Presence, Ritual and the Garden

Each Friday, Michael Harding sits at his writing desk, switches on the microphone, and tries to feel that you are in the room. In this autumn reflection, he explores how repetition, far from being dull, is the way we go deeper into the present moment. Whether it’s photographing the same falling leaves year after year, sharing breakfast with a beloved for decades, or returning to the same garden each winter, life is not a straight line but a circle, and every return reveals more than the surface.

Drawing on a Buddhist parable about a tree that is “not a tree,” Zen wisdom about naming the blackbird, Rumi’s field beyond good and evil, and the healing power of hearing your own name spoken with love, he considers how language can distance us from mystery. He offers a meditation of light and compassion, one that softens even our enmities and eases the body as well as the mind.

The episode closes in Mullingar Cathedral, where he prepares to speak, returning to a church that remains home. There he tells the little-known love story of an icon-maker who gave Saint Anne the face of the poet Anna Akhmatova. Above all, this is an invitation to bring attention, which is a form of prayer, to your garden, your plants, and the people close to you.

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