Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties ...

Ahh, the incantation of The Shipping Forecast. That strange but comforting list of sea areas was just one of the many mysteries out there. Credo in unum Deum. Κύριε, ἐλέησον, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Falobadobs and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.

For the young me the world seemed full of secret codes, and it was up to me to work out their meaning. That may well have set me up well for a life of learning languages, although I don't know why it didn't set me up similarly for maths, physics and chemistry.

These ponderings came to me in the garden this weekend while I was busy cutting up an old apple tree that had blown over, apparently the victim of old age, lack of rain, and honey fungus.

As I worked, I was listening to several episodes of the podcast Planet Geo, in which an Associate Professor of Geosciences and a high school Geoscience teacher "talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.” With great knowledge and enthusiasm, they do "deep dives" into subjects that fascinate and excite me, even though I barely understand any of it.

"What we're focusing on here is the Isua Supracrustal Belt, or also called the Isua Greenstone Belt. That's the super old stuff that people focus on a lot. The broader complex, the Itzhak Gneiss Complex, those are metamorphosed igneous rocks that are comparable to Acosta except younger, so 3.8, 3.7 billion years old. Then this whole region is Southwest Greenland ...."

And so it continues: gneiss, basalt, zircon, metamorphic, kimberlites, olivine, stromatolites ... I'm simultaneously trying to imagine and make sense of what they're talking about, and I'm mesmerised by it. I just love all the technical terms and the phenomena they refer to. I was toying with the thought that it's a sort of poetry, but actually it's more like magical incantations.

Listening to these voices, I realised how alike these domains are: faith, language, and science. Each has its own incantations — words that carry the weight of mystery, pointing beyond themselves to something immense. “Viking, North Utsire…” or “Isua Greenstone Belt” — both open a window to worlds far from sight but close to wonder.