In the garden, I believe I always knew that God was there. It was just something I took for granted: the unseen one, the one who was always there, in the beauty and the wonder. As I reached my teenage years, I loved the sense of God's presence in the deep woods or by the sea or on the wild and open common above my town, where the bracken billowed in the wind, sunlight and shadows of clouds chasing each other, creation in flow.

As soon as I could, I went off alone for adventures in the mountains - in the Lake District, in Scotland. And I became a mountaineer, climbing in the Alps and in Greenland, out of sheer delight for the reclusive and numinous one, who accompanied me through the passing years and journeys with me still: mysterious, deep and lovely.