On one beach, a young boy with his grandmother, at the turn of the tide, and on another beach, a grandfather with another young boy, when the tide begins to wane. In between it wanders through a lost and more hopeful Europe. The journey maps the loss of innocence and its replacement, by something that feels like understanding, and acceptance.
To Everything a Season is a beautifully crafted personal and reflective account of many years of the changing seasons, from autumn to autumn, in and around a village on the edge of the Cambridge Fenland. It is an uplifting reflection about change: what was, what is, what will be. It is about the miracle of the rich gift of life. It is also about death, loss, and the rebirth of the old into something rich and strange. But it is also a book suffused with a gentle humor, with a deep love and sympathy for our fellow creatures. Charles Moseley tackles what we have done to the world of which we are not owners or masters but stewards, not only for our children but for the whole web of life on which everything depends.
Charles Moseley - writer, scholar, traveller, speaker - records a journey alone, on foot, across a British countryside almost empty now but full of ancient memory, and records his meditations upon the intersection of past and present, of the holy and the humdrum. His many paths include the way to Walsingham, a Holy Week pilgrimage against the usual tide from Ely to Cambridge, St Herbert's Island in Derwentwater, the Holy Island off Arran, and further pilgrimages to Iona, and Lindisfarne. What makes such places numinous? What gives them that peculiar quality that even those who are sceptical of such things find strange, even challenging? This exceptional observation of the natural and internal landscapes revealed by solitary pilgrimage is a journey that cannot be finished this side of eternity.