Peter and Miranda Harris founded A Rocha in 1983. At the end of May 2020, Peter retired and continues to serve A Rocha in a voluntary capacity.
This page provides a glimpse into the work and thoughts of Peter Harris through his talks and writings about conservation, the Christian life, among other nuggets of wisdom.
Podcasts and interviews
Videos and films
Writings
Books
Poems
Falsterbo
Gathering here against the clearing of the mist
Against the glimpse of the southern shore
Beyond the tideless Baltic run,
Each one a survivor, anachronisms in grey
Broad-winged in a narrow age
Navigators in a time of drift
A kind of glory after the fact.
Lifting here from the resinous branches
To the first pull of the air
Between the heath and the pines,
Each one a note in the spiral song
Feeling for the first signs of hope
Searching for the community of the journey
Finding provision in the heart.
The fierce eye turns against the winter
The yellow cere shuns the cold dawn
And so these travellers take their leave.
This is the clear arrow of the journey
unerring mark to the ocean
to another season
waiting beyond the horizon’s line of cloud
and to the promise of return.
The leavetaking
You never knew me but I knew you
We were close neighbours in this forest.
The sound of your axes and the hammering of the wedges,
The howl of your saws
Took you into my home
But you never knew me.
We had no language with which to meet
Mine was the meaning of each vine,
The hope that each harvest brought at the beginning of each season.
I spoke the sound of thestreams that took the wealth of dead leaves
To the roots of the trees.
Mine was formed of the echoes of the stones,
Pulled from the slopes by the steady rain.
Your language was formed in the arguments of distant cities
The demands of a time I never knew
No time like the present.
You might have seen me above your hard heads
Bent over the task of the trees
Prosperous and poor,
Slaving in labour
I saw you but never met you
We never met.
