open spaces
Sat, 25 Oct 2025
| last modified Mon, 27 Oct 2025
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I really like wide open spaces.
It’s doesn’t come as ecstasy or anything so extreme. Its more a kind of lightness, sometimes awe, often a kind of peace. The gentle breeze on the plain; the billowing blades of grass in their myriads; the far off simmering of quaking leaves. It’s like I suddenly remember that I was so cooped up. And as with getting out of a tight space, it doesn’t feel like much but that nasty closed up feeling is gone.
Recently, after moving a little further south for my second year at Oxford, my regular routes to Church and ALDI have suddenly become comparable to detours along the River Thames and through random fields.
“Um… yes sir, doing well sir… I heard that you were selling a little whimsy and contemplation ‘round these parts? Yes sir… that’s wonderful, sir. Now, please give me a moment, I just need to fetch a couple minutes from my backpack… there you go. Pleasure.”
Sometimes I get this really peculiar feeling as I’m walking through the fields: “this is really cheeky. I shouldn’t be here - Oxford students are too busy for walks through random fields.”
But I’m never too busy, not truly. Its a choice to remained so cooped up. The fields are always right there. It reminds me how privileged I am to be in this part of the world. It’s all so stunning. I had a walk a month or so ago around my village at sunset (which I basically never do), and the sky was the most gorgeous lilacs and flaming oranges. It framed the gravestones in a kind of reverent stillness, and all the greenery I walked past just popped in the evening shadows.
I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’ amazing novel The Great Divorce. He has a quote which really stood out to me and painted a really beautiful picture of heaven:
I got out. The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider that they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got ‘out’ in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard.
I taste a little heaven in every open field. The beauty and freedom; the exposure and vulnerability; the subtlety of it all and the desire to walk far without end. I long for the world that turns from it’s rebellion and so grows in depth to accommodate (in some sense) its maker. A world that becomes truer as he is true, beautiful as he is beautiful, wide as he is vast.
Anyways. Please go for a walk!
last 5 blogs
- poeming is here (1 Nov)
- open spaces (25 Oct)
- reading more (16 Oct)
- when things go dark (7 Oct)
- blogging is here (30 Sep)