Kindred of the Quiet Way

Houselight, Winterlight

2012-01-31T23:41:00.000-08:00

Working at the top of the house in the Garret is very important to me in the winter. The Garret is subdivided into the Slum and the Pigsty. The Slum is (naturally) where we do our Slumbering, and the Badger’s adjacent study has drifted into the appellation ‘the Pigsty’(can’t think why).

All the pictures below were taken at the same time on the same day with the same camera setting. It interests me how different in the light as I move through the house.

The Slum faces south and has two roof windows, so it's always full of light reflecting up off the sea, even at this dark time of the year.

The smaller Pigsty is also light, but faces north so the light (and the room) is colder. On that side of the house the Badger sometimes needs a little heater on beside him as he works there, even when the slum is quite warm.

And then the stairs lead down from the Garret into the Dark.

It really does get very gloomy as one descends into the house on a winter morning. You can see the piles of things we've been sorting out for the charity shop, waiting to go at the top of the stairs!

I’m so glad we have the window Alice made for the light that shines through from the bathroom.

Downstairs the passageway is almost dark.

If we are expecting visitors I turn the electric light on.

The front room faces north and the light is distinctly frigid before midday. When we light the stove, that room comes alive. It's a wonderful summer room, as it's always cool and shady, very restful in the heat.

The morning light fills the back room, but in this season that can still be decidedly bleak; these pictures were taken on a dark, overcast day - on a bright day this room is gloriously sunny.

The kitchen is lovely in the morning – as you can see, Joe has finished the floor!

But, how glad I am of the Garret, the lightest place of all!

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365 Day 32 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

This was a BIG thing to go! It hung in the passageway next to the hooks where we hang our outdoor coats. Most of us (in our household) feel unnerved by continual encounters with our passing selves. We appreciate the need to check for spinach lingering between the teeth before we hit the street, but prefer that to be done in looking glasses tucked into modest corners. That mirror was undeniably in-your-face, and not improved by said face being in it, looking right back at ya! Goodbye and good riddance.

Yesterday, paint and wood.

2012-01-31T00:30:00.000-08:00

The kitchen is progressing. Joe insulated the floor.

He boarded it too, but that took longer than expected. He discussed with us carefully whether to use tongue and groove boarding to get a tight fit between the boards – we don’t want crumbs to be feeding rodents out of sight! He thought plain boards would do the job, and they cost half the money, so we went for that. He said the only difference would be you can see the nail places in straight boarding, even after they’ve been filled. I don’t mind that. I’m a Christian. Nail marks have a special place in my heart.

Then Nick got in on the conversation later in the day and said straight boards wouldn’t do, they’d shrink. The novelists among you should pay attention to this. The opportunity to observe interactions such as this is the source of colour and texture in fictional narrative. All novelists benefit from travelling by public transport, eating in cafés and sitting in hospital waiting rooms, eavesdropping shamelessly. Anyway, Joe stood there with a section of tongue-and-groove in his hand, looking a bit uncertain, reluctant to commit us to an extra two hundred pounds (that’s $315 right now), but we bowed to Nick’s absolute certainty (Nick is absolutely certain about everything) and went for the tongue-and-groove. As Joe had all the timber on his van by this time, he had to go back and change it. When he got the tongue-and-groove back to our place and began to lay it, it came to light that about a third of what they’d given him was sub-standard, so he had to sort through carefully, keeping this and setting aside that to take back. Plus he wanted to use full lengths where he could for a pleasing finish, but use cut lengths where it didn’t show too much, to save money. So this wasn’t quick and easy. But by last night the floor was down.

Kevin said we needed some more paint, and showed me on the wall while Joe was fetching the replacement timber, how undercoat was grinning through. Hebe and I mutter amongst ourselves that this is because they insist on painting with a roller. Using a brush and determination Hebe got two coats on the chimney breast with just a sample pot. Anyway I said I’d go to Tunbridge Wells (where the shop is) for yet more mega-bucks Fired Earth paint. I’d promised to visit my beautiful mama in the afternoon, 3 o’clock, usual time. So I slogged over to Tun Wells, got the paint, stopped for a sandwich in the lovely Nutmeg Tree where all is comforting English tradition with fragrant teas and waitresses in frilly hats and aprons, then got back with the paint by twenty to three. I had to get a new network card (for rail travel discounts) which cost me £28 ($44) ouch! The ticket to Tun Wells was £12 ($18). The lowest qualifying price for the discount turned out to be £13 ($20). Sigh. The paint was £29 ($46 nearly). So I spent about £100 ($157) today!!! Double-sigh! Thank heaven for editing work tiding me over while I wait on the publisher frowning over the sales of present books before making a decision to publish (or not!) my next novel.

When I got back four hours later I took the paint to the kitchen. Joe glanced at it. Kevin had gone – he drives the bus for the old people in the afternoon. “Thanks,” says Joe. “I think we had enough in the tin, but that’ll probably come in handy.” He’s lucky he didn’t die right then.

By the time I left the house I was just early and late enough to reach the end of the road with a clear view of the 304 bus sailing by on its way to Mama’s village out in the country. The No 5 was due in 15 minutes, but it didn’t turn up. In a hurry, I hadn’t stopped for my coat, and as the day grew toward dusk it was beginning to freeze. I could see my breath like a dragon. I waited ages for the bus, but no luck. The Badger had to go back up to Oxford, but he is kind to me. Before he went, he took me out to Battle in his car, took Mama’s car and put gas in it for her (the pumps defeat her), shared a cup of tea with us, and took me home – this adding 45 minutes driving around to his already 3 hour drive back to Aylesbury. My Badger is a sweetheart.

It was a full day, we were tired, Hebe had been cutting granite all day at the masonry, the night was cold – but we enjoyed a big plate of baked beans, cabbage and carrots, and (forbidden dairy, what the hey) macaroni cheese for supper by the fireside, the happiest people on earth.

Today? Perhaps I’ll tell you about today tomorrow. It includes getting that tiny toolbox in the post to you, Deborah, because I didn’t manage to fit that in yesterday. xxx

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365 Day 31 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Every month I write a column in this magazine, so they send me a freebie copy. The deadline for April’s is tomorrow as it happens, so I’ll be writing an Easter article today. It’s only a little column, 290 words, on living in Gospel simplicity. The reason I included the magazine in my 365 throw-out is really to do with disposing of things mindfully. Because when I’ve read it I don’t put it out with the recycling bin – ooh, that reminds me, dustbin collection today! Any magazines I have, including this one, I keep in good condition, reading them quickly so I can pass them on before they are out-of-date for someone else to read. If I can’t think of anyone who would like them, I give them to the surgery waiting room. This magazine, Woman Alive, I usually put through my next door neighbour’s door, as she is also a Christian.

And that’s January gone!

But only

2012-01-30T01:06:00.000-08:00

St Johns (our church) is, as we say in England, rather high up the candle. Though it is part of the Church of England rather than Roman Catholic, it describes itself as British (or English) Catholic – ie it models itself on pre-Reformation thinking. Personally I wish we could go back even further to pre Council of Whitby and join up with our Celtic roots, but that’s another matter. Anyway we have a lots of robes and incense and candles and all that jazz, and as part of our preparation for the Eucharist we include, as Roman Catholics also do, the congregational prayer based on Luke 7:7 or Matthew 8:8: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

As I prayed this prayer yesterday, I noticed its ambiguity. “But only” could mean two similar but different things. It could mean: I am not worthy to receive you, yet/even so/however simply speak the word and I shall be healed. Or it could mean: I am not worthy to receive you, just simply speak the word and I shall be healed.

The first meaning suggests a certain inner distress or turmoil to be overcome, ie I am dismayed and embarrassed to find myself in a condition unfit to receive you – HOWEVER if you will say the word, I shall be healed. The second meaning suggests a more tranquil seeing, accepting of one’s inner state, ie As I am clearly unfit to receive you I rely on your transformative grace, all you have to do is say the word and I shall be healed. See? There’s a difference.

This ‘but only’ is there in the translations of the Bible we read, and in effect we are all reading different Bibles because we are all constantly making assumptions about what we hear/read, not always realising that others are reading/hearing it quite differently.

A good example of this is the text where Jesus says “I am the way, the truth and the life; no-one comes to the Father but by me”.

Most preachers I have heard speak on this interpret it to mean in effect “I am the bottle-neck of Heaven. If you don’t subscribe to the Christian creeds, you won’t get in”.

Personally, I think it means something different. I think it means “I personify everything that is good, everything that is true, and what it is to be fully human. All people committed to goodness and truth, all who are open to life and love, are travelling my way and part of my family”.

Then there is the story of the Prodigal Son, the bit at the end where the older son is jealous and the father says he could have a party any time he wanted to. No-one seems to preach on this, but I think it’s a story about the two ways we fall off the tightrope of walking in Providence. Some people err in being too profligate and wasteful – much as the human race has taken the precious gift of the earth and squandered it in filthy over-industrialisation and commercial greed, like the Prodigal Son with his orgies and prostitutes until he is reduced to the unimaginably unclean (to a Jew) state of sharing his home with pigs and envying their table. But some people err in the other direction, by failing to see the abundance inherent in their situation, failing to trust the providence of the Father, living their lives in parsimony and scarcity when it was meant to be a party.

I wonder even if there is a need for us to quarrel as we tend to do, over biblical interpretations. They seem to me inherently ambiguous, and I wonder if that isn’t part of the Bible’s nature as a living book. It’s as we engage with it, look deeply into it, that we see depth upon depth, catch a glimpse of jewels winking in a new shaft of light when we had never noticed them before.

What I think is theologically dangerous is when people actually tweak the text to make it fit the preconception. I once saw this actually, literally, set in stone. I lived for a while in Aylesbury, and as I was still then a Methodist minister I preached on the Aylesbury Circuit every Sunday. This included occasionally taking a service out at a designed village. A farmer had leased all his land for building (but kept the ground rents; good move!) houses. So a large estate had been built, with a centre including shops, a doctor’s surgery and a church to be shared by all the denominations. On the outside wall of the church a large circle of stone was to display a biblical text. The text they went for – brilliant, inspirational, if only they’d actually done it, was based on 1 John 4, verse 7 – Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God and verse 16 – God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God. It’s the Ubi caritas (Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est) But, worried about losing the monopoly on soul-health, they twisted it round so that it said not Where love is, there is God, but Where God is, there is love. They switched the biblical wording around to make it say what the Bible does not say but many (most, even) Christians believe (and think it ought to say), that salvation is a commodity to be obtained by acquiescing and adhering to our formalised doctrines. This is not what Jesus said. According to Him, you can say “Lord, Lord” till you’re blue in the face (Matthew 7:22, Luke 6:46) – it’s if your life is characterised by kindness and compassion that is the mark of your allegiance. “By this” (nothing else) “shall everyone know that you are my disciples; that you love one another.” (John 13:35)

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365 Day 30 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

I used to be a Methodist minister, pastor of (simultaneously) six churches. I had a terror of arriving somewhere to preach or take a funeral/wedding only to find I’d left my glasses at home. So I had innumerable pairs of cheap non-prescription reading glasses scattered about – in pulpits, in my bags, in the car, in the pocket of my robes – so that this could NEVER HAPPEN. And I don’t need them anymore.

Hair

2012-01-29T00:14:00.000-08:00

I have read more about the Theology of Hair than I might have expected to.

St Paul started it of course. I have read what he has to say, and read with careful attention a considerable number of dissertations on the subject by faithful sisters looking deeply into the scriptures to shed light on the Way. I love the Bible, and I find in it the guiding light of God’s truth, but I don’t read it in the way that allows it to be interpreted as straightforward instructions for daily living lifted wholesale into the present day.

That is to say, when I read in Scripture a general statement like “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love is from God,” (1 John:4.7) I perceive that to have a universal application.

But what Paul had to say about hair and clothing I believe to be of specific and particular application. That there are many who disagree with me passionately I know already and I understand why. It’s not that I don’t get it; I do, but I disagree.

I walked a while, as some of you know, along a Plain path. I found it illuminating, spiritually nourishing, but a bit complicating – Plain but not all that plain if you see what I mean. I found it distracted me from the focus of Gospel simplicity which I think I came here to find and follow.

At the present time my focus is on seeing what I can do to address the amount of packaging I bring home when I purchase food and household goods. The other thing I’m considering at the moment is how to reduce the amount of water I use.

Today I didn’t do so well in either regard. It wasn’t such a good day. I woke up still tired from yesterday, with a lot to do. I’d figured out during the week that if I wash my clothes when I shower (letting the water accumulate by putting the plug in the bath) then I can use the one lot of water for both purposes. Our dish-drying cloths had been soaking in a bowl in the bathtub since the day before yesterday. The sun was shining today, and the day breezy, so I thought I’d better quickly rinse them through and hang them out on the line. In a hurry, because I had to be somewhere else by 10.30 and needed to shower, I washed the cloths through to get them out of the bathtub. I forgot a) that I was meant to be washing them in the shower water and b) that the same applied to the clothes I’d taken off last night and left in a heap on the bedroom floor. So instead of one lot of water, I required three – the dish-drying-cloths, the clothes and the shower.

Then I remembered that as this was the day the Badger planned to rotovate the back-yard for re-sowing, magically transforming all of it to a ploughed field and digging up the socket for the washing line (this sort) in the process, I had nowhere to hang out washing anyway.

Cursing and muttering I headed off to town and did my various errands there. Hungry, tired, and knowing I would return to find four other hungry souls waiting at home, I decided “Oh, blow it!” I went into Marks and Spencer and got some packs of ready-made sandwiches, some supper ingredients in sturdy plastic packs, a drink in a plastic bottle (on offer with the sandwiches), and a lemon meringue pie in a foil dish and cardboard box. Not an outstanding success on the packaging and water fronts, then.

But, why I was going into Hastings was to get my hair cut. Why I decided to cut it again was to do with packaging. I want to use Lush shampoo because it’s Earth-friendly, animal-friendly and comes in zero packaging. The conditioner that goes with it comes in a bottle you take back to the store to be re-filled. The only snag is, Lush shampoo can make my hair a bit lank when said hair is long. So I thought I’d cut it off. Short.

You know what? I so totally wish I could write to St Paul and say: “Now, here’s the thing. In our society today hairstyles do not have the cultural connotations they did back in AD 70. But what we do have today is a problem with mass-production and industrialisation that is threatening to take down the whole planet, via an ugly path of destruction involving water wars, deforestation, and unimaginable suffering in the lives of the world’s poor. I humbly ask permission, this being the case, as part of my path of simplicity, to keep my hair short and use Lush shampoo.”

If he wrote back, I’d show you the letter, I promise.

The result (honest and humble apologies for disappointing friends who feel God’s truth in the Bible requires ladies to wear their hair long):

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365 Day 29 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

2 pairs of shoe-laces. Something I have learned about clutter is the insidious power of Small Things. I tuck them away in a drawer or on a shelf waiting for them to Come In Handy – them and all their aunts and cousins and distant relations. They rarely do, but they gradually accumulate into a drifting shoal comfortably insulated by dust, occupying entire drawers and obscuring actually useful object from view. They sit on shelves competing for attention, reducing genuinely beautiful and useful object to One More Piece Of Stuff. Let them go, say I!

Our kitchen

2012-01-28T00:07:00.000-08:00

Would you like to know how Joe and Kevin and Nick are getting on in our kitchen?

Until the end of December our kitchen looked like this (ignore the strange woman in the pinny and focus on the units etc):

OK?

Now it looks like this.

It is quite dangerous. Like most houses in Hastings, it's built on a hillside: so though the ground is underneath the front of the house, underneath the kitchen at the back of the house is a four-foot gap, like a partial basement. Kevin managed to fall through, which his brother (Joe) found extremely funny.

I’ll keep you posted.

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365 Day 28 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

What to do with things like this? It came with an item of flat-pack furniture – probably a wardrobe or bookshelf. It’s a kit for securing a tall unit against the wall, in case your toddler decides to attempt scaling it while your back is turned. We move our furniture rather frequently and have tended to rely on educating the toddler in the inadvisability of climbing tall thin articles of furniture. Hence the anchoring kits become surplus to requirements while still extending the allure and promise of indispensable usefulness. We had more than one of these lurking in drawers. I added this particular one into a man-drawer kit that we put together and Freecycled. People snap up such kits in an instant but I’m not quite sure why.

Peace and light

2012-01-27T06:57:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I have this URGENT need for peace and tranquillity. Today, for example. So I have temporarily signed out of life and am reading a book.

Yesterday Susanna came to see me and we spent a couple of happy hours talking at the fireside. As well as the honey, she brought me a gift of a most beautiful wall-hanging candelabra.

On the one-in-two-out principle, two pictures went. This is what it looks like lit at night :0) Thank you, Susanna!

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365 Day 27 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

This is a doll’s house size tool kit, final remnant of paraphernalia associated with the creation of Taking the Tide of Love. I’m not sure who to give it to. Do you want it?

Packaging and water

2012-01-26T00:29:00.000-08:00

Quiet, soft early morning of low cloud, the light growing cautiously, the rain spattering hypnotically on the roof windows up here in the garret.

This is a good day. Susanna is coming around midday bringing a jar of raw honey from Redcoat Farm. Alice is on half-day at the library, so she’ll be home in the afternoon. It’s Thursday so the Badger comes home from Oxford for the weekend.

But first I must get up and have a shower and wash my clothes. Nothing dries this weather, they’ll just have to hang over the bath, drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

In our household, some of us have been thinking about water – how much we use, how much we waste – and packaging; what a lot of it there is and how hard it is to avoid, and discovering ways to wriggle out from under the mountain of packaging in which evil Mammon is burying our society.

Over many years I have thought long and carefully about ethical shopping, fair trade, compassionate farming, organics, animal welfare, and social justice. I have thought about the impact of animal husbandry, and noticed that farm animals compete with the poor for water and land, and eat 35lbs of grain for every pound of flesh they yield. I have pondered the journey of each pound coin, noticing that if I spend them in large chain stores they roll out of my community and into the pockets of rich shareholders far away, impoverishing the suppliers as they roll; but if I spend them in a small local family business the beneficiaries spend them within the community again, and so blessing accrues in the place where I live. I have thought about Gandhi’s “Think globally and act locally,” and tried to buy goods where I knew who produced them and how – well, sometimes; oftentimes I just bought what was cheap and asked no questions, like everyone else. But all this thinking filled my head up and I have never looked properly at water use and packaging. Well – I went to showers more than baths and didn’t leave the tap running too long, but that was about all. I chose paper bags over plastic when offered the choice and conscientiously took my own shopping bag so as not to need a plastic carrier, but not much more than that. Now I have taken a deep breath and resolved to tackle the issues of water use and packaging. One of my strategies involves a leaf-mould heap and a designated wormery. Another strategy is purchasing toiletries from Lush.

Lush (check out the Our Values section on the website) is a brilliant firm. They use natural ingredients, vegetarian, often vegan. They don’t test on animals. They have a fine environmental track record.

And here are two of their shampoos that I just bought: Ultimate Shine and Squeaky Green.

No packaging at all. That's it. That’s how they come. And no water making up half the product. Several of us in our household have Lush toiletries, so we got together to make up an order to save on postage. The (recycled cardboard) box they came in was packaging of course, and the biodegradable packaging peanuts, but I didn’t waste them. I used them to pack up some of the 365 items that I was Freecycling – three boxes of kitchen items for a young woman with three children moving out of bed-and-breakfast accommodation into her own home.

OK off I go - heading for the shower!

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365 Day 26 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

You might think this hardly counts as an item. The image is lifesize! I wanted to include it because it stands as an example of the kind of pointless things I am inclined to hang onto. That pretty little scrap of fabric . . . those dear little pegs. . . multiply that enough times and you need a drawer. Go on multiplying and you have a problem. In Goscinny and Uderzo’s glorious series Asterix the Gaul, in which the characters’ name are all jokes – Obelix the strong man, Cacophonix the Bard, Asterix the small man, Geriatrix the old man, Dogmatix (a dog, of course), Getafix the druid, inventor of magic potions; you can see them all here – the wife of the village chief (he was called Vitalstatistix) bore the shrewd appellation “Impedimenta”. I can think of more than one woman who could have been christened Impedimenta with good cause. Even though she was the best cook in the village, I have no aspirations to be “Impedimenta”, but I see it coming in the accumulation of nonsense like today’s item. I didn’t throw it away. It went into one of the craft kits (for children) I made up and Freecycled.

Fingers

2012-01-24T22:46:00.000-08:00

Fingers are so clever.

Yesterday I had to clean out the candle stub from the spring-loaded inner mechanism of the candle lantern. And I made lemon curd, which involves grating lemon zest. And as usual I had porridge for breakfast and of course washed out the pan.

What I notice is how amazing my fingers are for getting things clean. When bits of porridge adhere to the saucepan base, a thumbnail is both better at scratching it loose and better at leaving the metal unscratched – same with cleaning candle-wax off the lantern. Fingers clean the little fiddly lemon zest cling-ons of the grater, and then are easy to wiggle clean in the washing up water. If I use a brush to clean, the zest/porridge simply sticks to the brush. If I use a knife to prise loose the candle wax, it scratches the lantern. Fingers and finger-nails are an extraordinary combination of gentle/soft and strong.

They also have the advantage of being able to feel so acutely, and are therefore most sensitively responsive; the world’s most fine-tuned tools, dexterous and clever beyond description.

I remember reading an article about a child whose arms we blew off in the Iraq war. He was given prosthetic arms and hands with the most complicated mechanisms that gave them a truly impressive range of capabilities. For the person looking at him, they seemed to make everything right again. Bingo! Arms and hands! But . . . but he couldn’t feel anything with them. The ones God made him with were better than the clever prosthetics we fitted him with after our cleverly manufactured clever bombs blew them off in the first place.

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365 Day 25 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

I loved this and sent it as a special gift to somebody I love. In pursuing simplicity, some things are easy to part with, and others much harder. I find it easier to part with things I want to cling to if I think they will bring joy to someone who in turn brings joy to my heart. Inside the beautiful gold and red drawstring bag is a Buddhist mala – that’s a string of prayer beads. I had it for praying for people when I was travelling on the bus; to hold in my hands as a prayer focus, moving it along through my fingers feeling each bead as a prayer for each individual I held up into the Light.

New book

2012-01-23T18:03:00.000-08:00

Hey, look at the pic my friend Julie just sent me!

It's out stateside then! And my copies haven't even made it across the Atlantic yet! Well - just the one has, but that's been snapped up quick by my family!

Hope you like it Julie!

She's read it actually. I run all my manuscripts past Julie - not that you'd call her my severest critic; more my encourager cheering me on :0)

This book has been dedicated to Julie and to Jehane, whose prayers and kindness make a life raft at times. Thank you, ladies!

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365 Day 24 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Cripes. A handbag. Bought in a delusional attempt to be an elegant lady in a moment of eBay madness. It sat underneath the clothes rail for a while then I hope made some other woman who browses in charity shops very happy.

Day 23

2012-01-23T08:08:00.000-08:00

365 Day 23 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Oh, this picture represents a number of things. I have sorted through my tool-box where useful items like wire nails and rawl plugs had multiplied beyond the call of duty: but the fruits of those labours really belong to a later day in the 365 chuck-out. This photo logs a preliminary review of the tool box and a synthesis achieved between that and my Collection of Useful Containers. I had stored some of the tool-box items (eg panel pins and picture hooks) in stout little home-made envelopes, but over time those had begun to show signs of wear and become less reliable as containers. However I did also have some dear little tins and also some packaging items (like houmous pots) that I felt bad about throwing away. It seems so awful that for a few mouthfuls of food we create a throw-away container of such lasting and substantial material. Even where they can be recycled, long transport distances are involved – and when I say ‘long’ I don’t mean as in Sussex to Kent, I mean more like UK to China. And the recycling, though an improvement on landfill sites, is still industrial process. The optimum would be to create no packaging – but re-use is one better than re-cycling for such packaging as we do have. So I kept some of the houmous pots hoping we might re-use them. The envelope holders being in a terminal state, I added them to the kindling pile and drafted in the stashed houmous tubs – later, when I free-cycled many of the tool-box contents, I used up most of the saved food containers – some plastic boxes from take-out suppers, a yoghourt jar, etc – so that all the categories of nails and hooks were separately stored.

This picture of the two little envelopes is the record of a tranch of disposable (but not bio-degradable)containers that were saved, responsibly re-used and (crucially) left the house in the course of the 365 project.

Weather watching

2012-01-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

If I pad along a track that tries to stay close to the Earth’s heartbeat, I see everything differently.

The weather – sunny . . . windy . . . rainy . . . frosty – it all makes a very immediate difference if daily life works in rhythm with what is natural.

Having no washing machine because of building works meant washing clothes in the bath, as I used to do. Nothing has been straightforward. Some of the time the water had to be turned off and the hot water tank drained down; much of the time the electricity was off . . . on again . . . off again . . . Sometimes I would be boiling a kettle and the electricity suddenly cut –

So, as it’s been cold and rainy outside I cleaned out the grate of the luxury fire and set up the storm kettle indoors so we could boil water to fill up the thermos and thus have hot drinks and water to wash self, crocks etc. The water is fetched by a bucket from either outside or the bathroom upstairs.

I planned to have a bath then wash my clothes in the bath water to save wasting water, and a day came when the wind blew, the rain held off, and I needed a bath/shower! But on that very morning our neighbours builders set to work with their angle grinder just the other side of the garden wall (we did our side in the autumn). Cement dust blew across the garden with every gust of wind! Not a day for hanging out washing, then! After that it rained again. I gave up and had a normal shower.

But yesterday I got self and my clothes bathed – no builder, no rain, sunshine, brisk wind, dry breezy night, sunshine and wind still this morning.

Since we had the solar panels on our roof, we don’t run the furnace for heating or hot water very often – we rely on the sunshine in the summer and autumn, and in the winter just occasionally turn on the water heater for showers, and even more occasionally the central heating if it’s raining out and someone has a lot of washing to dry in time for a trip away or has completely run out of trouser to wear for work or some such emergency. So, though this has been an exceptionally mild winter, we have got in the habit of dressing very warmly indoors rather than relying on central heating. We have the woodstove in the evening, and it lifts the cold and damp throughout the house, but our bedrooms can be chilly! I sit in bed to work, and I wear fleece trousers, a vest (UK – US peeps I mean underwear not waistcoat), a high-necked fleece, and a big thick fleece hoodie over the top. And two pairs of socks. And at night, flannel pyjamas.

Thus my washing in its waterlogged state is challengingly thick and heavy! But that brisk wind had it almost dry, and now it’s festooned on the airers I have rigged up around the garret finishing off.

The result of all this is that weather now means so much more to me than ‘nice day’, ‘dull day’ etc. It makes all the difference to the management of the veggie garden and the wormeries (worms can’t cope with too much cold or heat), to the choice to do the laundry or not, whether to walk or take the bus or just give up and stay at home, whether to sit out on the step and boil up for tea in the storm kettle or clear the grate instead, whether there is rainwater collected for watering plants and soaking dishes or everything has to come from the tap. I notice more and am more tuned in to the turning of the year. It feels good.

I am also, incidentally, filled with admiration for Diana Lorence’s hearth management.

She has beautifully sculpted ash, artistically arranged anthracite and firewood, and a modest stash of evenly cut size-graduated fuel waiting out on the porch. This does her for all her cooking and water-heating.

To appreciate how impressive this is, you should look at our hearth,

and bear in mind that we have the back-up of a solar-augmented electric mini-oven, hotplate and kettle – and Diana doesn’t! Go, girl! Life, you are doing it well!!

(Image of Diana Lorence's fireplace at Innermost House taken from the album on the Innermost House Facebook page; also here on the main website.)

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365 Day 22 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Another statue of the BVM. I like it. I like her. So what? I salute her in my mind. Don’t need this statue. I feel the same about family photos: I love my family so very much, but I have no photos of them up around the house – they are sewn into my heart, and that is where the pictures of them are.

Trees where you sit

2012-01-20T23:36:00.000-08:00

I have no idea how this photo came to be on my camera. I was uploading some pics to go on Photobucket to go with my Freecycle posts so wannabe junk acquisitors could see what they were letting themselves in for, when to my surprise I found this photo smuggled in too. Trees, jostling together to peer into our back room.

Made me laugh, and reminded me of a recording I had of Aled Jones when he was a child, singing most beautifully Where’er You Walk, Handel’s setting of this snatch of Alexander Pope’s poem Summer:

Where-e'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade, Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade, Where-e'er you tread, the blushing flow'rs shall rise, And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

It went on his album called (I think) The Best of Aled Jones or something, that travelled with me in cassette form until cassette machines dropped off the edge of the world. So it came to pass that I had this tape with me when I moved in to Bernard’s cottage on the edge of Flatroper’s Wood, and often used to play it because he liked it especially.

After he had listened carefully to Where’er You Walk several times, he ventured to ask (this must have been something to do with Aled Jones’s Welsh intonation) why all those trees wanted to crowd into a shed when the lady sat down.

And it became a standing joke with us, about trees crowding into the shed. Bernard came through from the bathroom one morning with a funny kind of grin on his face. He’d found a leafy little twig on the bathroom floor – must have drifted through the window, we always had them open and there were trees and hedges all round the cottage. But Bernard’s theory was that, not content with crowding into the shed, they were on their way in through the bathroom window when our backs were turned.

Bernard used to say the trees waving was what caused the wind – obviously really, once you notice the wind only arises when the trees are waving . . . When he spent that long month in hospital before he came home to end his life in the peace of his own cottage, for part of the time he had a bed near the window looking across a parking lot ringed of the further side with trees. He told me once when I came in for my daily visit (that is to say, he wrote it down; he couldn’t speak because of his tracheostomy) that a tree across the car park had recognised him at last. He said the tree hadn’t known him at first but that morning it had waved to him :0)

Bernard . . . When we went on our long rambles through the woods, every time we came to a bridge or log crossing a stream, we had to walk over it without speaking lest we rouse the troll living underneath it. He didn’t discuss this. Just put his finger to his lips with a warning look as we approached the stream – and we crossed in perfect silence, like the sages in Chapter 15 of the Tao.

The photo must have been taken by someone when was out – our hapless builder maybe – showing a moment when the trees of Silverhill took a leaf out of the book of the trees of Flatroper’s Wood, and took it into their heads to see if they could crowd into the shed here.

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365 Day 21 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Ah – Kindle instruction leaflets. It is not very hard to work a Kindle. This picture is an example of a type of thing I have cleared out. I was carefully keeping a number of instruction leaflets for things I could work perfectly well, or brochures that came with things I bought, “just in case”. Well, I’ve thrown them away.

Ocean

2012-01-20T00:04:00.000-08:00

White lace-edged waves on a pewter sea, languid light seeping across the azure spread of sky behind a panorama of storm grey cloud. So beautiful. I am grateful right to the middle of me that I live close by the ocean.

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365 Day 20 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

A pair of trousers. They are nice and I like them. I have quite a few things I like that need to go. Sometimes friends with cluttered homes explain to me that they like their things, and the lack of storage space means that their homes have to be cluttered. Yes, I see what they mean. I like things, but I like space better.

Dust, dirt, dogs and donkeys.

2012-01-19T05:10:00.000-08:00

Hindu religious law sets in place a caste system allocating a place to every person born within that household of faith. But there are some people in its community born so lowly that they are out-caste – sub-human. They call themselves ‘dalits’, from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘oppressed’ or ‘broken’. If this is unfamiliar to you, to understand their situation better you might be interested to read this essay that explains more fully.

The dalits, sometimes called ‘untouchables’, have this pronounced upon them in the Law of Manu, based on the Rig Veda, a foundational text of the Hindu religion:

Their wealth shall be dogs and donkeys; their dress shall be garments of the dead. They shall eat their food in broken dishes, and black iron shall be their ornaments. They must wander from place to place, and they shall not sleep in villages and towns at nights.

Their work comprises all the dirty things that nobody wants to do – shovelling away excrement and bearing away the dead, for example.

Jesus of course was Jewish, not Hindu; but there was much in His life that I think might speak peace and comfort to the dalits of India.

Consider these words of Scripture:

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:42-45 NIV UK)

Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58)

Jesus said “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60)

This took place to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet: Say to the Daughter of Zion, “See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Matthew 21:4-5)

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me 'Teacher' and 'Lord', and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.” (John 13:12-17)

As for being ‘untouchable’: A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, If you are willing, you can make me clean. Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. (Mark 1:40-41)

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is— that she is a sinner. . . Then [Jesus] turned towards the woman and said to Simon, Do you see this woman? (Luke 7:39 . . .)

And Jesus died the death of the disgraced, the unclean, outside the city wall. And the Christian faith reminds us in our Ash Wednesday liturgy at the beginning of Lent: Dust you are, and to dust you shall return - and that's all of us, dust of Adam.

I wonder if you know about this company, Dalit Candles? The dalits of India must drink from special separate cups, to be dashed to the ground and broken after use, so that nobody else runs the risk of sharing with them. Dalit Candles have taken the little cups the dalits use, and made something beautiful to treasure from them, filling them with candles made of beeswax from the mountainous region of Kashmir. They are handmade by dalit people, and the profits from their sale go to take care of dalit orphans.

The dalits are supposed to dress in clothes the colour of dust, and they have a special place in my heart because they remind me of St Francis who chose to dress in garments the colour of dust as an expression of humility, and of the dusty feet of Jesus, the servant of all, who came to His own but His own received Him not, and who had nowhere to lay His head.

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365 Day 19 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Thinking of candles today, one of the ways I have chosen to lower clutter at home is by using things up rather than passing them on. This beeswax candle had been in my drawer smelling divine for some time. I made a point of actually burning the candle, enjoying its lovely perfume, its clean and refreshing flame. One thing less.

Simplicity facilitates change

2012-01-18T07:21:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows how hard it is to change habits. Eating habits are terribly difficult to change.

A while ago my mother remarked to me about something akin to the frog-in-a-pot-of-water syndrome. She had been looking for out-of-season peaches at the supermarket (peaches don’t grow in the UK much anyway, even in summer), and suddenly recalled her (and my) childhood when people ate peaches, but canned ones. She reflected on how much cheaper that worked out, because the logistics of transport, protection of easily bruised fruit and keeping produce fresh simply vanished. This caused her to see for a moment very clearly how our lives have changed by tiny increments, each gradual small change increasing our expectations until we reached the ‘consumer society’ of today with its midwinter lettuce and strawberries and green beans from Kenya in January. This in turn caused her to ask herself whether we had not made ourselves increasingly vulnerable to the effects of economic recession because we had a long way back to travel from the expectations we’d reached to the simplicity needed to weather times of austerity.

One way and another I have been thinking about simplicity since I came across Francis of Assisi when I was 15. But my journey towards simplicity has been like a yo-yo dieter trying to get thin, and that’s primarily because of the difficulty of swimming against the current of habits entrenched in myself and the wider society that is my context.

But recently I have noticed that if I can achieve a certain level of plain-ness/de-clutter/simplicity in my environment and daily schedule, something happens: I can think. With enough space and emptiness built into my life I begin to be able to notice things, I can make more intentional choices, I can hold in mind principles that I meant to remember – fair-trade, social justice, compassion in farming, environmental sustainability etc etc – that get easily lost in the muddle of things to be attended to if I take on too much or simply have too much stuff around me in my visual field.

Things that seem like too much effort – walking or bussing down to the wholefood co-op for bread, going to the fishermen’s huts for fish, remembering to heat water for the thermos while the woodstove is burning instead of turning on the gas furnace in the morning – start to feel possible when I have space to think. Once they feel possible, I do them. Once I do them, I create a new habit (fragile at first but strengthening with repetition). It is the energy of a habit that forms the forcefield safeguarding a conscious choice. Conscious choice is assisted by simplicity.

Thinking these things over early this morning just before dawn, I checked out my email to find in my inbox two messages that reinforced these thoughts very clearly.

At Zen Habits (blacked out today because of the SOPA protest, but hopefully a live link soon) Leo Babauta is writing about the discipline of sitting in silence in an empty room, to allow ourselves to calm down, to be content with stillness. At Pilgrim’s Moon Tess is talking about positive passivity, the receptivity that comes with responding to the need to make a decision by sitting quietly, waiting, allowing the right choice to emerge within the stilled soul.

And at Innermost House, as always, is inspiration for life measured by heartbeats and human voices, lived according to the turning of the earth in the light of the sun and moon, comforted by the sighing of great trees and the song of birds. These are signposts on the way of wisdom.

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365 Day 18 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

A coin of the realm – a “crown” commemorating the Queen’s silver jubilee as our sovereign in 1977. My sister was born in 1952, the year of the coronation, and I was married in 1977, the year of the Jubilee – I lived in York at the time, in a terraced house in St Martin’s Lane off Micklegate, overlooking St Martin’s churchyard. The Queen passed through in a car one summer day and, though not very tuned into civic dignitaries and events of national importance in those days, I did manage to get myself along to the end of the lane to stand with the crowds and see her drive by.

More on candle light

2012-01-17T00:06:00.000-08:00

I posted a few days ago about candlelight.

I really love candlelight, but (especially living in the garret of this tall Victorian house, from which escape in the event of fire would be difficult to say the least) I am uber-safety-conscious.

It might be fair to say I have something of a disaster mentality. In our supermarkets here there’s often a security sign at checkouts saying “This till is alarmed”, and I think I must have been born with an invisible notice on me saying something similar. As a consequence, though daily life is a matter of constant apprehension, I am prepared for almost any event.

Just now, apparently in slow-mo, we are having our kitchen ripped out and replaced. So we are several weeks with no stove to cook on or in – but, no problem! We have provided ourselves with a mini-oven and free-range electric hotplate, plus the top of the woodstove will take a casserole. We converted our back sitting room to a temporary kitchen and continued in there while Joe ripped out units and gouged holes out of the walls for new cable tracks. Then all went quiet while he went off to fix our Rosie’s roof while the weather was dry. Yesterday he was back with Nick, who will seal off the gas and remove the pipes that fed the hob and grill (we have solar panels now so it makes sense to go to all electric), take out the sink ready for the new unit with a butler sink Martin is making for us out of reclaimed floor joists (the unit not the sink), and re-route the cabling for where the cooker will stand. This involved turning off the water and draining down the system. No problem! Not knowing which day he would come, every day we have been ready with a huge 1.5 ltr pump thermos (which we happen to have) full of boiling water, and a bucket of cold water standing by. We also have an enamel kettle that we can heat on the woodstove in the evening to fill the thermos ready for the morning. For a while Nick also had to turn off the electricity. No problem! It was daylight so we didn’t need the many candles we always have, but we wanted a cup of tea so I went out to the shed and fetched the storm kettle, which we can run on the back doorstep on the shredded cardboard packaging we keep in a basket by the hearth to fuel the luxury fire when we sit down for a teabreak.

So well-defended are we against Hard Times (which we have seen aplenty) that Normal Times look to us like the treacherous surface of a sucking bog whereon all appears grassy and safe to walk on until you try to cross it. Thus we like to be prepared for all eventualities. As Lilian Beckwith expressed it in her wonderful series of stories about her life in the Outer Hebrides, “A Rope – In Case”.

So in my love of candle-light, I want not just candles in general, but candles that won’t fall over by themselves, ignite a tea-towel that accidentally fell on them, or get knocked over by the cat that jumped on the table when I wasn’t looking. When my mother was a child, the farmhouse being in those days lit by oil lamps, her sister managed to start a house fire by tugging out from under the oil lamp the piece of paper she wanted that it was standing on, not anticipating that this would cause the lamp to tip. I am wary of naked flames.

So I like my candles encased in glass, preferably with a lid, preferably hanging not standing. I take note of the comment Buzz left on my previous post about candles, recalling an occasion in her childhood when she had a candle in a jam jar and the heat from the flame caused a demi-lune section to shear off and fly across the room. Lawks! So though I do occasionally have candles in (large) jam jars, that’s just out in the porch or preferably right outside on the step as a “welcome” light.

In the bedroom I (briefly) had this beautiful lantern. It is a fair-trade item made by a firm using recycled and Earth-friendly materials, When I got it, I explained that I would be hanging it from a hook, and the shop lady and I spend some time peering into its chimney to be sure the metal fastenings that hooked the ring to the lid were sturdy. Happily the glass did not break when the heat from the candle melted the solder that was, surprisingly, the only thing adhering the lid to the chimney and the whole thing fell down with an impressive crash.

Then I discovered the UCO candle-lantern (cheapest in the UK are on e-Bay) and since then, friends, I have never looked back. Safe, effective, compact, it folds down for travelling, the candles burn 9 hours and they make a beeswax alternative to the standard paraffin ones.

Ta-da!

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365 day 17 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

A beautiful, handmade statue of Our Lady of Grace. Went to Barnados.

Lemon curd

2012-01-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

Normally we stick to eating wholemeal bread because it’s good for us as well as delicious, but white bread with lemon curd is so scrumptious, like cake really. The only difficult thing was having the patience to wait for the lemon curd to cool down!

Recently – around Christmas time I think, when we’d been having a bigger variety of food than usual, I began to feel horrified about the quantities of packaging generated, and I came into the new year determined to do something about it. Spurred on by reading Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man, which I’m halfway through and really enjoying, I’ve been reviewing what we buy and what it comes wrapped in.

We try to favour local shops or locally sourced produce – we do buy from Sainsburys and the Co-op though they are large chains, because they include a lot of organic, free-range, responsibly sourced, fairly traded products, and they make their baked goods and cereals from British grain, keeping the food miles down to some extent. Even with this good track record, practicality means more rather than less packaging in their stores, besides which we like to buy from small family businesses when that option doesn’t bankrupt us (it’s often, though not always, much more expensive). We keep our costs down by the type of goods we buy rather than by shopping with giants. Beans will always be cheaper than cheese or meat, by a long way when the animal protein food is bought mindful of the care to the animal while it was alive.

We separate and recycle our garbage conscientiously, but even recycling is an industrial process costly to the Earth, and no packaging is better than recycled packaging. So we’ve reviewed our buying patterns, and this is getting easier all the time to do; of the five of us living here, three (soon four) work freelance, and that gives us the space in our time budget to dot about here and there making purchases at the little shops scattered widely round the sprawl of Hastings and St Leonards.

We have changed to getting our bread and vegetables from local bakers and greengrocers – the bread costs half as much again or even double in price if we do that, but not the fruit and veg. There we can either put the food unwrapped straight in our basket, or have it packed in a paper bag. As the paper bags are excellent kindling, either is fine.

Dairy produce is not a problem because we shouldn’t eat it – it makes us all ill. We slipped back into eating it at the end of last year and coughed and sneezed and snotted along until we faced the reality that we really had to knock this off. I am no fan of margarine though, and will continue to opt for butter, but I care where the butter comes from – how the cows are treated, when and how their calves are slaughtered, if they are allowed to run with their mothers etc – so sourcing that is a bit of a headache. I do like meat, and have come cautiously to the view that eating meat means giving an animal life as well as death, but I am also aware of the role meat plays in the big killers – cancer, diabetes, heart disease as well as CJD and various other grim illnesses. And I don’t live easy with the notion that some creature’s whole life was brought to an end for me to eat this one meal gone in minutes. Not to mention the huge amounts of water used in animal husbandry, and the 35-1 ratio of grain to meat in every pound of animal flesh eaten (grain that was 20% protein anyway). So I have long stretches of eating vegan, and admire it as a way of life. But I find a little animal-sourced food helpful to my physical energy and wellbeing. Ideally I’d go for probiotic plain yoghourt, eggs, a little fish, and butter. The yoghourt presents problems for packaging and does gunge up my system so I’ll have that only rarely. The fish is easy because we live right by the sea, and I can take a plastic box to the shop instead of getting it wrapped in plastic bags. The butter – ideally I’d like to find a smallholder with goats and cows and buy the butter of either animal straight from her: I’ll go to the farmer’s market and ask. The eggs – we have a brilliant solution! Next door to the church where our Grace and the Wretched Wretch worship, somebody sells eggs from the garden gate. They keep rescued battery hens, and leave out boxes of eggs for people to help themselves. The prices are very modest, there’s an honesty box for the money, and empty egg boxes are dropped off to be used again. That fulfils all my criteria: zero food miles and Grace was going to church anyway, so there isn’t even travel to the shop), compassion for the animals, nothing has died, small family business, zero packaging (except re-used which is better than re-cycled), no shop-fittings (lights, electronic tills, displays) using Earth resources, the animals are naturally fed and free-range. Perfect!

So the lemon curd in the picture was made with lemons (no packaging, straight in my own cloth Buddha bag) from the greengrocer near Hebe’s masonry down by the sea, margarine from Trinity wholefoods (a co-operative down in Hastings), fair-traded sugar from the Co-op (a big chain but democratic), and eggs from next door to Pett chapel. Cooked up on our electric hotplate fuelled by sunshine via our solar panels on the roof. Eaten with bio-dynamic butter from free-range cows via Trinity wholefoods, on sinfully white bread from the baker round the corner from the masonry. In the sunshine :0)

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365 Day 16 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

2 pairs of trousers, sent to Barnados charity shop. Two things to go today, to balance with an incoming garment. If I have something completely new, I balance it by disposing of two items that don’t even appear in the blogged list – but the garment here was something that used to be mine that our Alice has had for a few years and now given back to me – a fleece hoodie. I’ll add in an extra book given away but not blogged, to be sure I’m not accumulating.

Watching

2012-01-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

In these days of bright sunshine, sometimes even a sunhat is not quite enough.

Most weekdays our Hebe sits cutting the letters of gravestones beside the stonemasonry window, above the garage where the hearses are kept and with a view over the forecourt on the edge of Mercatoria near the bottom of the hill by the sea. Her window looks out towards the back of commercial premises lining London Road; the sun slants in on her work over their roofs. Sometimes she has to give up her position in the good light of the window if the police want to use the masonry for a stake-out.

One of the neighbours does a line in stolen lead, and the masonry can never keep theirs on the roof very long. Hebe watches the drug trading down in the street, the shifty dealers looking this way and that and over their shoulders.

The rasta men saunter by, and the mosque is just along the road so some halal shops have opened up in the neighbourhood. In the closed-down Methodist temperance holiday hotel round the corner, refugees from Eastern Europe were housed. As the restrictions on their freedom to earn a living eased up, they began to spread out and settle in. Refugees from Somalia have added to the mix. Our Grace taught them English in the language school for a while before she became a full-time mother, and friends made back then still call and wave across the street.

This is one of the poorest quarters of town so many of the confused and stumbling weave in and out of the passers-by – people with mental illnesses and the challenges of myriad disabilities; very old people struggling on and off the bus with trolleys for their shopping and possessions; people whose complexions and unsteadiness and unfocussed eyes tell the tale of alcohol as a travelling companion down a long downhill trail.

The small greengrocer’s has been given a new lease of life because the proprietor’s son failed to make his fortune in the city and has come back to this ramshackle sprawl by the ocean to try his hand at selling cabbages and artichokes, Sussex honey and apple juice. Down on the seafront, Smiths Real Food café and Plenty with its delicious bread and cornucopia of wonder feed us well. The charity shops sprout plentifully here, and the Kings Road Flea Market, the Coast Tea Rooms with its glorious cakes, Jempson’s bakery and any number of second-hand shops, and odd emporia like the stamp and coin collector’s corner, do well – or at least eke out the possibility of a tomorrow.

The Chinese restaurant takes deliveries just across from the masonry forecourt, and Hebe watches as the whole family pours out onto the pavement to take in sacks of rice and a variety of provisions. The father of the family bows to her with Asian courtesy and grace as she passes him on her way in to the masonry in the morning sun.

One day a visitor to the masonry left his bicycle on the forecourt, and tried to collect it as he left. The Chinese family, out on the street unloading goods, assumed the bike was Duncan’s and the man a thief. Not recognising him, they accosted him full of staccato Chinese indignation and tried to prevent him leaving with his bike. Piers, cutting a stone, down in the garage off the forecourt, understood the situation and tried to remonstrate: but Piers is profoundly deaf and could contribute only sign language to the confusion.

The huge crucified Christ on the wall of the anglo-catholic church watches silently over this extraordinary melée of humanity. In an attempt to dignify His presence they gilded his loin-cloth recently, and His crown of thorns. It is possible they have not quite understood.

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365 Day 15 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Oh, a poster of the rejoicing as the shepherd recovers the lost sheep. This is the artwork of Sieger Köder and has been up on the wall of our kitchen for some time. Now the kitchen is to be grey and cream and restrained, Quakerish rather than the exuberant spice-box colours it was; so the picture no longer fits in. It made a good fire-lighter.

A little crazy

2012-01-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

It seems a little crazy but I need to wear a sunhat to work at the computer.

In the mid-afternoon, the sun comes round and blazes in through the roof windows in the garrett. Our bed (where I sit and write) is on the opposite side of the room from the windows, so the sun shines directly in my eyes and makes it impossible to see at all to work.

Unless I wear a sunhat.

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365 day 14 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Coming to the end of the floristry supplies now. This unopened box contains 3 blocks of oasis plant foam. And good riddance.

The luxury fire

2012-01-13T02:20:00.000-08:00

We have 2 fires, a woodstove in the large, north-facing front room where the piano is and everyone can fit in, and an open hearth, in the smaller back room that opens onto the herb bed and looks down the garden.

The morning sun streams into the back room and the front room has indirect western light in the afternoon.

The woodstove is obviously way more economical than the open fire, but we kept the hearth rather than installing a second woodstove because we love open fires.

When I married Bernard and we lived in his cottage on the edge of Flatropers Wood in Beckley, our only heating was a woodstove, and Bernard jealously guarded his woodstack of 2-year seasoned logs. So when I wanted an open fire to sit by, he said "Well, you needn't think you're going to be using my wood, you can gather your own!" And he made me a wonderful handcart painted chinese red, to go wooding.

I apply a similar principle to the fires here - the back room open hearth I think of as "the luxury fire" because it burns fast and uncontrolled, and the woodstove is "the responsible fire".

Therefore on the open hearth I burn sticks and fir-cones collected on walks and in the garden, and paper and card packaging. I figure that if we wanted a fire anyway, it makes sense to burn packaging rather than recycle it and burn wood, since recycling is itself an industrial process.

The picture shows the luxury fire in action :0)

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365 Day 13 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Still wading through the florist's supplies. 6mm anchor tape today. These florist's things went to a lady along the road from us, a keen flower-arranger. Her husband spotted them on Freecycle.

Candlelight

2012-01-12T01:50:00.000-08:00

Light fascinates and delights me.

As a child in church one of my favourite things was watching the light falling on the polished wood of the pews through the coloured glass of the windows ("gules" they call this, or Keats does). I love stained glass. I prefer abstract patterns to pictures, because I find the story of the picture occupies my consciousness and asserts an irritating distraction I cannot suppress from the light interacting with the glass in its colours and textures, which is what I want to look at. I love light passing through water. Swimming in lakes, I love the amber light with all the whirling silt and weed. Swimming in (indoor) swimming pools, I love passing under the skylight windows, so that I feel for a moment I am swimming through sunshine.

This morning I woke in the still-dark, fell asleep again and woke at sunrise, our big roof windows lit with a glory of salmon and azure, lavender, pearl, turquoise and peach. So beautiful. I lay and watched it, thinking of John the Baptist’s question, “What did you come here to see?”

“This,” I thought: “I came here to see this.”

Inspired by Diana Lorence, I am experimenting more than usual with candle-light (this household couldn't function without a steady supply of night-lights anyway, we are all pyro-maniacs). There have been times in the past when I have lived without electricity, but in a shared household where no-one wants to do that, this would not be practical. The electronic media are very important to me. My cell-phone is my alarm clock as well as my phone. My laptop is a work tool and my (almost sole) communication with the world, and I am inspired and challenged and entertained by films watched on it – about the Indian Hill Railways, about the lives of monks and nuns, Margaret Rutherford’s Miss Marple films, YouTube videos and bout health and nutrition, ecology and environment; that’s the kind of thing I watch, and it keeps me cheerful and approximately sane.

But mostly our heating is the woodstove or open fire, and in the nights when the Badger is away (half the week) I have only candle-light in the garret now. I am intrigued to discover the extent of immediacy that brings to the passing of the night, the rhythms of daylight and darkness.

My eyesight has had 54 years punishing addiction to books, and is helped by strong light, so if I want to read in bed I do have a book light. Even so, I find the absence of electric houselights makes a difference. Walking through shadow, with its mystery and peace, is very calming. And candlelight has a comforting serenity. It’s very welcome, because I loathe with a passion these eco-light bulbs we all have now, climbing from useless semi-darkness to a prison-harsh glare as they warm up. Ugh.

So I’ve been reading about candles – beeswax versus paraffin wax, special bushcraft high-temperature-melt wax, etc. And I’ve been thinking about candle-safety and house fires – communities like the Amish and the Carthusians seem to resign themselves to burning their places down on a regular basis. Hmm. And I’ve been thinking about smoke – about how surprisingly different the colour of Kings College Chapel was after they cleaned decades of candle-smoke off the walls. Lanterns, I think, are the way to go. I have a beautiful one as it happens – but the problem with burning tealights is they rarely re-light successfully so, not being an enthusiast for waste and already having all the wax scrapings we need for firelighters, I choose between a whole evening or doing without. I am turning over in my mind how to make a spike holder with a jam jar lid and a nail so can use short church candles in the lantern without creating lots of wax runnels. The lantern should minimise that anyway by eliminating draft.

Enough. Breakfast time. Off to make porridge . . .

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365 Day 12 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

More florist supplies. 12mm anchor tape this time. Gosh, this one-item-a-day does concentrate the mind on life slipping by! Twelve days of 2012 gone already!

I wonder if you know this book

2012-01-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

The online community is heaving with geeks, and not an insignificant number of us (though by no means all) find it easy to hang out here because we experience socialising in real life as both hard and alarming.

Many the occasion when I stride home from some gathering muttering to myself, apologising to God for my inept and graceless conduct, resolving to say less and do better next time. But God has heard it all before, and though I understand He has not given up on me, I don’t think He’s holding His breath either (I hope not, because if God holds His breath we all die, if my reading of the Psalm is correct).

People of limited understanding and experience frequently mock the Royal Family for their seemingly stilted social responses – “It is nice to meet you,” etc. Such derision exhibits a failure to grasp the function in a formal setting of ritualised phrases and interactions. A larking about style of Queen high-fiving her subjects and greeting them with “Yo, dude, how’s it hanging?” would not only make herself unseemly, she would also be forever placing her subjects in the awkward position of having no rehearsed response or clear set of social guidelines for successful, respectful, dignified formal conversation.

Where a meeting is merely empty ritual, it feels distinctly chilly of course. Ideally one’s meetings and conversations should feel warm and affirming.

I am a natural geek. Nerd to the nth degree. Look no further for an example of tactlessness. I think the nadir of my social gracelessness was the occasion when despite my repeated attempts to make things better (each effort simply digging me in deeper) I finally received a letter from an enraged clergyman telling me I was psychotic, sick, destructive and a number of other things (he went on for a couple of pages but I no longer have the letter) now long forgotten. I do try hard to avoid inadvertently upsetting people to quite that degree, but I certainly make as many enemies as friends.

So I keep near me this wonderful Book of Courtesy by Sister Mary Mercedes, a Dominican nun, who explains, teaches, guides, instructs, in the mysteries of how to be nice to people. She tells me what I have to say and do, to avoid making a complete twit of myself and driving normally dignified people into a state of teeth-gnashing fury at my inherently objectionable personality.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, especially if you, like me, generally feel safer in the company of animals and computers than your fellow human beings.

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365 Day 11 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Paper covered bindwire. Another casualty of the flower rota débacle. The original flower lady (God be thanked) decided to stay on, for a while at least.

Squid Juice

2012-01-10T01:26:00.000-08:00

This is my third attempt at writing and entitling a blog post. The first was mournful and self-pitying, the second peevish and defensive, laying blame on others for problems originating squarely with me.

In our house we have a phrase, “squid-juicing”. Squids, as you no doubt know, emit clouds of inky stuff when they feel threatened (at least, I think they do; I don’t think I made that up . . .). Some people pull a very similar trick. When they feel guilty or low or out of their depth – even, sometimes, just bored – they start emitting evil negative stuff – sarky remarks, grumbling, complaining, criticising: none of it justified, just squid-juicing. I do that. Today I’m on that trip. Again. Hush, Ember. Read a book or something. Spare human society your company. Tiptoe away.

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365 Day 10 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Florist’s scissors. Casualties of the flower rota débacle. More related items to follow over the next few days.

Buying things

2012-01-09T08:43:00.000-08:00

While cruising around the blogs of friends the other day, I read Beth Dopp’s reading list with great interest. Thanks for including my In Celebration of Simplicity, Beth – much appreciated!

Intrigued by one of her favourites from her reading of 2011, No Impact Man by Colin Beavan, I went across to Amazon and read what I could of the Look Inside preview. Brilliant! Funny, inspiring, thought-provoking, hard-hitting. I am reading it now on my Kindle.

That brings me to a crossroads, a question place. Part of my 365 adventure is getting rid of 2 things for every new thing I acquire (even if that’s donated by another member of the household from their chuck-out). So when I bought 3 fleece sweaters (I wear these constantly) from Lands' End UK in their big January sale, I duly donated 6 garments from my closet to a charity caring for children with cancer, and those garments won’t appear in the 365 blogged items.

But

Though that does indeed keep down my level of possessions, I think it would be more frugal and environmentally responsible if I slow right down on acquisition of new things – especially mass-produced new things probably made in sweat-shops. I did check out the manufacturing ethics of Lands' End, and was pleased to read on their website that their manufacturing partners use no child or forced labour, and pay fair wages – even so reading “made in Cambodia” on the label stops their reassurances laying my suspicions entirely to rest.

Part of my New Year resolutions and mindset behind the 365 adventure is to remember the human and cherish the Earth; so though in a moment of absentmindedness I did order those fleeces and will be pleased to have them (they certainly contribute to living with very low winter heating as we do), in general I will be trying to cut right back on the shopping and ensuring that the purchases I do make are for the most part hand-made, local (or fairly traded in from overseas) and sourced from small family businesses.

But I hadn’t given any thought to Kindle purchases. I guess though they help keep the house de-cluttered, there is such a thing as electronic clutter too. So I will investigate my memory sticks and consign 2 large files to the bin to balance the clutter-scales again after buying Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man.

I am not in favour of simply stopping buying things, though. My daughters are musicians and craftspeople, I am a writer and the Badger is a publisher. We know all too well that being able to continue to fulfil what is truly vocational for us, not merely commercial, depends on sales of a viable level as well as frugality at home. If no-one buys my books, only borrows them, then the book I have waiting for a yea-or-nay at the publisher (and depending on the sales of the ones already contracted) will never see the light of day. That would be a pity because it was written not as a money-spinner but as a way of making available to the imagination of the reader some scriptural truths very health-giving for our society. So I believe in buying books that have something worthwhile to say. And I believe in supporting honest, responsible business enterprise. It’s just the greedy consumer-fest I think needs reigning in, and the irresponsible over-creation of packaging and worthless knick-knacks.

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365 Day 9 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Last year our church had a fund-raising drive to pay for installing new toilets.

When I was a child at primary school, we changed to decimal currency, so that shillings, half-crowns, sixpences and florins all vanished from our lives. Up until that point, a penny was written 1d – an abbreviation of 1 denarius. It changed to 1p (one penny) and shrank its value from one twentieth to one hundredth of a pound in a single deft move.

If you wish to use the public toilets in, say, London Charing Cross railway station today, I believe the going rate to get in through the automated turnstile is 30p.

When I was a child there would be no turnstile at the entrance, but each of the doors to the individual stalls in the public toilets would be opened by inserting a coin into the slot – 1d, a penny. Hence, “spending a penny” was the euphemism of choice in polite society for temporarily vanishing into the bathroom to empty one’s bladder.

So it was that someone at St Johns came up with the idea of “Save a penny to spend a penny”, and asked us all to save our small loose change – the coppers, the 1p and 2p coins – to support the fundraising drive.

This struck me as something our household could comfortably do, so I pressed into service for silver 5p pieces an old hummus carton and for the coppers a bucket that had once held meringues bought to share with a cup of tea by our friends Erik Kuilenberg and Carien Bloema on their family visit with their children Ben, Huub and Jolijt last summer.

I cut slots in the lids like real money boxes, and we started saving.

In my somewhat OCD manner, I felt reluctant to part with the accumulated loot until the tubs were actually full. The toilets were built, blessed, up and running before our containers reached the half-way mark. But still we plodded on. This week it occurred to me – you know what? The time has gone. So I put the tubs out for recycling, and took the stash of mini-loot up to the coin-star machine at the supermarket, which yielded £12.82 that I duly added to the regular collection at church last Sunday.

Mouse tales. Not for the squeamish.

2012-01-08T07:52:00.000-08:00

Our two cats look sweet but are fearless and ferocious. Only last night Edwin (pictured above looking innocent) came charging in from the garden carrying a large worm.

Their exploits as hunters are trying to say the least.

A couple of months back, I felt uneasy about the vague whiff of death that seemed to be developing in our living room. Sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of tea, it seemed to me that the general atmosphere lacked freshness. I commented on this to my youngest daughter, to whom the problem was not immediately apparent.

“Come in,” said I. “Come in properly and sit where I was sitting just there in the middle of the sofa, then I think you’ll – ”

“AAAGGH! THERE’S A MOUSE!!!”

Just on the verge of taking a seat she spotted what I had overlooked: a well dead mouse laid out just there adjacent to where I’d been sitting. That explained the smell, then.

This last week, in the kitchen this time – the temporary kitchen which is not usually a kitchen at all and where consequently we also have a sofa – I sat down on the sofa sipping tea while I waited patiently for my porridge to cook.

I happened to glance down at the cushion alongside me. I should explain that our sofas are not simple affairs where a dead rodent would be immediately obvious, but muddles of multi-coloured throws and cushions and sheepskins.

“?” I thought. “That’s . . . that’s a tail!”

Further investigation confirmed that the object beside me on the sofa was indeed someone’s tail – attached still to its now deceased owner, a dear little house-mouse with a pointy nose and sweet ears. Extremely sad.

Then the day before yesterday I decided to tackle the Christmas Leftovers in the fridge. Epiphany loomed on the horizon, and it seemed to me that some of that collection of bowls and plastic storage boxes must be due for a turn-out.

I started with the small plastic sealed tub of aduki beans sitting on the top shelf. It had been there since before Christmas, I knew that much. The wall of the tub allowed me to determine the contents but not verify the state of their condition: not until I removed the lid did the advancing glutinous grey-green slime enveloping the beans become apparent. Right, then. Into the compost bucket with them!

I also knew there to be a small bowl containing a portion of trifle at the back of the middle shelf. I hooked it out. Hmm. Not actually rotting as such, but no longer appetising either. I chucked that in the compost bucket with the aduki beans and the other various peelings already there.

Unable to avoid facing the truth that the noble thing to do would be take the bucket down the garden and empty it into the compost heap without further delay, I actioned the promptings of conscience, taking a spoon to scrape out the bucket into the big bin.

Even with the spoon, the bucket still exhibited slimy cling-ons, and I thought I’d better rinse it out with the rainwater in the watering can before taking it back into the house, given that our washing-up facilities are limited while the kitchen is in pupation.

So I grabbed the watering can and sloshed some rainwater accumulated therein into to compost bucket. As often happens, the out-sloosh of water stopped because something blocked the spout. Snails and dead leaves etc drop in sometimes, and gather blocking the spout when the can is used. I put down the can, swished round the bucket, tossed the swill-water across the herb-bed and turned back to the can for a second lot of rinse-water. “!”

“What the hey?!”

There, unmistakeably, from the spout, protruded a long grey-whiskered pink tail and a pair of feet! Oh, my life!!

Nonplussed for a moment, I looked at the can. Then it occurred to me that giving the remaining rainwater in it a mighty swoosh down the spout might eject the beast within like a kind of awful parody of birth. This proved to be the case, and a small rat-ling was delivered upon the herb bed, where I buried it.

I tell you, it’s a white-knuckle ride living here in St Leonards!

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365 Day 8 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

A fragrant beeswax candle. Disposed of this in the obvious manner; very nice too. So many objects end up like this, cluttering up drawers because I mean to put them to good use one day – but never get around to it.

Subscriptions and Alice Popkorn

2012-01-07T01:30:00.000-08:00

Totally blown away by this picture by Alice Popkorn called Path of Life. Love it, love it.

I came across it while checking out a new blog. I almost never subscribe to blogs by email. I enjoy (sometimes) reading Country Living magazine, so the Badger kindly gave me a subscription to it as a gift – I felt so pleased, looking forward to it arriving every month; and of course one saves a lot of money by taking out a subscription. But as the months went by I found it wasn’t as I’d expected and imagined. To my surprise, much of the pleasure had been not the magazine itself but the idea of it. I liked looking in the newsagent wherever I happened to be, wondering “Is the new issue out yet? Do they even stock it here?” And the triumphant “Aha!” of pouncing on the new Country Living when I found a newsagent that stocked it. Once I had the sub, I still thought “Oh, good” when it arrived – but it was indeed increasingly “Oh, good”, not “Oh, good!” So when my dear Badger offered to renew the subscription, I said no. He is a kind (even indulgent!) husband, so he bought it anyway, thinking I might be being frugal and self-denying. The next year I got to the mail first and destroyed the reminder before he saw it. Having it delivered every month actually kind of immunised me against Country Living, so that I don’t really enjoy it at all any more.

I have not long ago taken out a subscription to Resurgence because you can’t get it in the regular shops near me. I will take it for a year then maybe have a rest from it. I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Resurgence: as a publication it is heavily influenced (as you might expect) by the personality of its editor, Satish Kumar – but while part of me finds him inspirational part of me finds him intensely irritating, and reading his articles I often think the editor could do with rather more rigorous editing himself. I used to subscribe to Resurgence years ago, until the irritation overwhelmed the inspiration, so I stopped it for a long while – but it really is one of its kind, unique and special. The Badger has a subscription to Permaculture, which is a wonderful publication – brilliant, totally recommend. He also has the Church Times which is jolly good and has the advantage of being printed on the kind of paper that’s suitable for lighting the fire.

But when it comes to blogs, I have an email subscription to Zen Habits which functions something like a Tent Inspection – the email alerts remind me that I’m doing my life all wrong even if I can’t always find the motivation to do anything about it. I also have a subscription to Magdalena Perks’ blog Anglican, Plain, principally because Magdalena is one of the dottiest people I have ever met (I say this with affection); you can see it in her eyes, she has the gaze of a fox! She walks the wild side of plain and intrigues me immensely. That alone would not be enough to make me subscribe to her blog (I'd still read it because it's fascinating, but I wouldn't get the alerts); but I worry about her – that’s why I have the email alerts. Magdalena has the courage and the individuality to pursue her path of choice against all the odds, despite her husband’s chronic health problems and the terrible allergies that dog her. Her determination and vision are colossal, admirable, and I like to keep a check on how she is so that she can’t fall into any rows or disasters without my being alerted at least to pray and care.

But for the most part what I like is checking down the list in the sidebar here to see who’s posted something new; part of the pleasure is that hopeful moment when I come over here to Kindred of the Quiet Way, checking out what you’ve been up to over in your neck of the woods. For some reason Julie’s blog (which is always worth reading) doesn’t take in terms of image and date of last post – but I click on it every time just in case she’s written something new. If I subscribed to them all the irritation factor would kick in and I’d feel bombarded – but coming to see who’s posted what always feels like fun.

However – I have just taken out an email subscription to a blog; Tess at Anchors and Masts has created a blog called Pilgrim’s Moon, which she describes as about “growing older on our own terms, a counter-cultural path for women.” She says this about it: “[Pilgrim’s Moon] seeks to explore new ways of aging that move away from the main alternatives society gives us of looking abnormally young for as long as possible or fading into a blue-rinse twilight zone and shutting up.”

Anchors and Masts is an excellent website, and I really like the sound of Pilgrim’s Moon (I’ll post a link in the side-bar here as well): when I went across to check it out, almost the first thing my eye fell on was the beautiful picture by Alice Popkorn called Path of Life up at the top of the post here. I think her pictures are amazing. Amazing. AMAZING. A.mazing. I mean, just look at this one:

Or this one!

You can see a gallery of her work here.

Oh. I got side-tracked! I came here meaning to tell you some stories about mice, but that’ll keep till tomorrow.

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365 Day 7 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Jesus (see this post). He found a home! When I took him round to Buzz’s place yesterday she confessed that when we had him in his manger at Christmas time she hadn’t looked at him properly, because she knew that if she looked at him she’d want to take him home. ‘Once a mama…’ eh?

Anyway, he will be put to work helping run Buzz’s Tuesday group Bébé au Lait, which is for mothers with babies and toddlers and ladies expecting babies – a place to find out about slings (and arrows of outrageous fortune) and baby info – think about birth stories and gentle parenting, and be in an environment where both breast-feeding and bottle-feeding mothers can feel welcomed and accepted. Jesus, being correctly sized and weighted for a newborn, will come in handy for demonstrating slings without bothering anyone’s actual baby, and for demonstrating breast-feeding positions etc. Perfect.

"Come and see"

2012-01-06T00:02:00.000-08:00

In John’s gospel, the prologue introduces Jesus as Light coming into a dark world where, though it is not understood and is met with hostility, even so He is “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (v.9) and “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name”.

The prologue to a gospel is the place where the writer sets out his stall as it were – as in the overture of an opera we discover glimpses of the themes and melodies that will unfold more comprehensively as the work progresses.

John’s gospel depicts Jesus as Light moving through the dark world, allowing us to see the way, illuminating the hearts and minds of those who welcome Him.

The crucifixion is described in this particular gospel in terms of glory (eg “Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son” John 17:1), so that the moment of self-offering in sacrificial death is the great blaze of light, the hour of glory when the work of the Cosmic Christ depicted in the prologue is consummated and fulfilled.

John’s gospel was written later than the other three, though it shows strong internal evidence for first-hand testimony (eg see John Robinson’s excellent book The Priority of John, a must for any Bible student). Each of the gospel writers is working in a church context, and understanding the context is helpful in perceiving the thrust and slant of the thematic content of that gospel.

John is writing for a church bearing severe persecution at a time when the expected imminent return of the Christ seems dismayingly delayed.

A question (not the only question, but a question) his gospel is answering is an urgent “Where is Jesus?”

Thus John’s gospel in telling the story of Jesus brings out the searching of discipleship.

In each of the gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks as He enters the drama offer a clue to the themes of that particular gospel. In John’s gospel, Christ’s first words are ‘What are you looking for? . . . Come . . . and see.” Christ encourages the search, beckons us on further and deeper, calls us to keep looking.

John shows us that the light to our search is Christ Himself, drawing us through the darkness to union with Him, to the state of faith in which we are completely one with Him (see His prayer in John 17) and with the Father.

The task of the gospel writer is not the same as that of a journalist telling the story of a famous man; the gospels are written for discipling the flock of Christ, teaching the household of faith. John’s gospel is teaching a weary and embattled flock how to find Christ now; where Jesus is to be found.

What he does is to show how the real presence of Christ has transferred from the man Jesus of Nazareth into the body of believers – that is to say the risen Jesus is still really and fully with us, but the locus of encounter is no longer in an individual only, but diffused into the laos – the people of God.

He tells the story of the risen Jesus appearing to the disciples the day Thomas was not with them, “the first day of the week” – and then shows us the same group a week later, this time with Thomas present, encountering for real, for himself, in person, the living presence of Jesus. This incident helps the believers (then and now) to grasp with powerful immediacy how it is that as the faithful meet together week by week, Christ can be encountered really and immediately in the midst. The Light of the World known in the hands and feet and smile and touch and laugh of the man Jesus, has now passed into the whole Body of Christ.

There’s an interesting detail that we are inclined to miss in translation, in the story (John 20) of Peter and the disciple Jesus loved at the tomb on the resurrection morning. Here it is in the King James version of the Bible. Note the words in bold:

¹The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre. ²Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him. ³Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre. ⁴So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. ⁵And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in. ⁶Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, ⁷And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. ⁸Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.

Three times the word “saw” crops up. The other disciple saw the linen cloths . . . Peter also saw the grave cloths . . . the other disciple saw and believed.

One word in English – but three different words in the Greek: “glimpsed . . . examined . . . understood.”

The other disciple stooped, looked in, and caught sight of the grave cloths. Peter went on in and examined the grave cloths and the head cloth lying nearby. Then the other disciple came in too and he saw – as in “Ding!” Lightbulb moment! He got it.

My daughter Alice made two etchings portraying the inner truth that John, with his preoccupation with light, was conveying to us in telling us about this happening.

John is showing us how the Light continues to move and illuminate and transform.

Look at Alice’s pictures.

Do you see?

In the first one, the light is outside, behind the disciples, and the place they are coming into is dark. The way they walked with Jesus, behind them now, was illuminated by his presence. This death has clouded their understanding. But look at the picture. Light is waiting for them in the depths of the tomb, like a promise: the grave cloths are shining.

The in the second picture we see Peter holding up the cloth, mystified. Alice expresses the moment in the way she shows the cloth partly obscuring the light and partly allowing it to shine through. Peter is searching for meaning there, but hasn’t quite got it yet.

But in that second picture, look at the other disciple, who has “seen” (understood): he himself is shining now, as he looks back towards the light of the way they have come. The Light has passed into him, is incorporated with him.

This is the message of John, the promise of Light that can shine within us, “While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light” (John 12:36); “the true Light, which lighteth every man”.

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365 Day 6 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Oh right, a spork. I felt really excited about these when I discovered them – like the ultimate travel-light implement. In actual use, I found them hard to manage – the prongs of the fork don’t spear things very well, if I use the ends alternately to eat I get the palm of my hand greasy or sticky, and neither end feels comfortable as the handle. After a while it dawned on me I had a much better picnic tool, called fingers.

Where the path might lead

2012-01-05T00:17:00.000-08:00

Actually that's a pic of our Hebe's bedroom in the morning light, so I don't suppose your path will be leading you there unless you know something I don't. Or I guess it might suggest that you fled straight up the stairs and flung yourself impetuously out of the open window - but maybe don't attach too much meaning to it, it's just there because it looks casual and simple and beautiful; and I am a picture person, always a bit disappointed if it's only text, and thought you might be too.

I love this set of guidelines for keeping living space calm and harmonious.

And here’s another brilliant, inspiring and useful post by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.

Until I came across that post (from Zen Habits) it had not occurred to me to list, as Leo Babauta suggests, four or five objectives in living simply.

I wrote in my book In Celebration of Simplicity about Gospel simplicity being not an end in itself but permitting the flexibility that leaves a person available to respond to God’s call – like this story in the Bible, and this one. I saw simplicity as a necessary threshold to spiritual development, but I hadn’t set my sights beyond that first step. Getting over it seemed like task enough!

I’m not sure I’ve advanced significantly beyond that, but the Zen Habits post has inspired me to make my own list of five objectives in living simply.

Freedom

The fewer commitments and possessions I have, the quicker my potential response time. I don’t have to respond quickly of course, sometimes waiting is appropriate and wise; but I can if I want to.

I also give myself a wider range of choices if I live simply.

I can live in a big house or a small one, in community or alone; and if I have to move house I can pack up my stuff and go easily, cheaply and quickly. I don’t have to worry about burglars or become paranoid that people love me only for my wealth. My time is not occupied cleaning, organising and searching for items buried among the clutter – yet I can live in a clean and tidy home because a quick dust or wash down is easy without a lot of stuff to move. I do enjoy housework but I quickly go off it if there's much of it or it's difficult to do. Clutter breeds clutter – it creates what I think of as the wood-filler syndrome; this being that every time a person needs a pot of wood-filler to effect a repair, they get a new pot because there’s so much clutter in the shed they can’t see what is and isn’t there. Part of the shed clutter is half- used pots of wood-filler. When the repair job is done, the new pot goes on the front edge of a cluttered shelf in the shed for future use; and so the problem grows. Eventually a weekend has to be devoted to clearing out the shed and taking pots and pots of half-used chemicals to the landfill site (there to poison the Earth for generations), and that could have been free time.

Space

Space happens on the inside, it’s not only an external thing. I do like external space; I like to watch the light change and move with the time of day in a house, and allow the architecture of a building to be noticeable, be itself the art-work of my home. I like to dance and move freely. I like to be able to place an object on an empty table against a bare wall, as a focus.

But I like inner space even better. If I allow myself to be spacious, my mind not harassed by a too-busy social schedule or an over-full diary, I can reflect on the meaning of events and consider relationships, and consult my Lord about concerns that puzzle me.

Spaciousness in the soul goes hand in hand with generosity, graciousness and a forgiving spirit; people who feel harassed and hemmed in are more likely to snap and respond irritably, dismissively. The things I regret saying often come from being caught unawares. When I create the conditions for a spacious mind, I can see things coming better.

Peace

Some day I hope our Hebe, who works as a letter-cutter, will carve for me in stone Toinette Lippe’s words “Problems arise when things accumulate”. Clutter makes people miserable. It creates arguments and drives away peace. Clutter encourages infestations of many kinds - vermin, moulds and bacteria – and leads to disease. Disease itself (Toinette Lippe makes a good case for this) is invariably a form of accumulation requiring dispersal. Therefore I view clutter as an intrinsic element of disease process.

A muddle in the house and a disorganised life and a full schedule lead to mistakes and frustrated endeavours, breakages and spills and accidents, bad feeling and missed appointments, low self-image and wretchedness.

There is a far greater likelihood of achieving a harmonious and well-organised environment where I can find everything and it looks beautiful, soothing to the spirit, if I don’t have much stuff. If I have one plate, the dirty crockery can’t stack up waiting to be washed, can it? Even if I never wash it up.

And, things (I find) have opinions, voices and agendas. If I allow possessions to accumulate around me, they weary me with their clamour. This fancy china that insists on being treated like porcelain (understandably). This tangle of electric wires, connected to the mains second-hand via a multi-socket permanently on and buried under a pile of dirty laundry, sits there plotting like Guy Fawkes how to set fire to the house one day. This great bag of lipsticks and nail varnishes and eye-shadows reminds me that no matter how hard I try I still end up with the same face and I will never achieve the look I was hoping for. It all talks and grumbles on, and when the house is clear one can finally discover the blessing of silence. Peace.

Non-attachment

I have noticed that possessions and commitments start to form a persona around me, as does the addiction to offering opinions (the sign of a cluttered psyche). People have less of a handle on me if they don’t know what I’m doing or thinking, and the less I own the harder I am to evaluate.

Possessions weave a history like a cocoon around us – the photos of our wedding day . . . Granny’s old armchair . . . the teddy I had when I was little . . . those dresses I wore when I was slim (and who knows . . .)

If you glance round someone’s home, you can read who they are – or maybe who they wish they were!

I am very interested in Carlos Castaneda’s idea that: “It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people.” The extremity of that view instantly creates mental opposition in us, but going with the drift of it is very freeing.

When my husband Bernard died, I lived in his cottage. We had not been married long, however, and that house had been the childhood home of his son. Bernard had rightly and with my full encouragement left it to him. I loved that small, low house among the trees, surrounded by birdsong and woodland creatures down a forgotten lane on the outskirts of Flatropers Wood. I loved Bernard too. Because I own few things, it was easy enough on the day he died, having made the necessary phone calls and waited for the funeral director to take his body, to pack all my possessions and Hebe’s into my little car (Nissan Micra) and drive away leaving the house free for Bernard’s son, with no regrets and nothing more to sort out. How much more complicated the process of grieving and moving on would have been with sorting through piles of specially-chosen furniture and loved artwork and Significant Objects. Aaagh. No thanks!

Sometimes possessions glue themselves on to us by cost. “I can’t throw that away! It cost £600! I bought it for my wife to make her happy – but it never did . . .”

Objects bring adhesion and entanglement, always. Some people like that. I don’t.

Earth testimony

I watched an interesting talk by Vandana Shiva about water, here.

The production of things, in the end, could cause us to die of thirst, a horrendous death. When I look at the mountains of mass-produced pointless cheap tat that clutters the shops on the High Street to no good purpose other than to transfer money from my bank account to someone else’s, I should see Christ on the cross groaning “I thirst.”

The Earth cannot respond to our mantra of “More! More! More!” The political pursuit of inexorable growth is an aggressive social cancer which, if it is not halted, will kill the organism sustaining it.

If I do not live simply now, the day will come when there will be nowhere left to store my clutter; it will all be ruined. The world of Wall-E looks cute at the cinema, but do I really want things to end up that way?

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365 Day 5 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here)

Oh, good grief!. How childish. I am ashamed to say I bought this for one event! The launch event for my book The Hardest Thing To Do was a medieval costume party, and I thought it would be groovy to have a wooden bowl hung from my belt as they did in the middle ages when crockery might be scarce enough that you’d be glad to have taken your own. How times have changed. How embarrassing to even have owned this at all. It’s gone to Barnado’s charity shop.

For those of you who like the idea of the 365 house-slim, but find the idea of a whole year and such a radical trim of possessions too daunting, here’s a link to Leo Babauta’s ClutterfatChallenge for transforming your home in a month.

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I put all the links in red today, because sometimes in a recessive colour people miss them and, not realising they're meant to click on them, get a bit bewildered. Is it helpful or too eye-catching ad intrusive to have them in red?

Living light

2012-01-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

Born in the summer, I love the light, the warmth, the long days. I love easy, loose, light, cotton summer clothes, and going barefoot in the grass, sandals in the summer dust.

Winter has felt increasingly ominous and difficult to deal with until I discovered the secret of living light.

In a world of electric light, the darkness falls around four in the afternoon these winter days. When we lived further north up in York, I remember the deepest time of the year would see dusk by half past one.

But when I am alone in the house I don’t always switch on the electric light, and then I enjoy noticing the different light in different rooms, depending which way the windows face. I enjoy the half-light and silver light, the shy colours of the dawn, the occasional days of glorious brilliance and the moody times of purple storm cloud.

If I can have a fire in the woodstove or on the hearth (in the other room), and light the house with candles, the living light radiates vitality, as the burning wood and beeswax release the stored sunshine they contain.

The quality of each living light is unique, too – candlelight and firelight are so different from each other . . . from starlight . . . from the clear pure light of the moon . . . from the ethereal beauty of the dawn.

Living light is so beautiful.

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365 Day 4 (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see here)

I can’t remember where this came from. I acquired it when we lived in Aylesbury and I was trying to make the best of living far from my family under somewhat nightmarish circumstances. It represented my determination to assert the cheerfulness and love of my (then) new marriage to the Badger. I knocked a tack into a door to hang it on, our first Christmas there.

It’s a pretty little ornament but the memories it recalls are difficult. Just married – should have been bliss, shouldn’t it? Life ambushes us sometimes. Anyway, I loved the Badger very much, and I love him and appreciate him more the longer and better I know him. The real heart of love I will keep; the ornament can go. It’s outlived its usefulness.

Stormy day

2012-01-03T00:11:00.000-08:00

A wild night of storm and rain, the wind still gusting round the house-top now as the sky slowly lightens toward dawn.

Up here in the garret where the Badger and I have our small apartment is a wonderful place for skies and weathers. Seagulls swoop and glide close outside the skylight windows and perch screaming on the old brick chimney framed in the window there – though today is too rough for any bird to attempt a rest on the ridge tiles.

I love this room, its sense of separation from the rest of the house, love watching the clouds scudding by, the moon crossing the night sky, and the stars and the rising dawn.

The Badger has gone back to Oxford for the working week after the Christmas holidays. I cannot recommend weekending; it is emotionally disruptive, and the continual adjustments create a psychological irritant. But being subsumed into coupledom is probably unhealthy, and the spaces between us can be creative.

Today Joe and Kevin, the team of builders with whom our decrepit old house has forged so close and abiding a friendship, are back, this time to gut the kitchen. It was cunningly designed, in the 1970s, in such a layout as to ensure that no matter where anyone sits, or stands, they will inevitably be in the way. And the worktops come to part of the way up the window, and a large blocky cupboard obscures the shafting light of the morning sun. We are about to change all that. But there is a complication. The previous inhabitants of this home had an interesting approach to DIY. Not long after they had the kitchen installed on the original floorboards, they embarked upon ripping up all the floors downstairs and replacing them with chipboard (in vogue in the 70’s). What to do about the lovely kitchen units they’d just put in? Simple! Cut round the floor boards they stood on and floor the spaces between with chipboard! Sigh. Therefore once everything is ripped out the dual-level flooring will also have to go. Underneath it, furthermore, there is a sort of basement – only 4 feet deep, a crawl space, where there previous owners of the house used to store their wine, accessing it belly-down on a skateboard. Every time they wanted a drink it necessitated a re-enactment of The Great Escape. However I think it would be handy to have a hatch into this space, to check for under-floor timber health, moulds, and presence/absence of rodents from time to time. Today (supposedly) it all begins (Joe and Kevin are about as predictable as the coastal weather). We shall be without a cooker and a sink for a while, and have migrated into the back sitting room with our fridge-freezer and a mini-oven and hotplate. We can wash up Amish-style and chuck the water on the herb bed just outside the door there. The kitchenised sitting-room looks homely and rather charming; it feels as though we’d gone away on holiday.

If I remember I’ll post pics of our progress.

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365 Day 3

I have another hairbrush, so I took this one to bits, washed it thoroughly, reassembled it and sent it to the charity shop. Sometimes I take bits to the Shelter shop – Shelter, as its name suggests, works to provide accommodation for homeless people. Most of my 365 chuck-outs that go to a charity shop will go to Barnardos though. Dr Barnado set up orphanages, and I have known people brought up in a Barnardos home; they did not have a wonderful childhood, but a decent one at least, and spoke well of the care they received. Nowadays Barnados work for children has a broader scope. Their charity shop here is in a the town centre right by the bus stops, making it next to impossible to pull up alongside in a car. This may be why they are sometimes desperate for new stock – it’s a handy place to make purchases and a lousy place to make deliveries. I’ll go down there today or tomorrow with a bag of mixed items from me and from Hebe; we are all in the mood for a New Year clutter purge.

Porridge

2012-01-01T23:33:00.001-08:00

I love porridge. Sometimes I go to sleep at night looking forward to the porridge I will be making in the morning.

I use for a measure one of the small cups from a Japanese tea set. I love the tea set too. I make my tea – nettle usually, sometimes rosemary – in it, and try to time things so that the tea is infused and still hot by the time I’ve eaten the porridge; just ready to drink.

I don’t drink it from the Japanese tea-cup thought, because they’re a bit small for breakfast – we have a cup and saucer made by an English potter that is just right.

This is what my breakfast things look like all laid out ready and the porridge cooking in the pan.

I am always impressed how big a bowl of porridge comes from a relatively small quantity of oats. The Japanese cup is exactly the right measure for my porridge bowl.

I take

1 cup of oats

I cup of soya milk

2 cups of oat milk

1 and a half pinches of salt (sea salt from Cornwall right along the end of England’s south coast)

Oat milk makes really creamy-tasting porridge.

I cook it all up together on a gentle heat, stirring with a wooden spoon to minimise sticking to the pan as it thickens. When it’s ready I sprinkle brown sugar on the top and allow that to melt before I eat it.

It’s just so delicious!

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365 Day 2

I'd been saving this body moisturiser pot in case we wanted it to re-fill with our own mixtures, but none of us who make them did in fact want it (too big), so I washed it out thoroughly and filled it with buttons for the School Holidays Craft Kit I put on Freecycle (instantly claimed!!)

Room in my heart for Thee

2012-01-01T06:56:00.000-08:00

A 365 conundrum.

This

is Jesus (in His manger, as you can see).

During the autumn, our church flower lady handed in her resignation. A new flower lady was sought – by flower lady I mean Church Flower Arrangement Team Co-ordinator. Nobody wanted to do it. Time went by. So in the end I volunteered. I thought, hey, how hard can this be? I can organise a rota. I can learn how to do flowers. I said I’d do it if no-one else would.

More time went by, no-one else volunteered. Meanwhile I gave away my car. Then I got cold feet about the flowers. Would it be hard to do on foot or on the bus? So I backed out of it.

More time went by and still no-one else volunteered. The rector gave out a notice to say we would have no flower lady from the beginning of Advent. The Advent flowers were up and those would be the last ones. If we had no flower lady by Christmas the rector would have to do it himself and we’d have to live with plastic flowers. Any volunteer coming forward would be starting by doing the Christmas flowers.

I felt guilty. OK, I said. I’ll do it.

So I bought the best recommended book on church flower arranging, which cost me twenty-five quid. I bought some oasis foam blocks, some paper-covered bind-wire and some florist’s cutters, and two widths of anchor tape. I can do this, I told myself – even by bus.

So, my first task would be the Christmas flowers. Now, I don’t know about you but my personal view is that the centrepiece of a church at Christmas should be the Baby Jesus in a manger – and it should be the best Jesus and the best manger you can lay your hands on.

We have as it happens a wooden plant-holder thingy that does look eerily like a manger. It’s rough, it’s rustic, and it’s handy for over-wintering the geraniums in the porch. So I thought that though a Jesus would be expensive, he would do for year after year, and would need only large amounts of greenery and berried holly that I could get from the garden and the wild places, and just a few simple Christmas roses in amongst – so it would probably work out less money overall than buying a lot of flowers.

Therefore I got Jesus on eBay, and a more lifelike child you never did see. We had him on display in our home over Christmas and when my grandson saw him he was keen to wake him up!

After that it all changed. We had been in the third week of Advent when I, under the impression I now bore responsibility for the Christmas flowers for a large and busy church, sourced Jesus, the flower-arranging book etc, and went for a few walks to locate potential greenery in situ.

But when I got to speak to the flower lady, which wasn’t easy because she was busy, things weren’t how I thought. First off, the flower lady had already organised the flower arranging teams for Christmas and they had that all sewn up for the next few months and probably until Easter. Then I discovered the new flower lady would have to source the flowers for all the arrangers, and they would have to be got from edge-of-town supermarkets for cheapness. I could see the impossible bus journeys stacking up. And the flower lady must go in once or twice every week to refresh and replace everyone’s flowers. There were some other off-putting details as well, which I won’t go into here. Well . . . I had been up for organising a rota but not for flowers all the way.

So I concluded with regret that church flowers and me were not a marriage made in heaven, and backed off in haste.

So my Christmas manger scene with greenery and hellebores was never to be.

I was glad to see the back of the flower arranging book because when I read it I hated it. I found it easy enough to bung the foam blocks, scissors etc in the 365 and pass them on.

But Jesus . . . come on, now! You can’t Freecycle Jesus!

I did try asking a Methodist minister if she had any use for a liturgical baby, and sent her His picture, but she has tactfully not taken up the offer.

So I was wondering – has any of you a desire to offer a home to Jesus? He is not a child’s toy really. He’s what they call a ‘baby reborn’, with a doe-skin torso and three-quarter arms and legs. He has his own blue-and-white striped baby-gro with matching hat. He has black hair and is asleep. He is correctly weighted for a new-born child.

The only proviso I have is that if you have Him I would rather you not ever sell Him, though you can give Him to someone else as a gift if the time seems right. Jesus was bought and sold once on this Earth, and I don’t think that should happen again.

Let me know if you’d like Him.

I'll put the hay in the compost.

This is His song.

365 2012

2011-12-31T16:56:00.000-08:00

So, my 365 adventure begins today. The game is to send on its way 1 item for each day of 2012, thus leaving my life 365 items emptier by the end of the year. And for every new item I acquire, 2 must go.

I’ll post photos of the things that I’m releasing into the wild as I go, just for your curiosity.

I believe in the three Green Rs “Repair, Re-use, Recycle”, so I won’t be just slinging my stuff in the town dump. I will consider mindfully each thing, and try to relocate it with someone who would be pleased to have it in their home – e.g. even some of the junkier bits I have put together to make up a Crafts Bag and free-cycled for a hard-pressed mama to keep her brood occupied over the holidays. I entirely concur with Jonathan Porritt’s words about throwing things away: “There is no such place as ‘Away’.”

I should make clear that since I decided to do this a few days ago I’ve been enthusiastically gathering stuff that I can move along, and found homes for some of it already so, though the photos will appear through 2012, those of you who know me personally may spot an item and think “Wait . . . what? But it’s May 23^rd and she gave me that thing back at the end of December. . .” An item for each day of the year is what I’m aiming for, rather than an item on each day of the year. I numbered each thing as I photographed it, so the items will be logged in the order I photographed them rather than in the order I’m giving them away.

I hope during this year to really make a habit of this so that my daily living becomes less cluttered, with a view to moving on in 2013 to include packaging into the game of getting rid of 2 things for every thing I bring into the house – which should certainly teach me to bear in mind that a plastic yoghourt pot is just as solid a thing as a Ming vase! That feels like too big a struggle for where I am at the moment though, but I’ll try to keep it in my Far Horizon sights in the hope of scaling down my uptake of packaging as we travel through 2012.

Just to link you in with someone else who’s decided to accept the same challenge, you can see how Julie is getting on with her 365 de-clutter over at her blog Just Julie B.

So here we go, then.

For DAY 1, my first item-to-go is a funky pair of feather earrings. These went as part of a craft kit for two little girls embarking on home-schooling. Their mother blogs over at Brigid’sPilgrim.

Er . . . the mother of the girls, that is - not the mother of the earrings . . .

Made I larf

2011-12-31T10:03:00.000-08:00

The people were urged as a religious duty to give funds for the mending of "Wikked Wayes".

Peter Ackroyd The History of England vol.I: Foundation.

By 'the mending of wikked wayes', is meant repairing the roads!

:0D

For 2012

2011-12-31T09:19:00.000-08:00

I start thinking about New Year resolutions around mid-November. A new year offers an opportunity to re-calibrate – take stock of my current situation, reflect on how things stand at present, and think about where I’d like to head next; what it would help to drop or de-emphasise and what it would help to strengthen and focus on.

I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie (A Game of Shadows, did not enjoy) at the cinema, and was grateful for the habit recently copied from my friend Kath of taking with me at all times a small notebook in which to jot down absolutely anything – a kind of external hard-drive to augment my own memory. In the dark cinema I wrote blind in consequently strange, but legible, writing the words spoken by one of the characters:

“Tomorrow the sun will rise and set. The rest is up for grabs.”

I really liked that as an expression of the opportunity that waits for us in every new day, highlighted by standing on the threshold of a new year.

In the words of Diana Lorence (of the Innermost House): To simplify does not mean to step down or to accept less, it means to begin again.

In beginning 2012 it seems to me that the priority both most urgent and most important is the Earth agenda, what Vandana Shiva calls Earth Democracy. The Earth is our context, it is the place that allowed Jesus to make Love visible, the university of our soul development, the means by which we taste and hear and touch and see something of the greater glory of God. No matter how religious we are, how focussed on heaven or how eagerly straining for the coming of Jesus in glory, without the Earth we lose the context in which God chose to play out the purposes of His sacred and beautiful will, His plan of salvation, the pattern of redemption, the vision of the Peaceable Kingdom. Never more desperately have our brothers and sisters in every species needed to have us stand with them, choosing God over Mammon, justice over greed, what is natural over what is profitable, what is right over what is expedient. The slime mould of Mammon is incorporating more and more of the human race, and the indifference of the religious right to the wellbeing of creation is advancing not hindering the spread of the Mammon-sprawl.

So in 2012, my first priority is to hold Earth Democracy at the forefront of my decision-making, and that my Resolution#1

Resolution#2 is to look for the Human. I find it disturbing to reflect upon the disenfranchisement of increasing numbers of members of the human community by the increase of automation made possible by technological advance. Driven by the unquestioned imperative of profit, people are made redundant by adoption of mechanisation – even forced to work towards their own redundancy by training the punters to use self-service machines. In 2012 I resolve to actively seek - even where it is to my financial disadvantage and personal inconvenience - shops, restaurants and public services where human beings rather than machines still determine what is done and provide the interface with the business and the customer – small family businesses, local enterprises, and firms whose practice, as well as their product and publicity, celebrates community.

Resolution#3 is to give myself permission to be me. This year I will take with both hands the opportunity life has offered me to live a simple life, what William Penn called a ‘retired’ life – quiet and reclusive; because I want to. This year I will refuse the guilt I feel at not joining in, and the compulsion I feel to attend events where I sense an expectation of my supporting presence. I will go if it feels right and comfortable. I might go if it just feels right. If it doesn’t feel either right or comfortable they can do it without me.

Resolutions#4,5 & 6 are inter-connected, and should be made more possible by #3:

#4 To stop arguing

#5 To stop criticising

#6 To stop complaining

because arguing, criticising and complaining achieve nothing, leave a bitter taste behind, erode friendship and goodwill, and are destructive and depressing.

As I am considerably addicted to arguing, criticising and complaining, part of my plan in implementing this resolution is to have a nice time: to do lots of things that I like, spend more time by myself, and not to ask too much of myself, so that I have enough reserves to conduct myself positively and cheerfully. I will be limiting my commitments wherever reasonably possible to one event per day, the rest of the time being given to housework, writing, thinking, reading, learning, cooking, gardening, walking etc. By ‘event’ I mean mainly things with people in – visiting individuals, fulfilling family duties, attending church worship and business meetings, etc.

I shall take the advice of William Penn: Have but little to do, and do it thy self: and do to others as thou wouldst have them do to thee; so thou cast not fail of temporal felicity: and, Avoid company where it is not profitable or necessary; and in those occasions speak little and last. Ha! If I manage to stick to this, my family will not recognise me!!

Finally, Resolution #7 is to sow the seeds of kindness and understanding.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Bathroom window

2011-12-31T04:17:00.000-08:00

Oh wow! Oh glory! Oh total gobsmacking amazement! Just look at the stained glass our Alice has made for our internal bathroom window! Oh golly gosh I am so blessed to share a home with these geniuses!!!!!!!!!!!!

Various shopping expeditions and a Christmas rose

2011-12-29T22:59:00.000-08:00

It’s not that I’m naturally quarrelsome, on the contrary I hate confrontation, but I have this addiction to being right.

Let me give you an example.

On November 26^th (I remember the date exactly because of the sequence of events) the Badger and I went to Wyevale plant nursery where I spent an inordinate amount of money on some houseplants and a beautiful wind-chime to hang in our entrance hall at home. I noticed that their Christmas roses were exceptionally good, but exercised strength of mind as I already have several hellebores in the garden, and didn’t buy one. I got a couple of beautiful cyclamen though.

The reason I wanted these houseplants was because on that day we had Guests for Dinner and I thought the house ought to look beautiful. We got some cut flowers too. We don’t normally have guests for dinner, you see – in fact I can’t remember the last time we did, and I felt very nervous about it and was trying to make everything perfect.

At that time we’d done some work to the garden, and in the afternoon of that day (it was a Saturday), the badger went across to Battle to take my darling Mama out to purchase a new vacuum cleaner, hers having bitten the dust, then on to our place for a cup of tea and a glimpse of the garden (mud, principally, but restructured mud) before returning her home because the Guests were coming. I hasten to add she was invited to stay for supper but one of the Guests was a bishop so Mama felt nervous as I did, and opted to go home. Anyway, while gadding about the world with Mama, the Badger took it into his head to call into Wyevale plant nursery with her, because she likes plants too. Accordingly, when they fetched up at the old homestead for a cup of tea, Mama arrived bearing a gift of a beautiful ivory-and-yellow orchid – another variety of plant I’d exercised strength of mind over and firmly put back. Beautiful. She had also bought herself a Christmas rose.

In the evening one of the Guests brought us a huge and glorious white cyclamen, also beautiful, so our house was resplendent by the time we’d all finished! And we had a good time over dinner, and that was all fine.

The following day (Sunday), talking on the phone to darling Mama to check she was still alive and well over there in her apartment, I learned that she wished she’d bought a second Christmas rose so they could sit looking symmetrical on her balcony. She said she thought she’d get one at Blackbrooks nursery next time she passed on her way to Sainsburys for her grocery shopping. Mama is intrepid enough to have learned the car routes to Sainsburys and Tesco, the two big food shops, but hasn’t got the route to Wyevale nailed yet. She thought the hellebores at Blackbrooks inferior to those at Wyevale, but hey.

On Monday the Badger had to go back to Aylesbury where he lives during the week close to his job in Oxford, so that Sunday, 29^th, was the last chance for him to get the Christmas tree – that being the beginning of Advent. As some of our household totally love Christmas trees and sparkly decorations, we put ours up at the earliest opportunity, Advent 1. After some discussion (tedious, another story, won’t go into it), it was decided that the Badger would return to Wyevale as they had tree stands there as well as the actual trees, and our last year’s one had broken. So I asked him if he’d pick up a Christmas rose for Mama, to which he responded, “No, she got one.”

“I know,” said I, “but she wants a second one, to be symmetrical on the balcony.” So he got one when he fetched the tree (jolly good tree, Nordic fir, excellent shape and very firry)

The next day, Monday, I phoned Mama to check she was still with us and in good shape, and she mentioned that she’d got another Christmas rose.

“Darn!” thought I – having the superior version sat on my porch waiting to make its way to her; but I said nothing about it, not wanting to share around my (albeit minor) annoyance and frustration at her trigger-happy flower-purchasing. And there it still sits to this day – it is flourishing.

Fast-forward (are you still awake?) to yesterday. The Badger and I took Mama to the tip to get rid of the old dead vacuum cleaner, which had been sitting in her garage all this time, then to Poppinghole Farm Shop where I cleaned out the Badger’s bank account in a foolish surge of thinking global and acting all too local.

While the Badger was getting the vacuum cleaner and other junk items out of the garage, Mama wanted to show me a hellebore in a pot, that she’d just retrieved from the balcony. Hellebores are hard to kill, but this one was surely on its way out, and she wanted another. I mentioned I had one at home, that I’d got for her from Wyevale after she’d bought one and wanted another.

“No!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t get it at Wyevale, I got it at the plant stall on the market.”

You did not, you silly old woman, thought I. You got it from Wyevale, I remember it all perfectly clearly. And if it’s the second Christmas rose, you got it from Blackbrooks. However, having resolved NO ARGUING (oh, dear, I haven’t explained about that, have I – tell you what, I’ll leave that explanation until tomorrow) I didn’t say anything. Meanwhile she had headed off into the adjacent room and was saying “I got it, but it wouldn’t hang on the door.”

Starting to feel a little bewildered I asked her why she had said that when we were talking about potted hellebores, and followed to discover her clutching an artificial Christmas wreath.

“You thought I got the Christmas rose at Wyevale,” said she: “but this is what I got at Wyevale, to hang on the door. But the surface of the door is uneven and I couldn’t put a nail in because . . .”

“Because it’s glass?” I suggested helpfully.

“Yes! Because it’s glass. So I stuck it up with loads of . . . er . . .”

“Blutak?”

“Yes! Blutak! But it fell off . . .”

“Because it was too heavy.”

“Yes. So I couldn’t put it up. But I do like it.”

And all of me wanted to explain that she had got a Christmas rose from Wyevale, and unfold the whole sequence of events that proved irrefutably by invincible logic and my perfect memory why that hellebore most certainly came from Wyevale – but the still small voice said something along the lines of “Shut up.” Well, to be fair, more like “Leave it.” So I did.

I just said, “Well, I got you another one and you can have it when you come over on Sunday;” and she was pleased.

Early this morning lying in the dark, feeling relieved to hear the buses at the depot along the road starting up, because that means day has come at last and I can get up and make porridge and stop worrying about the logistics of cramming in to this morning the multiple co-ordinating events and people jostling over its horizon, I mentally revisited this conversation, and you know what? The pot she had that dying hellebore in is not the same as Wyevale’s pots, so she didn’t get it there (it must be the second one). And thinking about it, I'm not 100% sure she ever said she went to Blackbrooks (though it’s like their pots), she just said she intended to go there. So maybe she did get it from the market stall after all.

Anyway I’m regaling you with this (seemingly but not actually endless, rest assured) story because I meant to tell you about my New Year’s Resolutions, of which the first is STOP ARGUING, because I am terrible at arguing. It’s this addiction to being right. It just annoys me intensely when something seems incorrect, so that I am unwilling to leave it, let it go. And in 2012, I’m going to learn the art of letting go, and stop arguing. But I’ll tell you about my New Year’s resolutions tomorrow.

Mouths and gatherings

2011-12-28T08:27:00.000-08:00

I have found a most helpful marker to enable me to distinguish between the gatherings I can manage gracefully and the ones where my stamina is likely to give out and I might

a) behave badly

b) feel the need to leave, urgently and fast

c) be so drained that I then behave badly all the rest of the day.

I can tell if it’s likely to work out by whether the people’s mouths are open or closed.

The kind of gathering where people have their mouth open is the sort where I am likely not to cope. I mean the kind of event where people look like this. If they are looking like this or this, I’ll probably be OK.

If the socialising is taken a stage further and as well as showing their teeth and red glistening bits of their mouths and standing too close they are also smacking their lips over food, or eating with their mouths open in demonstration of how delicious something is, or making loud wet kissing noises in greeting each other, I definitely shouldn’t be there because it freaks me out even when it’s only on telly.

I have found it very helpful to arrive at this discovery because it helps me sort things out. At our church, the 10.30 service is the variety where people have their mouths open a lot – at the peace they come towards you with that look, and there is a significant amount of socialising where people look like this. At the 8.00am service, on the other hand, though the people are still friendly they mostly look like this (only with bigger spaces between them), and I know it’ll be OK.

I miss Quaker meeting, where their mouths are mostly shut tight all the time unless they have something purposeful to say, which I found very soothing to the spirit. But I still think I was right to decide to worship in the place my family can feel comfortable – I just have to identify which events to be at, and checking how the people do their mouths is a good rule of thumb.

A gift of God

2011-12-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

When it’s Christmas or my birthday, I ask God for a present. One year I asked Him for long hair. He said OK but I’d have to take a while unwrapping it.

This year I felt fraught and frazzled on Christmas Day. I have discovered that I cannot cope with days when a lot happens – I disintegrate into bad behaviour – so I recently started the strategy of one-event-days. Each day I permit only one of the events that wash away my topsoil, and let the rest of the time be for quiet, thoughtful occupations – housework, gardening, cooking, reading, sewing, laundry etc. Basically it’s social interaction that I can’t do for long, and Christmas Day had a great deal of that in it, so that when I finally retired I felt a bit harrowed.

Consequently, I asked God for a present – if I might please have something like a cool drink for my soul, a restorative for my inner condition. Then I went online and mooched around for a bit googling on subjects like ‘living simply +house’, ‘simple living +kitchen’ etc: I wanted some images of peaceful domestic interiors, plain and light-filled.

In so doing I came across The Innermost House; and that was my Christmas present from God, the restorative for my soul, with the ability to re-orientate me towards my right north star, the direction my life is headed.

I looked up every link I could find to discover as much as I could - here . . . and here . . . and here . . . and have allowed my soul to marinade in the beauty and serenity, the discipline and spirituality of Diana Lorence’s home and approach to daily life.

On the actual Innermost House website, the most fruitful parts to read are the ones headed In Diana’s Words I and In Diana’s WordsII. If you click on those, you then have a series of essays to choose from.

The images of the house are just amazing.

I like the way we live here, and for our household a large house with a vegetable garden is the right way to go. I don’t choose to emulate Diana Lorence’s tiny house in a woodland setting, even though I am totally in love with it. But though our homes are different, I feel we are sufficiently on the same track for me to learn an immense amount from her – the disciplined simplicity of environment, the discernment and choice of the real, rejecting the synthetic and artificial, the attraction of the natural with its healing and comforting power, the necessity of silence, the nourishment of starlight, firelight, moonlight, sunlight and half-light; the importance of slowness, quietness, space and peace; starting with the inner life and allowing that to work outwards so that home becomes and expression of meaning . . .

Beautiful.

Just beautiful.

365

2011-12-26T14:13:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me today - if every day in 2012 I find one thing to move out of my life, by the end of the year I'd have 365 fewer things.

I like that idea. I might try it.

Christmas Day

2011-12-24T15:06:00.000-08:00

May he who by his Incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, grant you the fullness of inward peace and goodwill; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you always.

Divine order - nature, religion and the being of God. She is puzzled.

2011-12-24T05:13:00.000-08:00

What is God like?

Bewilderment often impels me to ask this.

I listen to the teaching and preaching of the church, and noting (amid its well-meaning and good-hearted reverence) the signs of superstition and narrow muddled thinking, inconsistency and vested interested, I turn aside discontented from its packaged doctrines and odd specific implementations of general morality.

I believe God created everything that is, that the one-song (uni-verse) poured forth from the Spirit’s life urge in a tumbling cornucopia of myriad self-expression. I believe tsunamis and ticks, sunsets and scabs, Pacific waves and putrid waste all tell me something about the divine economy and what one might call the 360^o point of view of the Living God. But every now and then something makes me stop and think, “Yikes! God! What are you like?”

This happened yesterday morning when we were discussing over breakfast the necessity of implementing the cats’ next flea treatment. Casually observing to my beloved spouse the connection between fleas and tapeworm – that fleas carry tapeworm eggs and, being small and streamlined, can crawl freely in and out of an animal’s anus and deliver tapeworm to its gut by depositing the eggs in its rectum – once more I found myself lost in the old question, contemplating the ways of mty Creator, asking “God . . . what are You like?”

The church is quick to offer me answers, but I find most of them are like carrying water in a paper bag – they don’t take you very far.

Over the last several weeks I have followed on television a series about British teenagers having a taster of Amish life. At the same time I have been reading Joe Mackall’s Plain Secrets. Both the TV series and the book puzzled me deeply. I think of a community prepared to take a human being brought up separate from ‘the world’, having no ID papers allowing him to make his way alone, lacking the social skills to swim easily in the mainstream, not even a social security number or a home, and condemn him to excommunication and shunning, forbid his family to speak to him, insist not only he but also his parents will surely be damned by God to hell – because he prefers to drive a tractor . . . because he prefers the common-sense option of a car on the freeway rather than the impossibly vulnerable buggy to transport his children . . . because he wants to use a cell-phone . . .

I read of the Swartzentruber Amishman taking his injured child streaming with blood from English house to English house for someone who could give them a lift to the hospital and, finding no-one home, resorting to taking her to the vet to be stitched up (the vet did a good job). Very resourceful under the circumstances, and no doubt the Amish are steadfast, admirable, faithful and courageous, with much to teach us who have been trapped and infected by the Mammon-tangle – but to say the Ordnung originates with God? Can I believe that? I don’t think I can.

In the case of a number of other lifestyle issues, I watch with bemusement the stockpiling of proof texts and tortuous application of biblical literalism necessary to arrive at predetermined evangelical points of view, and I ask myself - can I believe that? More to the point, does it take me any closer to the God who created fleas creeping in and out of anuses and hermaphrodite snails and volcanoes that will freeze a living city in death in the blink of an eye? Does the God who made the shark who stripped the flesh from the terrified swimmer care how he wore his braces or how short she cut her hair?

There are people who will, with kindness, courtesy and restraint, explain to me exactly why it matters that a menstruating women must not be allowed past the man-made rail that separates this patch of ground from that patch of ground lest she contaminate by her approach this wood/stone/concrete man-made table where the consecration takes place of the wafers they call ‘bread’ that were made far away in a press by other menstruating women set aside from the world in enclosed convents . . .

I listened as the Amish-woman on the TV said that it freaked out her children to see her British visitors hug each other goodnight (because that included hugging people of the opposite gender). She cautioned the girls over how they should bend down when they were picking tomatoes in the field, lest inadvertently, despite the modest dress they had been given to wear, men might see their breasts or legs or whatever it was that she was bothered about men possibly seeing.

The Bible says that God looked at everything that He had made, and pronounced it good. Everything. Breasts and legs, hermaphrodites and homosexuals and heterosexuals, volcanoes and quicksands and tsunamis, carbuncles and the ebola virus, grief and death and sorrow, fear and pain: God made everything, and said that it is good. Laughter and singing, the smell of rain on summer dust, the terror and splendour of sheet lightning, those seriously weird fish that live right down at the bottom of the sea. Hydrothermal vents and giant tube worms.

God pronounced good the octopus that found the crevice in the corner of the tank in the sea-life centre through which it escaped by night into the neighbouring tank to eat the fish that God had also made before creeping back into its own tank again before morning.

What are You like? God, what are You like? You are like something that is not adequately addressed by kapps and aprons, by monastic Rules, by the Athanasian creed or the Ordnung.

And human beings, in enshrining the holy, comprehensively get in the way.

I almost (this is a long story) ended up co-ordinating the flower rota at church. God, seeing this, acted swiftly and mercifully to prevent its occurrence because, you see, God knows me. But when I thought I was going to be the flower lady, I bought a book about arranging church flowers; and there, near the front, was a paragraph explaining to all would-be flower arrangers that they must charge the congregation all that they could for their expenses – car parking fees, petrol, foam block – anything and everything, because (this made me blink and read it again to check I’d got it right) the more they charged the church the more the church would benefit. Only a natural theologian could come up with so perfectly opaque a piece of reasoning. At first I put the book on a high shelf where I could hardly see it. But it still made me feel physically ill to know it was there, so I took it to the charity shop.

But puzzling about what God is like, bewildered by the perceptions and assertions of religious people, I glanced out at the woodpile, built against the garden wall. The seasoned logs, provident and neatly stacked, representative of forward thinking and orderly life, and the wall beautifully re-pointed by Joe and Kevin to last another hundred years, spoke to me of shelter and peace. And here I see the meeting point of the Amish Ordnung and the monastic tradition, mother Church and her dogma, holy ecology and the Divine mind. The ways of Mammon are essentially chaotic – even where they are systematic they tend towards chaos. The ways of God exhibit divine order – the bee lives for the flower as the flower lives for the bee, and each unfolds the inherent nature of what it was called to be. Order and peace are interconnected – mutually proceeding from each other.

And I know from personal experience, by the touch of His Spirit upon my life, that the presence of God is peace.

Therefore I have discovered at least this: that inasmuch as it strive towards order, religion with all its blindness and cruelty shows truly a yearning and twisting of the soul growing up toward the light.

If I work to put (and hold) in place order and peace in my life, then there will be some small thing thing in resonance with the one-song, the still small voice, the eternal Word. I think. I hope.

Sowing the seeds of peace

2011-12-20T23:48:00.000-08:00

Here is my grandson (the blue blanket is from his mother's own childhood), dreaming and thinking and wondering.

He will be three in May.

His parents are raising him in an unusual way. They are taking the approach of treating him with complete respect – the same respect they would show an adult. They listen to him, and take him seriously, and they always have, from Day 1. As a tiny baby, when his father was in love with him but somewhat overawed by his smallness, his mother entered willingly her responsibility to listen to him. Even when he was silent she listened to what his soul was saying. She put her considerable intellect to work observing, making connections, noticing links and patterns, to get to the place where she could work out what this or that noise, this cry or that cry, meant. My grandson’s parents would no more dream of hitting him (call it spanking, call it slapping, call it smacking, call it any euphemism you like, they don’t do it) than they would think of slapping the face of the archbishop of Canterbury.

I do not know any other child raised like this, and I am finding it an education and a fascinating delight to see the results of it unfold. At times I have felt impatient with it. The child-in-me is always tempted to force things, hit them if they don’t go the way I want. My daughter’s approach requires a person to behave like an adult to make space for the actual child to behave like a child. The approach of the average parent is that the parent takes the role of the child – demanding, shouting, insisting, impetuous – while the child takes the role of the adult; watchful, responsive, second-guessing what is needed to make everything go right.

Now that my grandson can speak fluently, we are starting to see his responses to the world and the situations he encounters day by day. Playing with his granddad (his mother’s father) about a month ago, he had been interested in some kitchen tongs for picking up hot food. Seeing his interest, his granddad took hold of the tongs to personify them for a game, calling them Mr Nipper and Mr Grabber coming to get the child. My grandson (his name is Michael, by the way) was intrigued, delighted and terrified all at the same time, engaged by the game but running away screaming to the other side of the kitchen out of the range of Mr Nipper and Mr Grabber. Seeing genuine apprehension, his granddad laid the tongs aside. Then a moment later, Michael demanded that he get "Mr Crab" back. He stood a safe distance away when Granddad pretended to get him, and he said said, "I not afraid of you, Mr Crab." Then he walked up and said, "Hello, Mr Crab," in a friendly manner, and waved. Then he started pointing out a few items of interest around the room.

His mother says this seems to be his tactic - to make friends with anything that scares him, and he does this with other children at the groups they attend. If another child upsets him or behaves in a way that worries him, he'll retreat to his mother and they talk about it, then he'll get a toy to give the other child and go up to make friends.

More recently at their home, Mikey was watching with his dad the powerful, moving, beautiful film Koyaanisqatsi, which contains stock footage of nuclear bomb tests. The scene of the bomb with its mushroom cloud is sombre and profound, and Michael was sensitive to the momentous nature of what he was seeing. He wasn't upset exactly, but picking up on the gravity of it all, he felt concerned about the bomb. He asked about it, and his dad told him what it was, and he said, "I want to talk to bomb, Daddy." When his father asked what he would say, Michael replied, "Don't worry, bomb. I give you some soup, bomb."

Way to go.

Underlying all aggression is fear.

I like the way my grandson is being brought up. This is how to make love not war. This addresses the seeds of war in the human community. This is how wars stop.

As a young mother I held in my heart the hope/dream of the day coming when instead of teaching my children about the world, I would come to the spring of wisdom native to the country of their own souls, and learn from them. It has happened. My dream came true. My children have all grown up into gurus, and by the beautiful wisdom in her my daughter Grace (good name, eh?) is raising a holy man.

There’s a whole raft of stories about the inimitable (Islamic) Mulla Nasrudin, wisdom fables. One of the stories in particular stayed in my mind – of an occasion when a seeker came to the village where the wise man lived hoping for audience with him, but the wise man remained incognito, preferring privacy, so the stranger remained unaware he was actually talking with him. And the stranger’s opening gambit was to say that he understood many famous men had been born in that village (hoping to compliment the villager, assuming he would take pride in fame attached to his village, I guess). But the wise man replied that as far as he was aware, only babies had been born in his village.

I love that story, love it. It makes my soul smile. It does just what a story should do, which is contain a whole related series of truths nesting compactly inside nutshell of its exterior. So much truth that I can’t be bothered to unpack them all and I’m just assuming you can see how big a story it is for yourself.

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6 KJV)

I have been away from blogging for a while, working, thinking, thinking, working, feeling and hearing the whisper of the Spirit calling me along new-old paths, figuring out what I have to do and have in place, how to align myself and where the stepping stones may be to place my feet where the Way is calling now. And I have thoughts and questions tumbling around to share with you. How’s your Advent going?

Indigo and silver

2011-12-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

Today has been like the left hand of beauty.

Sun-up this morning lightened into a wild and moody sky full of tempest.

The rain came pouring off the roof so hard down the spout it hit a couple of leaves and bits of moss in the drain and bounced right back up the grey-water pipe gurgling into the shower drain in the bathroom. Five minutes with a table fork lifting the choking debris out of the way fixed that, but in that short time my sweater was so sodden wet through I had no choice but to take it off and start again with a clean one.

Laying up the woodstove fire later on in the morning ready for lighting in the afternoon, the raindrops in the stove pipe fell musically, like diffident windchimes who’d never had much practice at singing. Listening to the tinny small voice of the rain, I thought of the colours of storm – indigo and silver, and that wonderful dark purple-grey. In my mind’s eye the picture lingered (still does) of that clear purposeful water gushing down the spout. The autumn rain that (so the psalmist says) clothes the earth with blessings.

And my, so it does! A couple of weeks back, weeding and moving plants around the garden, I marvelled at how dry the ground had become. It looked moist on the surface – the earth dark and damp and the weeds flourishing: but that was all from low-lying cloud and morning mists, just damp enough to give the plants the moisture they needed now fruiting was over. Deeper, round the roots, when we lifted the plants the earth fell away almost like powder.

This soaking drenching, deluging rain clothes the land with blessings. Just what we need.

I went out around tea-time for an armful of logs from the woodstore to keep the stove in through the evening. Fast asleep in the dry nook between the top of the stacked wood and the roof, a neighbourhood cat had curled up out of the wind and rain. A real bruiser of a cat - we know him, he creeps in and sneaks our cats' food when he thinks nobody’s looking.

This indigo silver day, storm-tossed and cool and clear, clothing the land with blessing: the left hand of beauty. Like evening incense the thanks of my heart ascend to Thee, O mystery most high.

And I found this today. Very inspiring, I thought.

Nativity

2011-11-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

Our Hebe is a calligrapher, letter-cutter in stone and general jobbing artist. The masonry where she does much of her letter-cutting is attached to A.C. Towner funeral directors.

Ed Towner is a lay reader at St Matthews Anglican church just along the road from where we live, and at Christmas time Towners has a crib scene filling the whole window.

The stable was made by Duncan Brown (one of the funeral directors who also makes beautiful sacred objets d'art) and Stephen Groves a one-time Anglo-Catholic priest, now a Roman Catholic. Hebe painted and gilded the 'Puer natus est pro nobis' ('For us a child is born') on the front edge of the nativity, and the little holly leaves on either side of the lettering.

Then this year she was asked to paint a backdrop to stand behind it. She has painted the town of Bethlehem just before sunrise. The exposure of the picture means you get the impression the sky is pale blue: in fact it is dawn colours of luminous rose and gold as well as soft blues deepening into mystery, and in the sky can be seen the stars that would have been visible at dawn on the day Jesus was born, including the constellation of the Southern Cross which she has painted over the stable.

I'll see if we can get a photo that shows the sky better, and add it on.

Vandana Shiva

2011-11-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

I'm a fan.

Absolutely

2011-11-23T01:44:00.001-08:00

Leo Babauta again.

I'm with him on this.

Etsy joy

2011-11-21T01:51:00.000-08:00

The creativity of Etsy is endless and rejoices my heart.

Looking at hats today as the year goes down into winter.

Look at this

and this

and this

Not to mention these!

In times of recession, it seems wit, eccentricity and a certain daft exuberance are still alive and well. Hallelujah!