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I was stopped in my tracks this week by words from the poet Patti Smith: ‘Seek out what magnifies your spirit,’ she says.

For me, it’s nature and poetry. Poetry may not be your thing. But in this ‘mast year’, this super-abundant season of autumn, as we’ve been hearing this week - my own go to is John Keats.

I’m lucky to live in Winchester where he wrote his much-loved ode ‘To Autumn’ in this very week in 1819, aged only 23. It was one of the last he wrote before his death from TB.

So I love to lead retreat walks here as we follow in his footsteps, first trying to see the world through the poet’s eyes - the ‘later flowers for the bees’, ‘the ripeness to the core’, the ‘wailful choir of gnats’, even - and then through our own eyes too. Seeing well is both an act of care and an act of prayer, I like to think.

As we walk along College Street we pause beneath a cherry tree by the house in which another literary favourite, Jane Austen, lived and died just two years before Keats was passing by - and with thanks we recall the people who have inspired us in life, famous or not.

No answer is usually the same. And how inspiring to think that someone else’s answer might be you or me.

Autumn, in Austen’s words, is a season ‘which has drawn from every poet … some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling’.

But I’m sure it draws good things from us all if we let it. Perhaps the deeper sense that life’s not about success but fruitfulness; or that we can let go, like a leaf falling, when required; or break open, like a chestnut husk, and welcome the cracks in our life as we do.

And while we’re not all poets, the apostle Paul writes, exquisitely, that we are God’s handiwork or ‘poeima’ (in the Greek) - from which we get the word ‘poem’. So with poetic licence, we might see ourselves as part of the very poetry of this autumn, part of the created beauty, the ebb and flow, the colour and leaf-fall; part of what can indeed draw goodness from another, and magnify the spirit.

‘Where are the songs of spring? Ay where are they?’ Keats asks, of autumn. But he’s speaking to us all, I’m sure, when he says. ‘Think not of them, for thou hast thy music too.’

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