Here are three creative pieces that provide me with moments of stillness and peace, even – in fact, especially – when I am feeling overwhelmed and finding everything too much to handle.  They remind me that there is an underlying reality of calm and beauty beneath the turbulence of our everyday existence.

The Peace of Wild Things, by poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry, brings me straight into the healing power of nature, to the imagination of his poem and also to the memory of my own peaceful places: Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College Oxford; the deer park beneath the rising Downs at Parham in West Sussex; and an idyllic rural water mill on the banks of the river Baïse in the south-west of France.  

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Click here to listen to Wendell Berry reading his poem

Violin Concerto in D Major Opus 61: II Larghetto, [click to listen] by Ludwig van Beethoven.  Performed in 1981 by Itzak Perlman and the Philharmonia Orchestra London, conducted by Carlo Giulini.

Reading through my previous pages, you will have noticed that Beethoven is one of my all-time favourite musicians.  If I had to choose one from amongst his astonishing range of compositions, it would be this. Every time I listen, its sublime, lyrical beauty brings tears of joy to my eyes and deep comfort to my heart.

And for a yet more profound sense of harmony, a respite (however temporary it might  be)  from the confusions of my life, I turn to the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations [click to listen] played by Rosalyn Tureck.

My mother took me to Tureck’s piano concert in Dublin in 1961. Even as an anxious 10-year-old boy, listening to this Aria helped me to understand that, sometimes, everything really does fit together, and  we can find peace and safety in the world.

I am sure you have you own sources of peaceful inspiration. Please do share them.