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Pauly the Fowler's avatar

Lovely piece. It brought back to mind the "spring house" on my grandparents' farm. It was a small fieldstone shed built over a spring just downhill from the house. Inside, the floor was a smooth rectangle of water, kept to a consistent level by what amounted to a small dam at the rear of the structure, over which water constantly trickled, flowing out the rear of the house so that the area behind it was always a bit squishy. On older American farms, spring houses were common features, as I expect they were in many places. While they were built partly to protect water sources, their main purpose, especially by the time my dad came along, was refrigeration. No matter how hot it got in the summer, the spring water was cool enough to preserve food, which was kept in large jars or pots sunk into the water. And no matter how cold it got in winter, that liquid rectangle would never freeze.

No one ascribed sacredness to the place (and my grandparents, being good Methodists, would have scoffed at such superstition), but it was a place that had a strong presence. On the rare occasions I saw inside (by the time I came along not much was stored there except soft drinks for the big family gatherings we had at the farm), I did feel something akin to reverence. The inside was dark, still, and silent, and but for the watery floor, the place could have passed for a disused chapel.

I didn’t think the spring house pointed toward God, but it did seem to point to a life lived close to the land, lived with a reliance on the land being itself. Taking water the land gave without being prodded by an electric pump. Cooling food without plugging in a refrigerator. That was something already appealing to me in my pre-teens. I didn’t then have the notion of deliberately inhabiting places such as I would pick up later from nature writers, but I felt like I glimpsed something like that resting in the cool shadows of the spring house. And if that spring house intimated life in harmony with some sustaining wholeness, perhaps there was sacredness about it.

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Hallvard Nordbø Jørgensen's avatar

Interesting.

We have a similar history here in Norway, with "holy places" and "hermit's places" (indeed, many missionaries also came to Norway and Iceland to seek God, probably from Britain and Ireland - some historical sources say that hermits were on Iceland when the Norwegian Vikings arrived there to settle).

In my area the small huts of the hermits were called "Kova". So that word is probably related to "cave". The word is not in use in Norwegian anymore, but some people in my area have the name "Kovajord", "cave-earth" or "cave-field", and I suspect that this name relates back to this phenomenon.

There was also much transferring of more ancient "nature mysticism" over to Christian folk beliefs, in medieval times. This also would include the intermingling of Christian faith with elements of nature (trees, plants, flowers, rocks, sites etc.) But in Norway this eroded away after the Reformation, so to speak, but especially as late as the 19th century (that is when "The Enlightenment" and modernization kicks in, for better and for worse).

I have thought about an idea of starting a scout group in my local church which would deal with practical tasks and experiences (classic scouting things), but connected to nature elements: Fire, water, earth, air, types of animals etc. The thing is: Each of these elements is "spiritualized" and "divinized" in the Bible, in complex ways. (God is in the fire (Moses), in the wind (Elijah, in a "Kova"), in holy water (baptism or ritual cleaning of the law), in wood (tabernacle) etc. etc.) So it is would seem quite fruitful to build bridges between the Tradition/liturgy/spirituality and practical experience of - and engagement with - nature. Of course there is much mysticism involved in these things, but at the same time "the metaphysics of mechanical materialism" is no longer really believable, if it ever was.

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