PROLOGUE

Some years ago I had a vision. A vision about two trees growing in a large garden. One was a mighty evergreen oak. The kind that you can see in gardens in the south-west of England. The other was a sapling. The branches of the mighty oak were being cut off one by one so that eventually a somewhat stunted trunk remained. By the small sapling sat a young boy on his haunches with his cat, both looking in wonder and amazement at this new thing. If it wasn't for the boy I might not have noticed the sapling at all, so small it was. Its arrival in the garden seemed to have just happened.

I have meditated often on what I saw that beautiful spring morning. What was the meaning, if any, of my vision? Here are some of my thoughts. The mighty oak tree represents the church. Christ is the trunk. 'I am the vine and you are the branches'. Pruning is always necessary, as every gardener knows, to stimulate new growth and vigour. Could my vision mean that we ought to go right back to the early church? Pruning away all the baggage of centuries which is preventing the Spirit from enthusing us anew?

The sapling, the boy and his cat would appear to point to something entirely new. Something very special and precious was taking root which seemed to keep the boy and his cat spellbound. I have been meditating on and off about this little scene. It had such a holy quality. More than ten years on I begin to see aglimmer of the truth it represents. Something precious and wonderful is awakening in people all over the world: a sense of the spiritual. Be they in or out of churches, the Spirit is moving in all earth's people. I am not thinking of some other-worldly esoteric perception and practice but of a down-to-earth awareness of value and meaning, a way of relating and living, of a sustained practical response to the growing realisation that all creation is a sacred gift and therefore infinitely precious and worthy of our reverence and care. For the serious crisis which has befallen humanity at the end of the second millennium has concentrated all our thinking wonderfully and made us ask deep questions. Such s: what has befallen the western human spirit? and why do we have such parched and shrivelled souls?

I am still 'in' the church. I write this with some trepidation for after having done my own personal cutting off of branches – technically called deconstruction – it feels more like being 'out'. Creating more inner space is an uncomfortable process, yet it is exactly this letting go, this new found freedom and what to do with it, this searching here and there, this living dangerously which makes room for the Spirit, creating new connections and possibilities and so enlarging our inner and outer vision.

A catalyst in all my deconstruction was undoubtedly the global environmental crisis, helped by my scientific grounding as a zoologist. It is leading me to a more creation-centred spirituality as reflected in my poetry.

Writing poetry doesn't always come easily to me. I have been astonished at some of the things I wrote. Did I really write that? I ask myself. Well, of course. Who else? My poems are the feelings and longings of my soul seeking to become words and images, to be read and to be spoken, to be shared and to be added and woven into the great pool of global consciousness; to give it solidity, colour and meaning.

This is what the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke has to say: 'You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born ... Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter into you long before it happens'.² How much more his words must be true today when we are searching for new ways of being human on planet Earth.

In A Spark in my Soul all my poems have been gathered together for the first time. By each poem I have written some notes, sometimes just a few sentences, a couple of paragraphs or quite a long story as complementary illumination. My poems are my heart-children and I suppose I like the reader to know a little about the circumstances of their birth. Resisting the temptation to keep on writing was not always easy. There is so much to say at this seminal time of our human endeavour.

A Spark in my Soul was a long time in the making. There was a waitingness about it. The poems have been written over a period of ten years from 1987 to 1997. Then I had a vague idea of a small volume. I let things unfold and reveal themselves as I didn't want to force a definite pattern. It seemed to me that perhaps diversity might have vigour as well as charm. Another example of women's lateral thinking.

Months passed by and finally it had come, title and all.

It is my hope that A Spark in my Soul may open one or two windows on the new spirituality which is emerging.