not with the lightless days, months and years that many of us have faced. Winter is very real. And all-consuming.

Yet it is does not exist in a vacuum. Nor is the fallow without its own meaning. There is a pantheon of seasons, giving and taking from each other; utterly mutual. There is a wheel, and the wheel turns—often slower than we would like, often imperceptibly; yet it turns. And we, too, can turn. We can come back. Back from the brink; back to our souls.

It is no small thing to ask someone to believe. Yet I have died a lot of times in my life. And some of those deaths have made me stop wanting to live. I have faced the long nights. And here I am, putting my hands into a growing ground.

I am blessed now with a new home, and it is better than I could have hoped for. And while I am far from healed, I can perhaps imagine healing.

We might not always get the miracle, the sudden turnaround. But one day—one day—we might feel a subtle change in the air; a breath that once felt heavy becoming something else within us. We might wake up and realise for the first time in a long time that we are awake. The sap will stir. The bulbs and the blood will be made ready.

Gideon

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.’
—Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

‘New wine must be put into new wineskins.’
—Mark 2:22

Dear reader,

Recently, published by a piece by titled, ‘Being a Christian Writer is Costly: Naming the allure of a vague spirituality.’

Being a ‘Christian writer’ myself (though as we’ll soon see, that label is complicated), I thought I’d give it a read. And I enjoyed it, appreciating the sincerity of its faith, its literary heart, and the strength of its storytelling.

I also disagreed with it.

It chafed against something important in me, agitating the God-splinters within. Given that I recently wrote an article about the importance of engaging healthily with people whom we disagree with, I decided to write a response. And in typical fashion, that response turned into a long reflection on what faith means to me. If you disagree with what I’m about to say, feel free to join in!

Thank you for reading,
Gideon

Poem: God is the worm

God is not the lion—
fearsome and aloof,
living only for its own.

God is not the lamb—
farmed according to our appetite,
stuffed in the mouths
of the Sunday privileged.

God is the worm—
quietly making and remaking
the ground beneath our feet;
creating, often unseen, the dark loam
from which fullness might grow.

©Gideon Heugh, Naming God

Prelude: beyond the walls

I heard about God in church, but that’s not where I found God—I found God in my grief; in the eyes of my shining daughter; in that night of jazz, friendship, and perfumed skin when I was in my twenties and full of hope.

I saw Christ in the dead tawny owl we buried beneath a beech tree; I felt him when I shook with pain as I said goodbye to my home.

I spoke to God in humble, heartbroken and heated prayer; and was answered not in words carved on stone, but in skylark song, and mountain awe, and the kindness of strangers.

We can search the narrow corridors of the temple and find only diminishing echoes. We can enter the Holy of Holies and see only a dusty, torn curtain laying on the ground. Meanwhile, God is stretching their legs beyond the walls: inhabiting the divine reek of the soup kitchen; weeping in the woods where the last of the birds are singing; kneeling by the edge of the poisoned lake, raging and plotting justice.

Intro: soft edges and shadowed corners

In ‘Being a Christian Writer is Costly’, Sara bemoans the growing trend of identifying with being spiritual but not religious. She implores the Christian writer (in a lovely phrase) to ‘pull tight the strings of our words against the pegs of our faith’. She urges them to not give up being ‘explicitly Christian’; to resist the temptation ‘to trade in the humble tenets of orthodox faith for a more sexy, vague spirituality.’ This vagueness might include substituting the words ‘Lord and Saviour’ with ‘Divine’, or being only ‘a writer who deals in wonder, mystery, and the transcendent’ rather than ‘a wild prophet pointing directly to the Son of God.’

I can understand the heart of this. And certainly I agree with Sara’s insistence that being a writer of any ilk should never be about ‘Aesthetic feeds, impressive follower counts, fancy book endorsement blurbs, enviable life experiences, and an astonishing stamina for regular early-morning writing times’ (though early mornings are absolutely when I write best!) Where I disagree with the piece is in why exactly people might be drawn to a vague spirituality; what ‘explicit Christianity’ looks like; the necessity of mystery; and what it means to be a ‘wild prophet’.

A few months ago, I attended an Inkwell event in Oxford. It was filled with poetry, gorgeous choral music, and good conversation. And one of the things that struck me about it was not the explicit Christianity, but the opposite. It didn’t seem to be a place of hard barriers, but of soft edges and shadowed corners; a place, in other words, that could hold a broad range of ideas and perspectives. A place for both the churched and the unchurched. There were the orthodoxly faithful there, but also plenty of people who had been burned by traditional expressions of Christianity and were seeking something else, something more. There was an expansiveness about the spirit there—beautifully un-rigid, holding space for the shy, the curious, the subversive. Such spaces are vital, because there are plenty of people who don’t want to go to church or be explicitly Christian. And for good reason.

Sara’s piece doesn’t spend too much time delving into what this reason (or reasons) might be, but I think it’s of vital importance.

‘Be more explicitly Christian’. Okay, but what kind of Christian? And how much importance should we place upon that word at all?

Chickens and darkness

‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven.’
—Matthew 7:21

‘All words are made up.’
—Thor, Avengers: Infinity War

We are currently in the season of Epiphany, which marks the moment when some very explicitly not-Christian (probably Zoroastrian) Magi went to visit the explicitly Jewish Jesus. There are no Christians in the Christmas story.

This Sunday, many churches will celebrate the feast of The Conversion of St Paul—but what did he convert to? Not Christianity. That wasn’t an available option. He remained Jewish. And yet, he’s a Christian Saint and wrote a hefty chunk of what we now call the Christian Bible (though he didn’t realise that this was what he was writing).

The waters are muddier than we think. Clearly, God doesn’t live in the box called religion. Any god as small as that would not be God.

So what of the words we use to define God? In the Bible, God is described as being (among other things) like breath, bread, a rock, a vine, light, darkness, a whirlwind, a whisper, and a chicken. But these words, and the stories they inhabit, are metaphors, symbols, signposts—not the thing itself. You can come up with your own language, your own metaphors if you want. The stories are still unfolding.

You don’t have to label something Christ for it to be Christ. Because the thing that we need to grasp about God is that we cannot grasp God. Whatever you’re gripping so tightly to, that’s not it. We’re all just hazarding guesses, cupping droplets of light in our hands, interpreting and reinterpreting vague revelation and always falling short. And that’s only a problem if you think it is.

‘God is just the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape,’ as Barry Taylor is said to have put it. For some people, the blanket called explicit Christianity simply no longer fits with their experience of the divine. It may even have become harmful, and so letting it fall to the floor might be the healthiest thing you can do.

It doesn’t mean that the mystery isn’t still there.

For a lot of people, whether they realise it or not, God is still Zeus: the bearded old man with superpowers. Or maybe they’ve moved beyond that to the God as the supreme being: an all-powerful religious entity. But you can keep going, if you want. The current of being. The spark of existence. The ground of being. Being itself.

Yet all words (all except perhaps one, but we’ll get to that) dissolve when they enter the heliosphere of the divine. Whether you say ‘Lord’, ‘God’ or ‘the ineffable ground of being’ is not of ultimate importance. Jesus himself (who, lest we forget, wasn’t explicitly Christian either) said as much when he declared, ‘Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Rather, he defines faith in terms of the posture of our hearts, and its fruit.

He demonstrates this most strikingly in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46). There are the ‘explicit Christians’ who take great care of Jesus, doubtless naming him correctly, yet are nonetheless rejected and cast out by him; then there are those who have no interaction with Jesus, but who live lives of compassion, and so are welcomed in. In the eyes of the divine, the distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous has nothing to do with labels, and everything to do with how we treat other people.

Then there is Jesus’ definitive exemplar of what it means to follow God’s commands: the Good Samaritan—someone of a completely different religion and ethnicity to Jesus. You think we would have taken the hint.

Star, planet, and pebble

‘For Jesus to become Christ, he must surpass the bounds of space and time, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Frankly, he must rise above any religion formed in his name that remains tribal, clannish, xenophobic, or exclusionary. Otherwise, he is not the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42) at all.’
—Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ

Does this mean that we can’t be Christian any more? No, it means we can return to the heart of what faith should mean.

Christian scripture says that to be a Christian is to be known by your love (John 13:35). Not the name you give yourselves, or the pronouns you give your God; not how much you talk about Jesus or which particular creed you subscribe to; but by your love—boundless, unconditional and indiscriminate.

Actually, it goes even further, saying that God is love (1 John 4:16), and that ‘Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.’

Now there’s a definition that matters. This is where Sara and I agree: it’s all meaningless without love.

The direction that Spirit is in travelling is outwards; the movement of God is one of growing expansiveness; it is a widening circle of inclusivity, a breaking of barriers. That’s what love is: a throwing down of the walls of self to bring others into our sphere of being.

Don’t just love yourself, your family, your tribe, your nation, your religion, or whatever it is you identify yourself with—love God (where is God? Everywhere; the divine image imprinted in every human being; the divine spark at the core of every star, planet and pebble. Loving God isn’t about gatekeeping a religion; it’s about opening your heart to existence itself); love your neighbour (who is your neighbour? Whoever is suffering, says Christ); love your enemies.

Just love. Stop ‘othering’. Quit ‘us and them-ing’. Stop erecting all those semantic fences and white-knuckling all those precious definitions—they don’t, and can’t encompass the divine.

God doesn’t want you to be more explicitly Christian. God wants you to be more explicitly Christ-like. And those, regrettably, are not the same thing. As ancient and recent history have demonstrated all too well.

Explicit problems

‘I love you Christians… you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.’
—Donald Trump

It is not the ‘alluring’ nature of deconstruction that is drawing people to it, but the alarming nature of the evangelical church. People are rejecting explicit Christianity because they see no Christ there.

People are choosing a more vague spirituality rather than a sharply defined Christianity not because such a spirituality is ‘sexy’, but because ‘explicit’ Christianity has hurt them. Or because God no longer seems to fit inside it.

Explicit Christianity might have wounded them personally, or they can see (and you don’t have to look far for this) the harm it is causing at a much wider scale. They might have witnessed one too many instances of a church covering for abusers, more interested in protecting the edifice than listening to and protecting victims. For some, perhaps for many, ‘Lord and Saviour’ might be a synonym for shame and trauma. Perhaps we look at those shouting most loudly about being ‘explicitly Christian’ and see only hypocrisy, misogyny, homophobia, nationalism, violence—everything that is most undivine.

If the word ‘God’ is a red flag for people; if they associate it only with exclusion and fear; then why shouldn’t they shun such language?

Belief in God on its own means nothing. Even the demons believe (James 2:19).

We are currently watching in grief and fear as America is being pushed towards fascism. And who do we see among those leading the charge? People going to great lengths to trumpet their explicit Christianity.

Trump was swept into office on a wave of white evangelicals. ‘Jesus Saves’, read the banners as the Capitol was stormed. I can’t imagine any such banners reading, ‘Embrace the beauty of divine mystery’, can you? At a peace protest, sure. But at a hate march? That’s where you’ll find the cross hoisted high and proud.

The same thing has been happening in my country, where far-right leader Tommy Robinson has been increasingly hijacking the explicit symbols and language of Christianity.

Of course, Christian nationalists do not represent all of Christianity, or even most of it. I work for a church, and it’s full of wonderful, big-hearted and open-minded people. It strives to welcome all, to serve the poorest, feed the hungry, minister to the lonely. Plenty of such churches exist.

But that illustrates part of the problem. Christianity is too broad a term to fit the specificities of its myriad forms—one interpretation of Christianity might be utterly alien to another; yet is also too small a word to encompass the ineffability and largeness of God.

If being ‘explicitly Christian’ is simply going to church, proclaiming the Bible to be the word of God, and having a ‘Jesus saves’ bumper sticker, then you can be ‘explicitly Christian’ and evil as hell. And pointing that out is the job of the prophet.

Iconoclasts

‘The prophet is an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered, and awesome. Beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretentions.’
—Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets

Sara implies that to be a ‘wild prophet’ is to point ‘directly to the Son of God.’ I do not believe this. Nor do I think it is what our sacred texts say.

To equate prophecy merely with evangelism is to neuter it. The primary, almost all-consuming concern of the prophets was injustice; the abuse of power; the agony of the people. They saw the blood on the floor of the temple and the courts and spat God’s anger and heartbreak at those responsible. The conversion they demanded was to tear out all selfishness and greed from our hearts and turn our eyes towards the neglected and excluded.

Prophets are rarely, if ever, institutionalised. Nor will they necessarily use institutional language. They aren’t inside the church; they’re outside, throwing rocks through the windows and calling for change. The establishment hate them, criticise them, dismiss them. If the language of the prophets is strange and unfamiliar, it is because they are speaking with divine imagination; their words are not of religion, but of the God who will tear down the temple, the God who looks like fire and tastes like tree sap and feels like starlight crawling beneath your skin.

The prophet doesn’t serve religion; she savages it.

‘I hate, I despise your religious festivals;’ says God through the prophet Amos. ‘Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.’ Why? Because the eyes of the religious had been so focused on their religion and on power that they had allowed injustice to infect the land. When religion gets in the way of love, justice and the repair of the world, God will hate it, and turn away from it in wrath (‘When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening.’—Isaiah 11:15).

Christians may need to stop and consider the possibility that parts of the church are in decline not because of a lack of religious zeal, but because God is gnawing spitefully at their foundations.

We might need to bury what we think of as explicit Christianity. Because only in putting a seed in the ground can you hope for anything to rise up into new life. Certainly, people are free and should be encouraged to do that in their own hearts if explicit Christianity has caused them harm.

Love is the music that God wants to listen to, not the stilted songs of religiosity.

In Walter Bruggeman’s words (from his classic The Prophet Imagination), ‘The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.’ And that applies to the dominant church culture and Christian culture, too.

We might say that to be prophetic can be to point to Christ—if by Christ we mean, to paraphrase Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the arc of the universe that bends towards justice. If Christ is the heartbeat of restoration, then yes, the prophet must help people to hear it, even if it means if it means pulling them out of the soundproof frameworks of belief they have built around themselves.

Lost in wonder

‘Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.’
—Mary Oliver, from ‘Mysteries, Yes’

Sara cites the popularity of writers such as Ross Gay, Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, Rebecca Solnit, and Ocean Vuong as evidence/symptoms of the spiritual-not-religious movements.

Yet could it be that these writers are giving people something that they’ve not been finding in traditional religious contexts? Something that they need?

Could it be that the profoundly important themes of ‘joy, nature, kindness, life, mysticism, trauma, and memory’, in Sara’s words, aren’t being explored deeply enough in church? That all the voices shouting ‘Lord, Lord’ are drowning out the still small voice of calm? That we are blinded by gospel glare?

One of the reasons that people leave religion, or never find it in the first place, is that the great immensities of the human experience such as wonder, beauty, grief and mystery can seem absent from it. In religion, they find a place that’s brilliant at pointing directly to what that religion says is God, but not necessarily a place that is helping them to be more fully human.

Without being lost in wonder, we’re just lost. Without surrendering to mystery, we’re held captive by exclusionary dogma; without a connection to nature, we will remain forever a step removed from ourselves, and from God. Beauty is the grammar of the divine; God’s vocabulary is incomplete without joy—and grief, also, for there is no love without it.

Devotion

‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.’
—J.R.R. Tolkien

Un-explicitly Christian writers have done as much, if not more, to change what I think, feel and do about God than a host of the explicit variety. There are also the very definitely not Christian writers who have done the same: Rabbis Jonathan Sacks and Abraham Joshua Heschel, for example; or the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz.

The writing of the likes of Mary Oliver isn’t diminished by the fact that it isn’t explicitly Christian (though Oliver does indeed write explicitly about God in some of her poems, and about Christ). It might even be enhanced by it. Without religiosity, there is more space for questions, for yearning, for unknowing. Dogma stifles wonder, without which there can be no real reverence, and so no real devotion. Oliver’s poetry has helped me to fall more deeply in love with this world, and that has deepened my faith.

So too stories such as The Lord of the Rings (got to keep my ‘shoehorning Tolkien into everything’ streak going). The cosmology of Middle Earth does have a god (more accurately, it has a pantheon of divine beings with a ‘One god’ who rules them all), but that god or the religion around it is never explicitly mentioned in the books. It is hinted at, vaguely, but Tolkien, being suspicious of allegories, kept it at arms’ length. And yet it is a story that is profoundly, powerfully spiritual in its exquisitely rendered themes of love, hope, nature, and taking a stand against evil.

Tolkien was Catholic, yet his work is also catholic in the original sense of the word: universal.

The Lord of the Rings doesn’t need to be more Jesus-y. It doesn’t need the word ‘God’ (or even Erū Ilúvatar) in it. The writing is absolutely soaked in spirit, meaning, and goodness. An inferior writer would have made it an explicit religious allegory, and the story would have suffered and been less impactful for it. C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a wonderful story, but to reduce it to merely ‘Aslan is Jesus’ is to view it through a narrower lens than the story deserves.

Conclusion: An anchor of belonging

‘O Jesus, drink of me.’
—Christina Rosetti, from A Better Resurrection

None of this means I don’t believe in and value tradition, ritual and orthodoxy. I do, enormously. My High Anglican schooling and Jewish heritage has made sure of that. Tradition and ritual can help re-member us to land and ancestor; they can be an anchor of belonging and connection in the maelstrom of modern life. Centering life around tradition and ritual is how the Jewish people have survived millennia of persecution. It is a rich and beautiful way to build and maintain community.

The key is to hold these traditions, should we value them (there will be those who won’t be able to, and that’s fine. God is always bigger than we think), but hold them lightly—to be welcomers, not gatekeepers. Can we treasure them without white-knuckling them? Because on the other end of that spectrum is fundamentalism, religious tribalism, and extremism.

People are desperate for meaning. So much of life has been stripped of it by the grasping neon fingers of modernity. We’re being forced to live in the shallows, and there is a great yearning for depth. It’s been touted that there is a ‘quiet revival’ of people turning to religion to find this, but what will they discover when they get there? The God of religion, unyieldingly defined; or the God of love—mysterious and ineffable, yet as close as skin?

I don’t want to be explicitly Christian. I want to be subversively Christian. I want to be prophetically Christian. I want to be Christian in the way that Jesus was Christian —i.e. not defined by Christianity and its doctrines and vestments at all, but in how he treated other people, championed the poor and oppressed, and lived with radical inclusion and compassion.

‘The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back,’ says Richard Rohr. So, Christian and non-Christian and vaguely spiritual writers, let’s present them with something else. Something better.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps greater.’
—Haldir, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Dear reader,

There’s so much advice on the tongue of each new year; so many step-by-step instructions for how to better ourselves, or instructions for how to ignore the instructions. Wisdom and counter-wisdom. Make the most of the fresh start. Look back. Look ahead. Pretend it isn’t even happening. Try it in the spring instead.

Plenty of these things are good, and you’ll know which path your gut is telling you to follow. All I can say for certain is that this is a tricky time for many people, maybe even most people, and perhaps what we need ministering to is our hearts, not our heads. We need art, not advice; music and beauty, not edification. And so when this poem came to me a few days ago, I knew it was what I had to share as the new year begins to break over us.

If you fancy going deeper, and finding more words to take across the threshold, then linked below is a piece I wrote a while back on finding new definitions of hope—ones that will serve us better than platitudes and optimistic feelings. Because the facts right now are grim, and we need something more soulful to carry us through.

Thank you for supporting ‘The Green Chapel’ over the last year. It’s been a blessing to be able to share my words. A grace-filled 2026 to you.

Gideon

Lines for a new year

1
Commit to your own voice. Reach
into whatever sodden hollow it has fallen
and pull it out; then reacquaint yourself
by walking it through different shades of ache.
Remember it to your body, to the waiting air,
to the bright berries.

Seek for a chapel in a corner of your heart,
in a corner of the grass,
and sound your desires there.
If you arrive and find that the door is locked,
climb through the window.
If you arrive and find there is no chapel,
then build one from sticks, and poetry, and spit.
Name the swirl of good and want within you, throat a song
from what’s been hiding. You will not be unheard.

2
The reports won’t bring you any good news—
it isn’t their business. Pay them little heed, or none.
If they’ve convinced you that you’re hemmed in,
pay attention to the seasons for long enough
to convince you otherwise.

The reports won’t bring you any hope,
so make your own, or borrow some
from the trees, from the music cupped by sadness,
from the sleeping longly-dark bulbs,
from the thoughtful question.

Be green-breathed enough to feel amazement;
be still enough to deepen;
be communal enough for grief and joy
to run amok within you.
Make a meal of it, invite people over,
pour on a gravy as thick as kindness.
Nothing will get you through like each other;
nothing will compose the year like grace.

Though so many things are withering, or fading
into the grey evening; though memory is slipping
and the blood of the real is slowly
being drained from us—
there are still the dawn-dreams; still the myths
of exile and return; there are still the fields
filled with pregnant ewes, and shepherds
making ready.

Somewhere, a polluted river
is being cleaned. Somewhere, a young girl
is having ideas above her station.

3
Don’t bury your sorrow, or your anger. Let them flame.
Make of them a beacon, or a pyre, or a place
to gather and tell stories. Later, scatter the ashes
onto the soil; stick around for a life of sunrises
to see what grows.

Trust the wheel of things: the always coming and going
and back again. Trust the arc of things: the glint-eyed Spirit
bending over the world with patient intent.

Listen for the resonance. That voice of yours
is never alone. The earth is waiting
for you to put down your phone
so that it can pull itself into you.
Make love-chased mischief;
make love-heated art; make love.
Keep biting the lip of audacity.
Weave a pattern of your days;
use as many colours as you can.

Some dreams will come true; many won’t.
Some fears will prove warranted; many won’t.
Being alive to the facts will sting, and so it should.
The point, maybe, is for us to keep living anyway.

©Gideon Heugh

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

If the Christmas story is important to you, then the rise of generative AI has to be important to you. Because both speak directly to the heart of what it means to be human.

At the core of Christmas is the incarnation: more than just God visiting the Earth once upon a time, but the very idea of en-fleshment, embodiment, entanglements of soul and molecule—

the Godding of matter.

The birth of Christ is a consecration of the physical world. It is the ultimate affirmation of the phrase that kept spilling uncontrollably out of the divine throat in the creation story: ‘It is good… it is good… it is very good.’

Generative AI—incorporeal, ungrounded, unliving—bears within its code the opposite of this message. The message of generative AI and its proponents is that of transhumanism: the idea that human nature (and therefore human purpose, value and meaning) is something that must be transcended.

Generative AI says, ‘This world isn’t good enough. We can, through technological advancement, improve upon reality itself.’ Nature is to be dominated; human nature to be augmented, escaped, or supplanted.

This is a startingly similar message to apocalyptic, fundamentalist religions. Tech bros and the rapture lobby are two sides of the same deluded coin: both are de-incarnational; both are anti-here.

At the heart of so much of the trouble in our world is the breaking of the connections we hold within it. These relationships we have with each other, with the wider natural world, and with ourselves, are what makes life worth living—they are the source of and vehicle for all goodness. Generative AI is a further fracturing of this vital interconnectedness: putting a machine in place of a human, oppressing our need for body and soul.

The god of generative AI is productivity, efficiency, and ‘more is more’. It strips work of its meaning, art of its essence, and people of their value. It skips the process of gestation and birth that is essential to creativity and life. Generative AI says ‘easier is better’; whereas spirituality says ‘the struggle is real’.

Generative AI is therefore a dark reversal of the Christmas story. It is the latest, and by far the most significant, plunge into disembodiment. It is anti-incarnation; anti-wonder; anti-soul; anti-human; anti-matter… and therefore anti-Christ.

Christ (the Word, the spark of reality, the ground of being) and the physical world are inseparably, irrevocably intertwined. The sages said that by, through, and for Christ, ‘all things are made and held together’ (Colossians 1:17; John 1:13). Christ is in the soil, in the stars, in a child’s drawing, in the breaking of bread, in fellowship and compassion and conviviality. This is what it really means to be generative: to participate in our own existence, not delegate it to a machine.

If you care about the Light of the World, you need to embrace the Flesh of the World. God is analogue, not digital.

The divine is with us, not elsewhere. The Christmas story says that the meaning of life can be found here: in the mess, in the beauty, in our aching hearts and our deepest yearnings; in love, in creativity, and, yes, in work. Christ is at the tip of your fingers.

The simple living of human life is enough; the value of the world is inherent. We are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14)—created in the divine image (Genesis 1:27).

So come back to reality; to the human. That’s where you’ll find God.

Merry Christmas,
Gideon

More on this theme:

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘Then all a world I made in me:
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.’
—Judith Wright, ‘Woman to Child’

Dear reader,

The trouble with taking a break from writing is that it gives you the space to write. I didn’t want the pressure of having to publish anything over the Advent/Christmas period, but perhaps not unsurprisingly my imagination took that as a cue to dip into the dark ink of the season and conjure up some words. So I’ve got a couple of pieces that I’m going to briefly break my fast to share with you.

The first, below, is a prose poem that I wrote late one night when the phrase ‘the analogue God’ came to me; and the second will be a reflection on the necessary but neglected strangeness of Christmas.

As with much of what I write, my hope is to reach people for whom God-stories no longer hold the meaning they once did; or who were let down by an institutional narrowness, and want to find something more expansive; or who just yearn for the blood-red, grass-green soul of things.

Blessings to you,
Gideon

The Analogue God

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’
—John 1:1-3

Even in the beginning, there was never only the Word.

The Word was the idea of it, the pulse of it, the electrical signals surging through the nerves of it—not a phrase hung aloft in the void, but the syntax of all that was unfolding.

There was the Word, but there was also everything that the Word was within and that lay within it. There was everything that it birthed, bore witness to, and that in its creation gave the Word increasing form.

God never wanted to be indefinite, and so gathered mass.

With so much to gasp over, so much ever-distancing expanse, there needed to be something that could anchor our imaginations; something that could capture the motion of the spheres in the glint of an eye. And so the ancient scribes called it the Word, because what else do you say about the death bed, the blossoming tree, the night sky that will outlast all history? What do you call sacrifice, and gravity, and the scent of newly cut wood?

What about decay, and how it makes things grow?

Even in the beginning, there was never only the Word, because the Word is the desire to be and to become, and so in the beginning and ever since the beginning there has been the great thrust of consequence: star-flesh; mountain-flesh; womb-flesh. And then of course hopefulness; honour; kindness; the gnashing of teeth that fills their absence.

It takes an awful lot to make a world.

The night sky will outlast all history, yet still, for at least one moment, it bent towards it. Because there was that particular flesh—much prophesised, bartered over, and lied about, yet still a stubborn candle haunting our darker rooms. The ancient scribes didn’t want us to miss it, even if they couldn’t do justice to it.

Such is the Word. The universe was always too vast for us to grasp; and we needed love to be described in more than just a sermon or a kiss; more than just the shift of the pale moon and parades of dawn light. We needed someone to show us how to live; to say ‘blessed is’; and to die, hung aloft in the void.

More on this theme:

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

Poem: ‘Waiting’

The rumours are of morning. They say it is on the way,
if you can believe them. 

But what if it takes a lifetime? It wouldn't be unusual.
And what if that cold stream of years
carries away your expectations, leaving you
with nothing but dreams 
and a paling recollection
that there is another way to be?

Waiting for change can gnaw you to the bone—

but what bitter incense could begin to rise 
from that raw mash?
Might you see something startling 
if you dared to unhook your neck
to peer into those exposed depths?

Once, in a time of wearied hope, the strength of the night
splintered a faithful woman’s hip, and out of it arrived
some necessary marrow.

©Gideon Heugh

Meditation: quietly into the fecund night

Dear reader,

If you have followed my writing into winter before, you will know that Advent is my favourite season. Not Christmas (which, for many people and for many reasons is a difficult time), but Advent.

It is a season that’s rather unjustly been relegated to a countdown. It has become mere doors to be opened on a calendar, when what it has the potential to be is a window into our souls.

Because perhaps more than any other season, Advent is a mirror of the human condition. Advent is where we actually live—not in the arrival, but in the waiting. We dwell not in the revelation and the reward, but in the in-between. We can be found most often not at a destination, but on the way there, or setting off again because we didn’t find what we were looking for.

To be human is to search; to reach for; to be in the process of.

This is Advent. It is a season for accepting that the night can’t be blasted away or ignored, but must be sat vigil through. We wait, and in that wait we become.

Advent is a long sigh; a purposeful relaxing of the shoulders. It is slow; it is hush; it is the lessening that distills. Long evenings; candle shadows; the unhurried turn of pages.

Advent is the soft skin of a deep yearning. It is a quiet anticipation; a tender opening up of ourselves to prepare. Gentle wonder. Un-extravagant hope. It is Evensong; Vespers—no hiding from the dark, but the solemn steps we take into it; to let it fold us into a centre of silence.

Advent is no fanfare: the palace-dwelling and the prejudiced and the offices of power do not understand it. It is a hymn of descent, knowing that the heights hold no great treasure. It is a turning down of the brightness that we might see better. It is an allowing; an acknowledgment; a starry night of cold honesty. It is modest, and reflective, and haunting—spectres and angels indistinct.

Advent is being still for long enough that the tears arrive. It is the gathering of blankets; the reaching out for hands. It is the promise that hurts because it is so beautiful and it might let you down. It is the strange but essential messages of dreams; it is the natural and stolid determination of a pregnant woman. It is the grief of the one who is still waiting.

Advent is the humble pilgrimage—the journey you take not because you need to get somewhere, but because you felt the call to go.

And so we go. Quietly into the fecund night.

Poem: ‘What you learn when you lose everything’

You learn the signs of particular ghosts,
and how to distinguish their sound from fox talk.
You learn, from cold staring, the writing
on the face of the waning moon. You learn that forever
can be the darkness filling the ache
between one moment and another.

You examine patience from a hundred different angles,
and find the one that hurts the least.

There is a remarkable amount you glean
from a ground of wet leaves, from the teeth of a cold snap,
from the scent of the woodland path
rotting down into pockets of mushroom. 
Dead wood; avoidant behaviours; noting the birds
who still insist on singing through the grey months.
 
One night, you listen to recordings of an April dawn—
the blackbird pipes between beams of morning 
and the gushing hope of it swallows you into sorrow.

You learn the many strange faces of Jesus, recalling perfume
and what it was like to be wrapped in saving fellowship.
You read the rusted edges of poems, and stop wondering 
that loneliness is a snuffed candle.
You learn about the long life of oak trees,
and their longer death. You learn about how we'll never even glimpse
most of the universe; it's too far away, and even light
isn't that quick.

An idea can be a prison. A broken heart can be a prison
it can be the tremor shaking open a prison. 
Outside, the ghosts are barking;
the new moon and the browning acorns could save you
by making you forget
what you think you already know.

©Gideon Heugh

Recessional: fasts and offerings

I often write and share daily devotions at this time of year. I love doing this, but often it means sacrificing a little of my own time and space. This year, I intend to be as utterly and blissfully screenless as possible for Advent and Christmas (with the exception of communal things like watching the Shaun the Sheep Christmas movie with my daughter), and that means no Substack and no social media (which I’ll be leaving for good before long anyway).

It’s traditional to fast through Advent, and a digital fast might be a good place to start. The increasing and increasingly vacuous noise of the digital landscape would make such a fast wonderfully conducive to deeper reflection. My screentime will be replaced with sacred reading, writing, stillness, and gathering.

What could you fast from this Advent to heighten your sense of the really real; to lean into the waiting—the long night?

Though I won’t be sharing anything over December, rather than leave you with nothing I thought I’d put together a little compendium of nourishment that you can dip in and out of as you please. What follows are links to previously released essays and reflections that I hope will be enriching at this time of year. There are a couple of thousand more of you subscribed to The Green Chapel now then when I first published them, so for most of you these pieces should be fresh. Save them, share them, read them out loud with a group, take them with you into the dark.

I’ll see you on the other side. Many blessings to you this Advent and Christmas.

Gideon

Further reading

A primer for the Advent season, exploring what it can offer us.

‘What is it that you are yearning for? What are the long aches that you whisper to yourself in the dark? What is the oppression that you fear you will never be free of?’

A meditation of the generativity of endings.

‘Without the sweet leaf-rot that comes from letting go, there is no fertility, there is no growth. Our problem is that we want life without death. What resurrections have we failed to witness because of our refusal to put something in the ground?’

What we can do when it feels like nothing can be done.

‘You can lament. You can find the soul of yourself and others. You can choose to love. You can rest without guilt. And you can trust that the troubles that are shaking you and the world can be rewritten into a better story.’

An alternative Christmas sermon ‘in search of a more beautiful Emmanuel’.

‘But what if the problem is not that we have stopped believing in the Christmas story, but that we weren’t given the right one to believe in in the first place? Furthermore, what if there is a fault in our understanding of it means for a story, any story, to be true?’

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
—Saint Paul

Dear reader,

This is the second part of an essay that got too big for its boots (or, more accurately, for email size limits). If you missed part one, you can find it here. Alternatively, you can also download the whole shebang as an analogue-friendly, print-ready PDF. Thank you for reading.

GH

How to use this guide

This is a guide to reversing brain rot. Yet it’s not a guide to thinking more; it’s a guide to living more. Escaping the dumbening is not about becoming ‘intellectuals’; it’s about utilising our minds for depth—for the things that we actually want to do and that give us life—rather than dwelling only in the shallows.

What follows are twelve tools to cultivate that depth. You can read it all in one big gulp, or go through one section at a time. You can follow it sequentially, or skip ahead to things that especially strike you. I’d recommend lingering with it though, or re-visiting it. Maybe take a notebook to it (see tool number five) and write down anything that resonates, or any actions that you want to take as a consequence. Or, you could do none of that, and just use it as fuel for a fire that’s already burning within you.

Twelve tools for reversing brain rot

1. Reading

‘A house without books is like a room without windows.’
—Horace Mann

If you want to fight back against brain rot, reading books is one of the best weapons you have.

What’s so wonderful about reading is that it’s both deeply pleasurable and immensely good for you. It’s chocolate, if chocolate was also packed with vitamins and helped you build muscle and lose fat. It’s crossfit for the mind, but also a spa retreat in Bali.

If you want to renew your mind; if you want to calm your mind; if you want to strengthen your mind; if you want to make your mind more rich, luminous and elastic, then you should read books. Not summaries of books; books. Full fat, organic, ink-and-paper-and-glue books.

Read widely, read vociferously, read to stretch yourself but also read just to escape and feel good. Read novels: detective, sci-fi, fantasy, comic, literary, horror, whatever; read memoirs; read poetry anthologies; read history; read children’s books; read great literature and read smutty literature. Just read.

Make sure it’s a physical copy, too. Research has shown that information doesn’t sink as deeply into our minds if we’re reading off of a screen (including e-readers)1.

If you’ve fallen off the reading wagon, start with something that you know you’ll love and that will be easy to get into. I only managed to read four books in 2024 (I’m no stranger to mind fog myself), but so far this year I’ve read two dozen—mainly thanks to PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books, which are not only exquisitely written, but a delight to read.

The effects that reading has are almost supernatural:

• Improved concentration span and memory

• Better mental health and self esteem

• Higher levels of creativity

• More emotional intelligence and empathy

Children born in poverty are less likely to stay in poverty when they’re older if they read, while one study found that people who read for 30 minutes a day lived longer than those who didn’t read at all.2

Replace scrolling with reading as your go-to activity and you’ll not only be setting your mind up to flourish, but your whole being.

2. Deleting social media

‘[Social media platforms] are responsible, as much as any other force, for the unravelling of civil society that seems to be accelerating.’
—Cal Newport, On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society

If reading is one of our best weapons, then social media is brain rot’s. Unless you’ve been hiding beneath an algorithmic rock, you know the harms it causes by now:

• Heightened anxiety, depression and low self-esteem

• Increased loneliness

• The spread of misinformation

• The warping of reality

• Polarisation

• De-sensitisation

• Radicalisation

• Loss of attention spans

• Decreasing empathy

• Mass theft of personal data

Social media was, once, a social networking platform. You used it to connect with people, organise events, and catch up with what’s been happening. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t evil. That’s changed.

Social media is now aggressively and very effectively designed for one purpose: to kidnap your attention and monetise it. That’s why you don’t see that much of your friends there anymore, just ‘content’. And it’s only going to get worse, because now the majority of that content isn’t even going to be generated by humans, but by AI.

True, social media isn’t all bad. It can be used as a tool for artists to share their work, for example. Yet in doing so, it forces those artists to become ‘content creators’, desperately fighting to please the algorithm instead of creating the art that they want to create.

Yes, you can still occasionally find some meaningful things on social media. But is it really worth swimming through an ocean of sewage just to find a bag of sweets? You can find those things in other places, and without the cost. The equation doesn’t add up any more; the good doesn’t get anywhere close to outweighing the awful.

What we need to realise is that the things we think that we’re staying on social media for are a lie:

• It’s a lie that social media helps you to stay connected. It’s a simulation of connection—one so convincing that it tricks your brain into thinking it’s getting the real thing, while undermining the real thing by replacing it. It provides ‘the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship’, in Sherry Turkle’s words.

• It’s a lie that social media helps you to stay informed. Yes, it’s giving you information, but it’s the worst possible kind of information.

  • It’s unbalanced, feeding you only what it knows will engage you, showing only one side of every story, therefore locking you in an echo-chamber.

  • It’s devoid of nuance, bombarding you with short-form, dopamine-baited hot takes and shallow perspectives that are designed for instant consumption and reactivity.

  • It’s contextless, giving you a cat video one second then the aftermath of a drone attack the next.

• It’s a lie that social media helps you to relax. The simple way to test this is to examine how you actually feel after spending time on there. After scrolling for half an hour, do you feel calm? Do you feel energised? Do you feel light and creative and optimistic? No, you don’t. You feel grubby, tired, possibly a little more anxious and irritable. If you’re stressed, scrolling won’t help; it’ll just numb you, while the stress carries on in the background.

Moderation doesn’t work. Its design is too good, too compelling, too effective at overriding individual agency. You’ll be better off in dozens of ways—mind, body and soul—without it. It’s time to get out of the slop-fest.

3. Talking to human beings

‘“I want to see you not through the machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome machine.”’
—E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

I remember sitting in a school assembly when I was ten and listening to a teacher read out an abridged version of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. In it, a woman sits alone in a windowless room, surrounded by buttons that if pushed would cater to her every need. The whole world exists like this: confined, isolated, utterly reliant on technology, with all communication done entirely through a virtual network.

This was written in 1909. It was created as dystopian fiction, but now it’s just how people live.

If you want to unravel, disconnect yourself from the physical human web. We need each other; in every single meaningful way, we need each other. And the kind of connections and conversations we have in the digital landscape are only imitations of each-otherness—shadows of the real thing, offering only a fraction of the nourishment that it offers.

We need to rediscover the beautiful, surprising, essential mess that is human conversation. Meet up with people. Throw your phone down a mineshaft before you do, so that you actually talk to them. Strike up conversations at work, at the school gate, at your local mahjong club. Gather. Connect. Be communal.

Yes, it’s difficult. But, as with most things, it gets less difficult with practice. Yes, it can be scary. But far scarier, surely, would be failing to allow our minds and souls to grow through the nourishment of true human interaction.

A recent study found that the single most important factor in our quality of life, across every area, is the quality of our relationships3. This is determined by how much attention we pay to those people, and our quality of communication with them.

Social media is not conversation. Email is not conversation. WhatsApp is not conversation. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had misunderstandings—in relationships, friendships and at work—that have been solved simply by meeting up and talking it through.

Furthermore, spending face-to-face time with a variety of people is a brilliant way to break out of our echo-chambers. Speaking of which…

4. Challenging your preconceptions

‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you have an opinion, the algorithm is going to make sure that it gets reinforced. Algorithms decide what we see; and in doing so shape what we believe. The digisphere is confirmation bias on steroids. Once we get a foot in the door of an ideology, the algorithm is going to shove us through and throw away the key.

We need to challenge our preconceptions. The best way to do this is to talk to people who we might disagree with, to establish connections with people outside of our tribe. This is an art that, thanks to the digisphere, is vanishing before our eyes. There is no healthy disagreement in the online space, just opaque and bloody intransigence.

These are some practical steps you can take to break free:

• Get your news from various sources (never social media. You’ve deleted it, right?). So, if you normally read The Guardian, start reading The Times as well, and vice versa.

• Slow down your news intake; give time for nuanced perspectives to form. The 24-hour, omnipresent news cycle is antagonistic to quality understanding. Don’t get news from an endless feed, get it from a quality, long-form publication, program or podcast. Better still, read digests that collate different perspectives, such as The Week.

• If there’s an idea that you hold fiercely to, actively seek out intelligent people who hold the opposing view, and listen to or read some of their reasoning. Instead of dismissing people and movements you disagree with out of hand, think of how you might be able to better understand them. Don’t plant your flag in an idea until you’ve done due diligence on the thinking that’s behind it, and behind any opposing idea. Go deeper, and look for trusted sources (ChatGPT is not a trusted source. Avoid it)

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5. Writing

‘Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.’
―Philip José Farmer

It is not necessary to become a writer; but for the enrichment of your mind, it is recommended that you write. This doesn’t have to be novels, essays, poems, or a memoir. You needn’t even worry about writing well (that will come with practice). But, if you want to think more deeply, you could do a lot worse than picking up a pen or pencil. Because writing is not just the mere expression of thought, but the creation and stimulation of it.

When you write, you generate, follow, explore, clarify, amend, extend, articulate, add to, subtract from, arrange and re-arrange your thoughts. Writing is thinking.

As with reading, the medium is important. Studies have shown that writing by hand activates our brains in much richer ways than typing on a screen.4 If you want to invest in your memory, learning, and cognitive development, then don’t use a notes app: use a notebook.

Here are some starting points for getting more writing into your life, whatever your level:

• Journaling. Just ten minutes at the beginning or end of the day—whichever suits you better. Write down how you’re feeling, what’s happened recently, what you can learn from, what you’d like to remember in the future.

• Keeping a Commonplace Book. This is a collection of quotes, sayings, and ideas that are meaningful to you. You might just add one or two a week, but over time you’ll form a beautifully personal compendium of inspiration and thought-fuel.

• Writing letters. This is a gorgeous, thoughtful, calming antidote to the hyperactive communication systems of the 21st century. When writing a letter, you can form, unpack and explore your thoughts and feelings as you go—discovering what it is that you really want to say. It’s a proactive, nuanced form of communication, as opposed to the reactive verbal vomit that is instant messaging. Plus, a letter is just a lovely thing to give or receive.

• Drafting by hand. If you’re working on a work project, an essay, a poem, a script, or even just an important email, try drafting it by hand first, even if it’s just in note form. You’ll find this gives you far more space to explore your ideas.

This is one of the many, many reasons why using generative AI is so daft. It’s literally silencing yourself, surrendering your voice to a machine. To become a wordless society, as we are becoming, is to unmake reality—or, just as frightening, have someone else make it for you.

6. Walking

‘The real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.’
—Thich Nhat Han

Walking is possibly the great catalyst for thought. If you have a problem to solve, a mental block that you need to shift, or if you simply want to stir your creative juices, walking is the way.

There’s something about keeping ourselves shut inside for too long that also shuts us off from the full expanse of our thoughts. There’s something about keeping still for too long that also immobilises our creative and problem-solving faculties. Movement of the body moves the mind. Strolling beneath the expanse of sky creates room for us to stroll about our imaginations.

I have never been for a walk and not felt better by the end of it. If I feel stressed, depressed, or stuck, walking is a tool that I know I can rely on. And they don’t have to be great hikes in the mountains or long treks the country; a twenty minute stroll around my local suburban neighborhood often does the trick. Even a leisurely obambulation through city streets and parks can be fruitful to the mind.

Having said that, the presence of nature on a walk is especially fecund. Again, it does not have to be grand beauty. It could be the blaze of a lone autumn tree; the carol of a robin; an arrangement of flowers seen through a window. Our minds and bodies long for this connection. Thus I rarely fail to find a poem when I am out walking. Poetry is soul-language, and when I walk, it is like I am opening the soul’s windows, allowing the light to swim in and out.

To choose to forever four-wall ourselves is to shrivel. There are studies showing that patients recovering from surgery who can see nature through their windows recover sooner than those who cannot. Just being able to see a tree makes broken bones knit together faster. The out-of-doors makes us more alive, and makes us think more deeply. Go and get amongst it.

7. Remembering that your mind is part of your body

‘Mens sana in corpore sano.’
—Juvenal

There is a colossal dissonance between the environment that our bodies and brains evolved in, and the environment in which we now live. And that dissonance is hurting us.

While we might sometimes think of the mind as being separate from the body, this is patently not the case. They are, if you want to get biological about it, part of the same deal. Your body includes your brain, and so our brain is affected by how we treat our bodies.

Not all of us are blessed a body that wants to work. But there is always something we can do to show it a little love. There are three main pillars to good bodily function, all of which affect the health of our minds:

1. What we eat and drink. There’s an overwhelming amount of nutritional advice out there, much of it contradictory. But what we can say with absolute confidence is that ultra-processed foods (basically, anything that contains ingredients that you wouldn’t be able to buy and use at home) are catastrophic for body and brain health. Avoid them. Eat real food, the sort of thing your grandparents could make, and you’ll be fine. And stay hydrated, too. Water is brain fuel.

2. How well we sleep. ‘Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury,’ says Matthew Walker in Why We Need Sleep, ‘Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity.’ It is ‘the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.’ Our screens have encroached upon this vital element of our health, and our cognitive function is suffering as a result. Sleep affects your concentration, your creativity, your memory, your patience; if you want a healthy brain, get more of it.

3. How much we move. Too much focus is put on the idea of ‘exercise’. But you don’t need to play sport or become a runner. What you do need to do is move, in whatever way you are able. Sedentary lifestyles are devasting for our overall health. Avoid long periods sitting down. Find movement that you enjoy (gardening, walking, yoga) and try and get some in every day.

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8. Learning something new

‘Becoming is better than being.’
―Carol Dweck, Mindset

No human is born with the innate ability to perform a particular skill. The things we can do, we’ve learned how to do (though our genetics might make it easier to do some things more than others). Think of something that you’d consider yourself ‘bad’ at. How much time have you actually spent deliberately learning how to do it? Probably not a great deal.

I can play chess because I’ve invested time in learning how to play chess.
I can’t speak Swedish because I’ve never invested time in learning how to speak Swedish.

A delicious fizz rises up in our minds when we put them to the work of learning. Earlier this year, I decided I was going to learn how to write in cursive, and bought a book to facilitate it. Have I mastered it yet? No. Am I much, much better than when I started? Yes.

You’re never too old to learn something new. What’s something that you’ve always wanted to try, or learn? Go for it. Move towards having a growth mindset. There’s an easy trick you can use to accomplish this: utilising the word ‘yet’.

So, ‘I can’t write in cursive’ becomes ‘I can’t write in cursive yet.’

I can’t read long and complicated books yet.
I’m no good at tennis yet.
I can’t repair my own clothes yet.
I don’t know much about gardening yet.

‘Yet’ turns everything into an opportunity. This is, incidentally, the opposite of what generative AI does, which is to gaslight us into believing that we are incapable of doing things that are well within our capacity for growth. You think you can’t do something, so you delegate it to a chatbot, and so never realise your potential. As Henry Ford said, ‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.’

9. Cultivating creativity

‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.’
― Maya Angelou

Creativity doesn’t have to be only what is traditionally thought of as ‘creative’ (writing, painting etc). Creativity isn’t necessarily about making art; it can simply be what John Lane called ‘the sacred arts of living’. This is cooking, gardening, homemaking, repairing things. It is to cultivate habits of making, so that, ultimately, what you make is a life.

Social media, ChatGPT and the rest of the digital rot-factory undermine this. And they do so by finishing the job of turning us into consumers. They are the last steps up the path taking us from being participants in life to passive observers of it.

The creative life is one that is opposite to the consumer life; it is the life that we participate in fully and unmediated, not delegate. Creativity is putting our hands into the dough of life instead of buying it from a supermarket pre-sliced, plastic-wrapped and pumped full of chemicals.

Creativity is an act of hope. It says, ‘I am here. I have an imagination, and a body, and can choose joy and goodness no matter what else is going on.’

What could you start to make? How might you pour your imagination into your hands and let them work? This is how we counter consumerism and the mind-fading it encourages: we draw, write, build, paint, sculpt, plant, knit, sew, stitch, repair, carve, etch, cook, bake, build, gather, craft, create.

Creativity is how to be in the world and actually experience it, not just witness it. And to do that, we need to change our approach to doing difficult things.

10. Doing difficult things

‘AI… I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I’m 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. … The other day, somebody wrote me an email, and said, “What is your stance on AI?” I said, “I’d rather die.”’
—Guillermo del Toro

Writing this essay has been incredibly difficult. Writing an essay, story or article of any length is a challenge: it requires skills that take a long time to learn, research that takes a long time to research, and then just the bloody-fingered effort of tapping the thing out and editing it and editing it and editing it.

Like any creative work, there are times when you simply don’t want to do it, or feel like you can’t, or are unable to find any inspiration. It’s hard. Using generative AI would probably take some of that difficulty away. But then, and I mean this all seriousness, why the hell would I want that?

I like being able to do difficult things, even when I don’t like it, because I know that it’s good for not only my mind, but my soul. I know that challenge, friction and overcoming obstacles are part of the human story. The ability to do difficult things is essential for human flourishing. ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings,’ as Wendell Berry put it.

Without coming up against and then overcoming some resistance in your life, you will never gain the strength needed to emerge from the shallows.

I’m not saying that we need to make our lives uncomfortable; I’m saying that we shouldn’t always be in such a rush to make them convenient—to eliminate all friction and therefore any possibility of spark.

One of the most insidious things about generative AI is how quickly it has convinced people that they are unable to do things that we have always been able to do. Like coming up with ideas. I’m all for AI doing things that are physically impossible for us, such as analysing enormous data sets. Yet we’ve somehow believed the lie that one of the most fundamental things about being human—creativity itself, the thing that sets us apart from the rest of the living world—is better off outsourced to a machine. How has anyone accepted this?

How? Because the groundwork has been laid for decades. The rise of the chatbot is not a bolt from the blue. It’s the zenith of two intertwined ideologies that have been the engine of the modern world.

• First: that faster, easier and more convenient equals ‘better’.

• And second: that productivity and growth is the be all and end all of existence.

These are the ideologies behind single-use plastics, microwave dinners, and sweatshops. They’re the ideologies that say that it’s better to drive to the local shops, instead of walk; or spray our gardens with toxic, forever-chemical weedkillers, instead of making the effort to care for soil and plant.

Everything from industrial agriculture to plastic grass to smartphones to ultraprocessed foods—everything, in other words, that is ruining our health and the health of the living world—is underpinned by the hyper-convenience, hyper-consumerist ideology. And generative AI is just the next progression of it.

We need to reject this ideology. We need to believe again in the importance of doing difficult things; of going slowly; of the necessity of process rather than a blinkered obsession with getting to a result. Life blooms in the doing of things, not in the thing that is done. By using generative AI (or any form of hyper-convenient shortcut), you’re skipping from A to B without moving through all the juicy, genuinely generative stuff in between.

Generative AI is a self-doubt machine: anti-resilience, anti-grit, anti-becoming. Slightly insecure about your ability to do something? Use generative AI and there’s no need to face or overcome it—no need to learn or grow. Your self-doubt consequently becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: delegating a task will, over time, erode your ability to do that task independently. Every problem solved for you and every idea generated for you is a vote against your being a person who can solve problems and have good ideas.

You ought to be more enchanted with yourself. One of the most complex, powerful, unique and astonishing things in existence is sitting on top of your neck. Use it, or lose it. I want to expand and strengthen the neural pathways that help me think deeply, solve problems, and come up with ideas, not let them atrophy because using AI is ‘easier’. What’s the use of all that brain plasticity if we’re never going to stretch ourselves?

Do difficult things. Refuse to abdicate your mind. Re-lithe your brain by saying no to the bypass of cognitive effort. Reject the use of generative AI. You don’t need to use it, and, if you value your own ability to think, you never will.

11. Finding solitude (i.e. destimulating)

'Shutting out the world is not about turning your back on your surroundings, but rather the opposite: it is seeing the world a bit more clearly… Silence in itself is rich. It is exclusive and luxurious. A key to unlock new ways of thinking.’
― Erling Kagge

We have slain our silence, and it’s crushing us.

Deep thought and creativity requires a spaciousness that the digisphere doesn’t afford us. The endless scrolling, always-on, always available, context-switching maelstrom of the online world forces a kind of cognitive claustrophobia upon us. Without boredom, without hush, without opportunities to let our minds dwell on a particular idea or wander around searching for new ones, we cannot thrive.

Every day, our brains are assaulted by far more information that they evolved to be able to take in (one study has shown that a person living in an urban environment today will be faced with more information in 24 hours than someone living in the 15th century would have experienced in a lifetime). It’s small wonder that we’re frazzled, anxious, and mind-clouded.

We can counter this by cultivating solitude. You don’t need to go on a retreat, but its vital that you build moments of retreat into your everyday life. Create habits of quiet, un-busyness, un-interuptableness. Unplug yourself from the information machine.

• Wake up 20 minutes (or more) earlier than usual and spend that time in quiet with a journal. Or, have that quiet time at the end of the day instead (or as well as). Perform a ritual such as the examen—a prayer in which you carefully sift through the day.

• Go for a daily walk or run without music or podcasts—just you and your imagination and the living world.

• If you commute, take some of those journeys without any stimulation—without listening to anything. Just observe, daydream, be.

• Spend deliberate time every day without your smartphone (see below for more about this). Ban your phone from bedroom and bathroom; keep it off for at least the first and last hours of the day. Leave it in your bag or pocket when you’re in queues or waiting for things.

• Take the Sabbath seriously (you don’t have to be religious to do this). Have one day a week where you slow down, de-stimulate, and spend time in quiet. A day without screens, without busyness, without the need to accomplish anything.

• Practice mindfulness and meditation.

• Stop context switching. If you’re going to do something, do that and only that.

12. Rediscovering wonder

‘Men dull in mind find no cause for wonder anywhere; they idly sit at home instead of going to see what is on view in the great theatre of the world.’
—Conrad Gesner

Search engines, Google Maps and algorithmic recommendations banish the possibility of the unexpected. Life is passively absorbed, not actively discovered. They strip us of curiosity, and curiosity is the lifeblood of joy and creativity. If everything is handed to you on a plate, you’ll never bother to cook something up yourself. If all your questions are instantly answered, there’ll be no need for the inquisitiveness that leads us to new ideas.

Not only that, but the hyper-availability of information damages our ability to retain and recall information. When you’ve taught your brain that any and all info is just a few thumb-taps away, why would it bother investing in the architecture of memory?

It is a beautiful thing to smile and say, ‘I don’t know’. It is a thrill to find out slowly, to allow the layers of mystery to unfold in their own time instead of having them slammed into your eyes by the internet. We live in a deeply enchanting world, if we would but pay attention to it. ‘The world is full of magic things,’ said W.B. Yeats, ‘Patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’

• If you don’t know something, and don’t need to know it right away, don’t use a search engine. Slow the process down by using reference books such as dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias (remember that reading on a page activates our brains better than on a screen).

• Don’t use map apps to get everywhere. Learn the directions yourself (this is, after all, what all humans did all of time until a few years ago). Allow yourself to look around, wander, and lose yourself in your surroundings.

• Don’t look up everything about a place before you go there. Leave room for discovery.

• Stop taking pictures of everything in order to share them online. Go somewhere beautiful and just be there. Just look. Experience life instead of merely documenting it. Don’t be so busy trying to capture memories that you forget to make them. If you’re going to take pictures, try an analogue camera.

• Stop letting the algorithm choose things for you. Listen to albums, not Spotify playlists. Ask a local for recommendations of places to go, not Google.

• Knowingly say ‘I don’t know’ more.

We live in a world of infinite choice, but this has left us fatigued and overwhelmed. Life is short, death is very final, and we will never get around to trying everything, or knowing everything. But that should be a liberating thought. Instead of fighting the endless tide of information, we can sail down the streams of our imaginations. We can choose where we put our focus; we can lean in to wonder.

Conclusion: the analogue mind (why you need to ditch your smartphone)

There’s been a common thread throughout this piece—a malevolent presence lurking in the room

Everything I’ve written about above is negatively influenced by one thing: the smartphone.

Smartphones have played a dominant role in why we’re reading less, why we’re hooked on social media, why we don’t talk to each other any more, and why we don’t understand each other any more.

Smartphones stop us from writing, they keep us indoors (and even if we’re outdoors, keep our eyes locked on a screen), they disembody us. Smartphones stifle learning and creativity, and put powerful, unnecessary and harmful generative AI at our fingertips.
Smartphones eliminate the possibility of silence and solitude, and have helped erode our sense of wonder and curiosity.

They seemed magical when they first came out. Yet over time they have been increasingly engineered to take hold of our minds—changing the way we think, remember, and interact with the world around us. Instead of the phone being a tool, it has become an appendage; instead of the internet being an independent entity, it is something that our very existences have bled into. And so we are fading.

If you want to feel better, think better, and be less tired, anxious, and stressed; if you if you want to read more, sleep more, and connect more to the people around you; if you want to be more rested, more focused, more empathetic, more at peace, more productive—then you need to untether yourself from your phone.

As with social media, moderation is red herring. Due to the phycological vulnerabilities that smartphones exploit, we can’t moderate our own behaviour with them. When you’re on your phone, you’re not in control. Even when you’re in the same room as it, it’s affecting your ability to think.

The pro move, therefore, is to get rid of your smartphone entirely. Though that might seem unthinkable, it’s becoming increasingly plausible thanks to a growing list of alternatives.

If ditching your smartphone doesn’t feel possible right now, there are still plenty of things you can do to counter its most brain-rot inducing effects:

1. Get a ‘dumb’ smartphone. These phones, such as the Balance Phone and Light Phone, have many of the useful features of smartphones, but without the brain-rotting ones.

2. Delete all unnecessary, unhelpful and distracting apps. Whatever it is that’s sucking up your time, whatever it is that’s making you unconsciously pick up your phone, delete it.

3. Turn off notifications. Unless it’s a phone call, you don’t need to know about it right away.

4. Use an app blocker. Software such as Freedom and StayFree can help keep you away from distracting apps and websites. You can schedule them to activate at certain times (so you can’t scroll in the morning or evening, for example), or block apps and websites permanently.

5. Use a minimalist launcher, such as Minimalist Phone. These strip back the interface of your phone, making it less enticing, and ensuring that there’s far less to click on.

6. Aggressively ban your phone from certain times and spaces.

   1. No phone in the bedroom or bathroom

   2. No phone for the first or last hour of the day

   3. No phone at mealtimes

   4. Definitely no phone when you’re with another human being

You could even, when at home, treat your phone like an old-school landline, keeping it one spot and only using it there.

Our minds are not amorphous—we are analogue beings. True intelligence is sensory, grounded in matter. To re-ignite our minds, we need to de-digitise ourselves, and re-engage with the really real. We need to quit the dangerous experiment that is the hyper-online age and come back to the body of things, renewing our minds by returning to our senses—to be alive in the world around us, not disappearing into our screens. That is how we survive; that is how we escape the dumbening.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

Dear reader,
You might have been expecting the second part of ‘How to escape the intellectual apocalypse’. I promise you that it is coming soon, but given the heaviness of that subject matter, I thought it might be nice first to take a breath. And what better way to do that than with a poem?
This came to me while walking some much-loved local paths on my birthday last Friday. Birthdays are celebratory, but can also provoke a deep sadness, causing, as they tend to do in my case, reflections on what once was.
I’ve been experiencing quite the period of drought, and weariness, and grief, but something in the soul of things seemed to sense this, and in response offered me words that provided some relief. I hope they bless you as they’ve blessed me. They’ve turned into one of my favourite poems.
Gideon

When there is no poetry in your fingers

—do not despair. Listen
for the songs of memory, the ones that gently shelter
the truth. Close your eyes
and think of breathing the sweetness
of leaf-fall; think of brushes of snow
hushing the roads outside your old home;
think of what you did
in the softness of that spring morning
when the blackbird and the eyes of your love
gave you something to hold.
Then there is the inevitability of primroses;
then there is the cornflowers
washed in cascades of sun.

In a canticle of darkness,
can you hear the canons of light?

I try not to despair. After all, there is little difference in my mind
between the oak path leading up from Ambarrow
and the lanes of my heart. So,
when there is no poetry in my fingers
I walk, and the music tends to find me: sounds
of new colour brought forth by the ever-transfiguring earth.
Today, it is whispers of rain
and mistle thrush; it is the kork of the raven
pushing through crowds of birch and pine; it is the land
making folds of itself, folds that it can climb into
once the great body of winter
has pulled himself over the horizon.
My imagination is there with it,
summoning long evenings; whisps of bonfire smoke
coming in through the window;
the advent of orange peel, Christ, and clove.

What will this turning bring?
There is always so much
that this turning could bring.

When there is no poetry in your fingers
do not despair. Come to the oak—
the big one that watches over the path
near the top of the hill.
It is more than three centuries old, and is only just
getting started. Every year, it sheds the cloth of life
and settles into a deathish sleep, knowing
that in concert with the bluebells’ rise
it will be brought back to the living.

©Gideon Heugh

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other lovely things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘Dear Log: Can it be true? Do all Simpsons go through a process of “dumbening”? Wait. That’s not how you spell “dumbening.” Wait. “Dumbening” isn’t even a word!’
—Lisa Simpson

Dear friends,

This was originally intended to be a single post, but as the word count casually strolled past seven thousand, I decided that it might be better off being split in two. I don’t particularly like doing this, as I wrote it to be a single piece, but I think the platform that I’m sharing it on makes it necessary.

Part one, which follows below, is a primer; a prelude. It contextualises what I think the dumbening is, and where it’s come from. Part two, which I’ll publish a handful of days after this, offers twelve practical tools you can use to rescue yourself and your loved ones from it.

Thank you, as ever, for reading. And if you’re new, welcome—it’s great to have you here.

GH

The enshittification of the human brain

'If we have only have trash and trivialities to sell, we must produce trashy and trivial personalities to serve as consumers.’
—Lewis Mumford

You’ve noticed it, haven’t you? Of course you have. Your intuition has been telling you for some time: little nudges in your gut; an awareness growing at the base of your spine. The evidence is airborne, windlike, seen in its effects.

Mind fog. Weakening memory. A weariness haunting your edges. Growing irritability. Diminished depth of thought. Not being able to focus in class, or at work. Not being able to finish a book. Not being able to start a book. Not being able to take our eyes off the phones; even as we sit with our friends; even as our children beg for our attention. Screenwreckage.

Then there’s the fomenting anger. The bursting pustules of political violence. The increasing ubuiquity of shredded nerves, reactivity, and intransigency of opinion.

Yes, you’ve noticed. It’s shocking, but no longer a surprise. How could it be? It’s been stalking us for some time. It’s been gathering strength in the corners; rarely in plain sight, but never completely out of sight—a tumour in the periphery. You catch a scent of it, you feel your marrow twitching, you know it.

Still, you push the conclusion down, numb it away; the truth too uncomfortable to face directly.

Now, though, it’s official. The data is in. It’s arrived in stone. The news alarms us but, if we’ve been paying attention (if we can still pay attention), also makes us mutter, ‘Of course.’

We’re losing our minds.

No neutrality

‘Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.’
—Johann Hari

We have known for a while that, thanks in large part to smartphones and social media, our ability to concentrate has been rapidly deteriorating. We have known for a while that, thanks to the digital outsourcing of knowledge (okay, Google), our capacity to retain and recall information has been shrinking. And we have watched seemingly helplessly as for the last decade we have been force-fed a mental diet of increasingly shallow, rapid-fire, polarising, radicalising, de-sensitising, numbing, dopamine-baited ‘content’.

What exactly did we think was going to happen?

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? Because we’re not really thinking any more. Not deeply. To think, you need time and space. You need the ability to focus, or even just the opportunity to let your mind drift, search, and make new connections uninterrupted. To think, you need to go for a walk. Stare out of a window. Read a book. Write in a journal, write a letter, write on a scrap of paper desperately summoned to catch the lightning. To think, you need to have long conversations. Have follow-ups to those conversations. Debate. Throw ideas around a circle of differing minds. You need to be able to do nothing. Dwell, linger, meditate, daydream—step purposefully out of all your doings and into the halls of imagination. And, importantly, you need do those things free from distraction; or, in other words, free from the devices that we’ve become enslaved to.

None of this is an accident. It isn’t guilt that we should be feeling about our screentime, any more than a gambler should feel guilty about their gambling addiction. What we should be feeling is anger: anger towards those who have done this to us—who have exploited our vulnerabilities for profit.

Technology is not a neutral tool when it’s specifically designed to hijack our minds. Our devices are hostile. The harms of social media and smartphones have been in the open for years, but neither the tech companies responsible nor the governments who might neuter them have done anything meaningful about it (though, mercifully, this is beginning to change in some countries, with bans on social media for under-16s, for example). The tech companies don’t care that we’re becoming mindlessly in thrall to these technologies—our brain-rot is their business plan. And it’s making them apocalyptically rich.

The digisphere is being exploited in other nefarious ways, too. We know for a fact that bad actors such as Russia and China are using social media and other web communications as part of their hybrid warfare strategy, sowing discord and political unrest among other nations. Meta and TikTok make this remarkably easy to do; and, again, haven’t taken any real steps to stop it.

Luckily, our salvation has arrived. Because now there’s actually no need to think at all. The latest model of ChatGPT can do it for you. You don’t need to come up with your own ideas. Solve your own problems. Write your own words. Or do anything as complicated and difficult as talking to another human being.

So, what do we think is going to happen next?

I say ‘next’, but it’s already happening.

The cognitive decline industry

‘The problem with revolutions is that they sometimes devour their children.’
—Christine Rosen

Several key pieces of research have been published in 2025 that confirm the suspicions and common sense of so many:

• The first is that it seems as though the human race is getting measurably dumber for the first time in recorded history.1

• The second is that literacy (such a vital palisade in our defences against brain-rot) is in decline.2

• The third is an MIT study showing that using generative AI models such as ChatGPT can diminish your ability to think3 (backing up Microsoft’s own research that came to the same conclusion, a conclusion that ought to be bleeding obvious).4 This in the context of existing studies showing that simply being in the same room as your smartphone negatively affects how you process and retain information5.

• And the fourth, and perhaps the most alarming, is that our personalities are changing, and not for the better. Agreeableness and conscientiousness—the vital traits of empathy, kindness, being able to form relationships, responsibility, and caring about your obligations—are in freefall among 16-39 year-olds, and are also declining in older generations.6

It is therefore not just our cognitive intelligence that is suffering, but also our social and emotional intelligence. Our ability to think, but also our ability to relate. These are all things that help us to navigate life better, that hold society together, and they’re all in decline.

Much like the rise of anxiety, the research suggests that it was in the early 2010s that these shifts began to happen, coinciding, unsurprisingly, with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and social media.

There are other factors involved, such as the mass isolation and trauma brought about by the coronavirus pandemic; the vanishing of community; the decline of sleep; the loss of the natural world; the escalation of global crises and conflict. Even the quality of the food we eat and the air we breathe affect the lubrication of our synapses. But looming large are the screens we’ve been sucked into, and the extraordinary harm this is causing.

It’s probably time for us to start calling silicon valley what it actually is: the cognitive decline industry. As has been noted over and over, the people who create these technologies tend to avoid using them, and go out of their way to make sure their children don’t, going back to Steve Jobs refusing to let his kids use an iPad.

Why are we using them?

The alarm bells now being sounded about generative AI were ringing as smartphones began to take over our lives, and were completely ignored. We plunged headfirst into the shiny new technology, and are only beginning to understand the grim consequences. This is why it’s so desperately sad that generative AI has been embraced so unthinkingly by so many. It seems that we’re going to keep making the same mistakes.

Unless we choose not to.

What our minds are for

‘The great thing is to gather new vigour in reality.’
—Vincent Van Gogh

When I talk about intellect, what I’m not talking about is our ability to do long division or read Chaucer. It’s far more than mere computational power, and has very little to do with IQ. How ‘smart’ you are is an irrelevance.

Nor am I interested in intellect for the sake of attainment, productivity, or status. Hustle culture is very much part of the problem. Sherry Turkle describes how intelligence ‘once meant more than what any artificial intelligence does. It used to include sensibility, sensitivity, awareness, discernment, reason, acumen, and wit.’ This is not mind-as-tool-to-get-ahead, but mind-as-tool-to-sink-our-teeth-into-the-business-of-living.

Intelligence, as I define it, is the ability to bring our mental faculties to bear upon activities that make us more human. It’s problem solving… and it’s making art; it’s thinking deeply… and it’s understanding one another; it’s logic… and it’s imagination. Our neurodiversity means we’ll have these things in different balances, and that’s wondrous—the point is that cognitive function is a broad church. And the digitally-sponsored brain rot that we’re now living through affects all of it.

In part two (see below), I detail twelve tools we can use to fight back.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other beautiful things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

Dear reader,

This is the season of the soul.

Apple-fall. Harvest moon. Sighs of colour in the crowns of trees. Letting go season; taking inventories of the heart season; consolations of gold-tinted melancholy season.

Steaming cups. Misty dawns. Long, wind-blown, leaf-strewn walks. Faint scents of renewal left behind in the footsteps of decay.

Settle in. Pick up the pen, or the paint brush. Set the table. Stir the stew.

Here are three poems for the beginning of autumn.

Autumn morning

Here is life: that unbearable miracle.
Here is the morning carrying you again
out of the darkness, offering you
the heavy pearl of choice.

The harvest moon is high and full
in the pale dawn; the trees are ready
to start laying their rich canopy
upon the ground.

Here is your weariness; here
is the emptiness; here are the damp ropes
wrapped around your heart.
You stretch your body,
you breathe the cool air, you sip coffee
and listen to the quiet blue of the sky.

The sobs. The smiles. The embrace
that reminds you what it all could mean.

Here is life: ragged and shattering
and somehow forgiving, somehow worthy
of forgiveness—of thanks.

Autumn soup

We walk the lanes, our breath before us,
the sun and earth at grateful angles.
The ease of your steps, the brightness in your eyes
are a lesson. Hands held, laughter, taking time as it is—
the being here that makes life worth the trouble.

Each day is new colour in the leaves;
we point this out to each other,
cross the roads carefully,
cheeks aglow in the bronze chill.
There is little purpose to our strolling,
nor should there be—not with the delight of the world
so gratuitous, not with beauty’s design
merely to be beautiful.
I don’t need to tell my daughter how glorious this is.

We stumble upon chestnuts, hundreds of them,
a new ground. Some are split open
in invitation. I show you how to avoid most of the spikes
(there’s no way around getting hurt completely)
and we fill our pockets; just one more, and more, and more.
I stir this feeling into a pot of soup.
Living simply is a comfort food.

Hope

Hope is a golden leaf
falling to the ground.
it knows that one day
it will become the soil;
it knows that one day
a seed will settle
into its dark arms,
that roots, blind
but seeking still,
will spread into the deep.

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other beautiful things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

‘The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child
is singing still.’
—Mary Oliver, What can I say?

‘If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Ay! and what then?’
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae

There is no future
unless we keep dreaming
of ones that are different
from today.

There is no future
unless we keep dreaming.

Dear reader,

The piece below shows more of me than I’d usually care to disclose. This is because as well as being part polemic and part meditation, it’s also part memoir—all wrapped up in a prose poem.

It’s a slightly different approach to tech criticism. The argument here is purely heart-shaped. It tries to put forward the case for being human, but entirely in illogical terms. Because that’s the point. Being human doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to in order to be rich with meaning. In fact, it might mean more because it doesn’t make sense.

I don’t want the sterility of easy answers, the smoothness of logic, the soullessness of copy-and-paste living. I’m not interested in a God who shines in perfect splendour, I want one who spits in the dirt and rubs it into the eyes of the unseeing.

There’ll be a companion piece to this that I’ll publish not long after, one that looks a bit more at the head arguments for not using these technologies (it’s called How to survive the intellectual apocalypse). For now, here’s one that’s all soul and stomach.

GH

In the worship of productivity
and consumption
and efficiency
AI is the golden calf;
but high on the mountain
shrouded by cloud
wrestled by lightnings
the artists
with blood on their feet
fire in every bone
and the gods reaching through
their fingertips
are carving words of thunder
onto tablets of stone.

When I was a child, I would lay on the floor of our conservatory and listen to the rain
falling onto the glass. I would stay there for hours, imagination wandering as the deep thrum covered me like a blanket.

What is generative AI?
It is a tool for the unenchanted.

I was seventeen when I wrote my first poem. My first love had just broken up with me, not long after my parents had got divorced, and I couldn’t stop the cold water of it all filling my chest. Love, even (maybe especially) teenage love, never leaves you, and many lovers and half a lifetime later I can still, if I dwell on it, feel the shine of her eyes in my gut. Though I threw the poem away right after I’d written it, unbeknownst to me something had been birthed inside that spasm of pain and creation.

What is generative AI?
It is the crowning of incuriosity.

My daughter and I are writing a story called ‘The Dog, The Goat and The Dragon’. It’s about some best friends teaming up in a land of talking animals to stop an invasion of ghost snakes. We’ve been working on it for nearly a year, and are nowhere near finished.

When she was two or three, we co-summoned an imaginary friend called Pi-Pi: a woodpecker who for some reason talks like a South Asian matriarch. A neighbour of ours once gave her a toy bear for Christmas; we decided later that it’s also a celestial being who has existed since before the beginning of time.

What is generative AI?
It is the slow decay into soullessness.

When walking the Camino de Santiago recently, I spent a considerable percentage of the 115km journey with my knee sending bolts of pain up through my hip and spine. I wept when I reached the end of the journey, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. Rather than go into the Cathedral, I sat on the ground in the Plaza and watched the steady stream of other pilgrims arriving. Their joy lifted me, though they were strangers. I felt desperately alone, yet connected to something of great and wild meaning.

What is generative AI?
It is the flag of your consciousness planted firmly in the shallows.

I have baptised a broken man in the River Jordan and made love in a supermarket car park, and both of those things were spiritual experiences. I’ve seen several angels, one of whom cut my hair and gave me a warning that I would ignore to my great cost. One of my favourite memories is getting crippling altitude sickness while climbing in the Alps—it was one of the last times that my father, brother and I did something together. I’ve been told that my writing has helped people through some of the darkest days of their lives, and every day I think about giving it up.

What is generative AI?
It is the triumph of the convenient over the meaningful,
the easy over the good.

The God I used to fervently believe in seems ludicrous to me now, yet my faith is a deeper part of me than ever. I would love to explain this to you, but I can’t unless you’ve had a kiss that changed your life, or been left speechless by a mist of bluebells, or felt a grief so momentous that it opened you up somehow. I write about Christ a lot, and though I know less and less about what that word means, I know it’s something to do with quantum entanglement, and feelings of wonder and belonging, and the dust on the Galilean hills. I’m increasingly convinced of its significance.

What is generative AI?
It is a chariot for the uninspired.

The stars above Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe left a mark on me that hasn’t faded in 25 years. When we were 12, my friend AJ and I, who haven’t spoken since we left prep school, heard a demon in my kitchen. There was a strange voice, the dog started barking madly, and then it all stopped, and we kept on eating our dinner.

A young man in Malawi once asked me if I could offer him any hope. I didn’t know what to say. I keep repeating the same mistakes even though I know they’re destroying me; I’m holding on the belief that, somehow, they’re leading me to a sharp nail of truth.

I know that going for a walk somewhere green will usually save my life. I first started truly bonding with my daughter by teaching her to hug trees during the first Covid lockdown. I’ve been lonely for most of my life and I don’t know how to fix it; much of my time here has been an ordeal, and I’ve loved it.

What is generative AI?
It is everything that is not living.

For more tech criticism, see my essay series The Fight for our Aliveness. Many of these reflections and poems, along with plenty more that I haven’t published yet, will be featured in my upcoming book, The Song of the Real. Make sure you’re subscribed to The Green Chapel for info on release dates etc. Subscription is free.

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A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other beautiful things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee

Dear reader,

Self-promotion isn’t my thing. This is mildly amusing, because in my ‘professional’ life promoting things is essentially my job, and I’m quite good at it. But it’s a different story when the thing I have to promote is me.

When it comes to my art, I like the cosiness of my notebook and pencil, the softness of thought and imagining, the quiet scratch of graphite on paper—not the shriek of saying, as in Kae Tempest’s brilliant lyric, ‘Here’s me standing outside the palace of me’.

Despite what the vulnerability can sometimes cost, I love sharing my heart with you, my words and ideas. I’m passionate about soul, and there’s not much soul in marketing (though a lot of it could be more soulful than it is).

But that’s the perennial problem for artists, and at some point you just need to suck it up. So, here I am. And I’ve written a book for you. And I need to start promoting it, starting, I suppose, by telling you what it is.

It’s called ‘The Song of the Real’, and I think you’ll really like it.

It’s somehow managed to end up as both the most ambitious and the most personal of all my books so far (that’s a very book market-y thing to say, but in this case it’s true). It’s full of the sweep of big philosophical and theological ideas, but also the intimacy of grief and love and sunlight caressing a leaf. You might call it a manifesto for how I long for the world to be seen; how I long for it to be loved in the ways that we are so spectacularly failing to love it. But it’s a manifesto told not through argument but through poems about soil and kindness, and through essays about the ways in which we need each other, in which we need soul—which is no abstract thing, but is root-bound, skinful, rain and sun-scented.

The subtitle is ‘Poetry and prose for staying human in a digital age’. And you will have noticed that this is what I often write about anyway. It’s the burden on my heart and the fire in my bones. Because everywhere I see the growing grip of screen and algorithm upon our lives. I feel the growing anxiety, loneliness and weariness that it’s all causing. And I despair at the the way that so many people are plunging (or are being plunged) headlong into new technologies like generative AI without thinking deeply about what the consequences might be.

We shouldn’t give up on being human.

We can love this world. Love it in all its woundedness. We can turn back towards the deeply real. We can find the humanness that is being buried beneath all this bright glare. Because we have to. That’s what I believe, anyway, and that’s the message of this book.

If I can get my act together, it’ll be coming out later this year. I will of course keep you updated on the release date, and how you can get your hands on a copy. Stay tuned. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the book (or about anything!), feel free to ask away in the comments.

As ever, I’m incredibly grateful for your support for The Green Chapel (big, big love to everyone who’s ‘bought me a coffee’—it means a lot), and for sitting through this promotional malarkey. To cleanse it from my palate, I thought I’d finish up today’s letter with a poem (one of the ones you’ll find in the book!)

Instructions for reviving your soul

Begin by acknowledging its neglect,
and that this is not your fault.
Know that there are too many people in power
who have no interest in your flourishing,
who profit from your withering,
who deal only in the currency of accumulation
and status and success—none of which
can make anyone more beautiful.

Quit the game of perfection.
To be whole means to include
all the ways we break apart;
it is to see the consolation in our failures.
Every day you are given a life to live.
Every yesterday is a compass to guide you through it.

Be communal. A soul cannot sing
in the key of the individual.
Be restful. Constant busyness is a fine way
to extinguish the spark of your aliveness.
Be mindful. Distraction creates distance
from the needs of your being.

You know what thrills you,
what softens you, what sets free
the brightness in your eyes.
Go there. Linger there. Make habits
of abundant living. This may require subtraction,
distillation, letting go
of all that un-gorgeous gain.

Return always to grace—
to the mystery of endless mercy,
of being able to start again
over and over again.
Offer it to yourself, to others,
to the woundedness of our age.
Look for what is lovely, and,
if you cannot find it,
know that kindness will create it.

©Gideon Heugh

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other beautiful things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

Buy Gideon a coffee