Finding the Light 

Paul Kingsnorth’s* stunning poem, Hymn of Entry, is everything Sophia would wish in a work for Sophia’s Notebook.The poem fulfills each of the principles laid out on the splashdown page of this website (principles which Sophia herself lived so fully): Be brave. Seek truth. Love wisdom. Live beauty.

Courage. Truthfulness. Wisdom. Beauty.

How necessary these are, how precious, and how rare.

In its fierce loveliness, Paul’s poem really does speak to the heart.

Artist (and Sophia’s aunt), Clare Llewelyn, and calligrapher, Margaret McGinnis, have in their artwork (the cover pen and ink and the printed text respectively) for Hymn of Entry heard and made visible the force of it.

As the poem reveals, there can be for each of us “a gap in the wall” built so painfully around us. There is a pathway open to us, a grace offered to us.

Be whole, little hare.

Seek the light and find it.

Click on the following title to read Paul’s poem: Hymn of Entry

*

Paul Kingsnorth is not only a gifted poet and novelist; he is also an exceptional essayist. His latest book, Against the Machine, a collection of essays, was published recently by Penguin Books.

Against the Machine is an analysis–a radical analysis, in the sense of cutting to the roots—of the antihuman impetus of our era’s mad career into a technocratic future.

Every aspect of Sophia’s Notebook, by the way, remains deeply human. It is (and is intended to be) an act of resistance to the darkness pressing in upon us.

“Be brave,” Sophie would tell us.

Every act of courage, every act of kindness, every act of beauty resists the Machine.

Against the Machine is available from independent bookstores, from :Booktopia: (HERE) or from Barnes and Noble: (HERE).