Belonging to the land - Invincible Summer
Invincible Summer
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Invincible Summer
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Jun 21, 2026<br>ethics
Belonging to the land
A homily for the summer solstice
The Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel asked me to deliver a short homily on the summer solstice for today’s Sunday Service.
Today is the longest day. The sun has climbed as high as it will climb, and for a few unhurried hours it seems almost to rest there, at the very top of the year. The light is generous. The land is at its fullest – the leaves all out, the grass grown high, the brook running. And on this day, better than any other, let’s consider a very simple question: where, exactly, are we?
I want to answer that with the help of a poet.
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and raised among the loggers of the Pacific Northwest. As a young man he was restless and far-ranging. He steeped himself in the poetry and the languages of China and Japan. He shipped out across the oceans in the engine room of a tanker, seeing the world the slow way. And he studied for the better part of a decade in the Zen temples of Kyoto alongside my first teacher, learning, among other things, how to sit still and pay attention.
He did a lot of moving. And then he came home. He settled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, built a house of local stone and timber, and stayed. And from his patch of ground he offered us a piece of advice both plain and demanding: “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
“Your place on the planet.” He had a particular way of describing it. Not your country – countries are drawn by armies and arguments. Not your postcode – that is drawn by the post office. He meant your watershed: the catchment of a single stream, the ground over which the rain that falls on us all runs down to the same water. Pick a watershed, Snyder said. Learn it. Love it. Live in it. Look after it.
What would it be like to do that? Where is ours?
We are sitting, this morning, in the watershed of the Hampstead Brook.
You might never have heard its name, because we have buried it. But it is here. It rises just up the hill, in a boggy hollow once so unlovely it was called Hatchett’s Bottom – until later generations, to sell the air as a cure, renamed it the Vale of Health. From those springs a stream gathers and runs down through the chain of ponds on the Heath – past the swimmers, past the herons – and on through South End Green. And there, close to where we sit, it slips underground. Hidden, culverted, all but forgotten, it carries on beneath the pavements and the traffic, joins its sister brook coming down from Highgate, and flows on as the River Fleet – under Kentish Town, under King’s Cross and Clerkenwell – until at last it empties into the Thames through an undignified pipe beneath Blackfriars Bridge.
A living river runs under our feet. And most days we walk straight over it without a single thought.
Perhaps that is the whole of our trouble – and the invitation of the solstice.
The aborigines of Australia tell us they own no land; they belong to it. To belong to the land is not to own it. Deeds and fences tell us who owns the land; they do not tell us who belongs to it. Belonging is something else. It is to know the name of your brook. To know where your water comes from, and where it goes. To know which trees stood here before you arrived, and which birds will be here after you have gone. Belonging is knowledge that ripens, slowly, into care.
The four small verbs are really one long practice. Learn it – pay the place the attention you would pay a friend. Love it – and let that attention deepen into affection. Live in it – stop treating the land as scenery you happen to pass through, and start treating it as a home you are answerable to. And look after it – for that, in the end, is the rent we owe for belonging anywhere at all.
So on this longest day, with the light so freely given, here is a gentle commission to carry out through the chapel doors. Go and find the brook. Walk up to the ponds and stand at the grate where the Fleet still murmurs in the open air. Learn one new name: a tree, a bird, a bend in the water. It is a small thing. But naming is a start to belonging – not by being born in a place, but by paying attention to it, patiently, until we own that the land owns us, and accept gratefully the responsibility to care for all the lives - animals, plants, soil, people – unfurling on it.
May we learn the land that holds us.
May we come to love it.
May we leave it better than we found it.
Amen to that.
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