Four: The Fisherman’s Cross

The ancient church here beside Church Farm is dedicated to a fisherman.

A man who went out before dawn. Who waited. Who read the water. Who knew that what he was looking for moved beneath the surface.

Andrew was the one who said come and see. Not I will explain. Not let me convince you. Just — come. Look. Decide for yourself. Whatever tradition we come from, that invitation is one I recognise as true. It is the spirit of the Sufi teacher who answers a question with a story, the Zen master who responds with silence, the grandmother who simply makes tea.

He died on an X. A saltire. A cross that tips sideways, opens outward, refuses to point only up or only down. What if a cross could mean here, and here, and here, and here — four directions, four possibilities, the whole horizon held? Many traditions know this shape: the medicine wheel, the mandala’s four quadrants, the four sacred directions honoured in indigenous ceremony the world over. The cross as compass, not cage.

And perhaps what all of these symbols are pointing toward is not a direction at all — but a centre. The place where all four arms meet. The still point from which all directions are equally possible. That centre is not somewhere I travel to. Awakened consciousness knows it as the ground I am standing on, right now, in whatever field I find myself.

In the river meadow beside this church, a few steps from where his name has been spoken across eight centuries, I built a labyrinth whose foundational geometry is that same crossed circle. It is sleeping now, tucked under grass and good soil. But the pattern is there.

Was that a coincidence?

What moves beneath the surface of my life right now?

What might I catch, if I let myself cast a little further out?

The river runs past the old stone church. The fish are still there. Some things do not change.