It's been one of THOSE weeks: a wild mixture of the blessed and the nasty, but above all a week of sheer wild busy-ness: two talks to disparate groups, an out-of-town trip, a family crisis, work spun of out control, one damned thing after another.

And so, by Friday night, when I sat down (much too late and much too tired) to start this week's piece, I found myself staring blankly at the screen, unable to put one word in front of another, to complete one thought or find one image. I peered into the recesses of my mind's attic, digging for Stuff. Nothing. Not so much as a scrap of a rag. Not a crumb in any cupboard.

Argh.

So: the obvious course, out for a walk. This time last week, as I recollect, we were dangling from the cusp between Mud Season and Spring. Spring arrived, as near as I can tell, on Wednesday morning around 11:45 and lasted for, oh, it must have been a good 15 or 20 minutes, and now we are in early summer. A very dry early summer, too; but when I put on my sandals and stepped out into the gentle darkness, it had rained a little - just a sprinkle, enough to dampen the pavements and give the sound of passing cars that rustling-taffeta sound.

The air was cool and soft, a refreshment in the face, lightly touched with the scent of flowering apples. I stood for a moment under the crimson maple across the road, next to the streetlight, gazing up in admiration of its young deep leaves and flowering branches, wet enough to catch the light with a shimmer: such beauty. The sound of my steps startled a frog into a series of wildly improbable leaps. I walked slowly, inwardly unknotting, and each breath I took in felt much as it feels to gulp cool water when you're parched and dry.

Is it universal, this urge to push your face right up against Creation when your spirit is dry and tired and worn right out? I don't know enough religious traditions, other than my own. Maybe this is our heritage from the Jews, a desert people. Or maybe, expressed in whatever way, it's universal to the human spirit.

I used to think that all the imagery in the 23rd Psalm of green fields and clear, still water was an image of Heaven to people who lived in dry places. But I've never lived in a physical desert - there are, of course, other deserts, but that's another story. I have no experience of more than transient drought, and certainly none of that dangerous clobber of midday sun. Yet I too see Heaven as a place of living green and silver, of flowering apples and deep woods, shadow and light, stillness and fresh air. Maybe this is the best I can manage to imagine of the unimaginable. Maybe for others, the image is different.

I found myself still struggling for insight: what interesting point could I make with this material? What's the point of the flowering maple? Where's the meaning of the cool and damp? And still, that silence: nothing It's in this quiet nothingness, this refreshing absence of any understanding at all, that it's easiest to curl your fingers into this fresh beauty of the world. Incarnation isn't just (just!) God's taking on flesh to bear us company in the pain of our humanity. Incarnation is God dug deep into this world, God's deep joy in the earthiness of Earth, the dance of stars, a frog leaping. I just need to be tired enough to shut up and listen, and so stunned by life as to cool my natural arrogance. Then I can be with God in this silent delight.

Do nights have souls? Probably not, but if this evening had a soul, it was a quiet companionable one, and it stayed with me as I walked slowly down to the grey limestone bulk of the church, and even more slowly back home. I'm still too tired to write anything coherent or meaningful: this will have to do. But inside my soul, something's unkinked and gentled down, that was twisted hard and tight. If I can't talk worth a damn tonight, maybe I can listen.

So all I can do for now is to hold this out: not cleverness, nor insight, nor anything of my own, but only a branch of flowering crimson maple with the wet on it, in the quietness of rain.

"O give thanks to the Lord for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever."