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12

Stand still

Saint Kevin. Yes, there is one – the patron saint of people with mildly comic names like Malcolm, Mavis and Crispin.

St Kevin lived in Glendalough, County Wicklow in the sixth century. He was a hermit whose manmade cave was so small that when he prayed, with arms outstretched, he had to stick one of them out of the window.

One day, absorbed in prayerful contemplation, a blackbird landed on Kevin’s hand. It was a long prayer and Kevin stood so still that the bird started to build a nest in the saint’s upturned palm.

But now Kevin had a dilemma. Should he drop the nest or keep standing with his arm out? Well, being a saint, he decided to keep standing there, his arm stretched out like a branch. For weeks: while the blackbird laid her eggs; while she hatched them; while she fed her chicks; until the young fledged and flew the nest.

It’s a tale celebrated by Seamus Heaney, who wrote that Kevin found himself ‘linked into the network of eternal life’.¹ Heaney echoes the lines of William Blake in ‘Auguries of

Innocence’ about holding ‘infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour’.²

By becoming a kind of tree, Kevin was joined into the circle of life, death and rebirth. He was physically and metaphorically rooted, and by demonstrating his love for this bird and her brood, his body became a kind of living prayer sculpture.

Wildlife photographers – nature watchers of all kinds – talk about this quality of stillness, which enables them to disappear, and so to enable the life that is around them to be more fully itself. That standing still is an emptying, receptive process.

The Hebrew prophet Elijah, standing outside his cave, anticipated the voice of God in a thunderstorm or an earthquake or a fire. To his surprise, he found it in ‘a sound of sheer silence’.

Pretending to be a tree for several weeks is a tough call, but the Spanish poet Pablo Neruda offers a more realistic practice. What if we stopped for one second, he asks, ‘and not move our arms so much’. That would be ‘an exotic moment’.³