Lifestyles

“I truly seek a very solitary, simple and primitive life with no special labels attached.  However there must be love in it, and not an abstract love but real love for real people.”  (Thomas Merton)

People often comment on how complicated and expensive living simply seems to be!  They look at the cost of buying land or choosing organic vegetable or travelling by horse and buggy or making one’s own clothes, and the mind boggles!  I thought it might be interesting (if it’s not just gallop on by) to look at some of the strands we weave together in this household to make complicated, simple, frugal and expensive into one organic fabric that hopefully doesn’t cost the earth.  Apologies to those of you who've been stopping by here for ages and already know all this.

Our big resource is family.  Not one of us has ever been rich, but we are very motivated towards strengthening and consolidating the wellbeing of our family – this habit can be traced back through my parents and grandparents, and has shielded us from poverty if not made us wealthy.

In our household the family way of living forms the main planet and the Badger’s life is its own moon.

The household is committed to Earth-friendly, spiritual, ethical choices.  We choose freedom and independence and prefer to walk our own path, with as little government and bank involvement as possible.  In our purchases our watchwords are: “organic, handmade, fair-traded, local, compassionate (animal and human welfare), wildlife friendly.”  We do buy stuff from big chains because our income doesn't stretch to buying all the best stuff from the best places and we don't know the techniques of dumpster-diving; but we at least are part of encouraging the big supermarkets to go on stocking organic and non-GMO and free-range products.  We try to get our clothes from suppliers who have paid at least some attention to ethical considerations - Howies, Lands End, Nomads, Vivi Barefoot, White Stuff etc.  We recognise that the ideal is to live more purely than we do, but we're not there yet, just travelling in that direction.

Because we earn our money in an eclectic mix of slightly unusual ways, working freelance and relying primarily on expressing truth in beautiful ways as a source of income, it is helpful for us to live frugally.  Our income (this is true of most freelancers) is erratic and unpredictable, so we depend on stashing money away when it does come in.  The result is that we can often afford nice things but we also have to keep an eye on the account books, if you see what I mean.  Our earnings are at the level that we can afford treats provided we have in general been extremely thrifty.  This is not difficult for some of us, as the habit goes back generations, but I am appalling at it.  Money arrives in my life freely and leaves it just as freely.  When I run out I stand down here waving my hands to attract the Lord's attention and shrieking "Help!"  And God is good; He sends me what I need.  But recently His still small voice has been gently suggesting I might like to try to live a little more moderately.  I tell Him he is my Father and He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and He says "Yeah, I guess so, but . . . do you think you could just try?"  So I am.  I have bought this book and am reading it with close attention.

We do not run a car, we walk or travel by public transport, our food is mostly vegetarian or vegan.  We don’t go out much, because we like being at home, and all of us require huge tracts of solitude and find social interaction tiring and alarming – even when it’s enjoyable and with people we love.

Our large expenses included: the purchase and repair of a big house to accommodate us; fitting solar panels to the roof to supply our electricity (and export it to the National Grid) and hot water.

Resourcing our lifestyle choices is not terribly complicated, but does take thought and application.  We all take time to nose out the places where we can get fair-trade vegan part-recycled shoes for our hard-to-fit feet to do serious regular walking, and sources of organic ethical and local food at the best prices.  We make a lot of our food and gifts and some of our clothes.  A lot of our large purchases – eg furniture – are second-hand (cheap), or craftsman made (always at a good price, but sometimes a significant layout of money).  This all means lavishing oodles of time on researching and checking things out.

The Badger’s life is different.  He works very hard indeed at an office-based job in Oxford which is almost exactly a hundred miles away from Hastings where our home is.  So part of every week he lives away from home, starting work early in the morning, finishing in the evening, with a forty-five-minute drive through heavy traffic between where he works and his satellite home.  This leaves neither time nor energy to do much else.  He has very frugal habits, so he just hits the superstore and buys what’s cheap – though our ethical/political/animal welfare principles make sense to him and have also modified his automatic choices.


During the week when he's not with us, he lives in a family-sized house that he got with a little capital and a lot of mortgage - but the mortgage and all outgoings are covered by the three other people who live there with him as his tenants.  You have to admire a man who, needing to live away from home half the week, has figured out a system that returns rather than requires money!  The Badger himself has a tiny bedroom there as neat as a ship's cabin - about 7ft x 7ft.  It's not a hardship to him to have this extra place away from home, because it's the only place where he can do the garden exactly as he likes - and the Badger is happiest out in the garden.  But here at home he is blown about by the Winds of Strong Opinion.   In that separate garden of his own he grows raspberries and lavender and roses and fruit trees, and a cool green lawn for summer evenings.  When he bought the house it had been inhabited by a family with two large dogs and two footballing sons, and the back yard was all concrete and astro-turf!

The Badger's heart is for the Earth and the Lord, and the blending of these two ways of life (ours and his, I mean, not the Earth’s and the Lord’s) works very well.  His choices are very savvy and thrifty.  He likes to travel and has a curiosity about the world, and his work requires him to go overseas once or twice every year; and he volunteers for a charity to go to Africa helping teach people in his same line of business but with few training opportunities. His drives a company car, but he gets to choose it, which means he has opted for a Toyota Prius which was the first and best of the hybrid-engine eco-cars.  His choice has influenced other to do the same.  


The Badger having a car means we all have weekend use of it, for a trip out to farm shops hard to access by public transport, or to take bags of things to charity shops or the dump when necessary.  We dilettante artist types are scrupulous about paying our way, but it’s reassuring to know the Badger’s steady income is coming in and being saved up – and he is generous in paying for occasional large repair bills or other necessary outlays.  But we try not to call upon his generosity or his car unduly, as this would mean our own principles were no more than a smoke-screen for Life As Normal.

We compost and recycle, re-use and repair.  We are making our garden as bee-friendly and wildlife-friendly as we can, and we water it with stored rainwater when it's dry and feed it with our own various composts and natural nitrate fixes.  Our household pets are rescue cats.  We immensely value quietness.  Sometimes you can hear people chatting quietly and laughing, or hear someone singing or playing piano/guitar – but most of the time there is silence in our house.  Except when the Badger blows his nose.  We do not like powered machines and use them as little as possible.  We have very, very few cleaning/laundry products and toiletries and are committed fans of bicarbonate of soda and cider vinegar.  But essential oils, herbs, propolis and honey are important ingredients of daily life.  We love plants, and grow and propagate them.  We prefer to avoid clutter and value space.  We like natural things – and that includes pearls and silk and silver as well as wood and stone and clay.  We believe water is a precious resource and are careful not to waste it.  We believe in truth and simplicity and vegetables.  And firelight.  And candlelight.  And garlic.  And stars.  And grace.  And the power of kindness.

Conversation is important in our house – every day are little gatherings of people mulling over together the insights and wonderings of their heart’s core.

A bus ride away is my beautiful mama who, along with my father now deceased, mostly financed the purchase of this peaceful house with its electricity from sunshine and its garden of vegetables and flowers, and the small house whose tenants' rent provides the bulk of my income.  She is part of our life too, and we do everything in our power for her happiness.

A few minutes’ walk away from our house through little streets and back-garden alleys, or past the local shops, depending which way you go, Buzz and the Wretched Wretch live with their man who is like a kind of large Ozark bear but less fierce.  He works in the admin of the National Health Service midwifery facility.  Buzz has her hands full with caring for the most active child ever born, but also finds time to run a gentle parenting group and serve on the committee for the National Childbirth Trust (her mother was a founder member of the local group) which champions the cause of natural birth and breastfeeding.  From the chaotic centre of their little house that hums with intellect and imagination they are changing the world one child at a time.  They have a small, enclosed garden full of sunshine, an exciting place with flourishing herbs and long grass where a child can have interesting adventures.  The Wretched Wretch has his own colourful playhouse out there, passed on from a friend.

A few minutes’ walk in the other direction takes us to Rosie’s and Jon’s, a tall thin house that totters up from its mossy basement roots to its chimney high in the triumphant blue.  Rosie and Jon are musicians, and their home is stocked with French horns and euphoniums, tubas and trombones and drums – and a huge, elegant, inlaid, carved, ethereal, melodious harp.  There is often also a banoffee pie in the fridge.  And cheese.  And a pot of curry on the stove.  Rosie likes nettle tea and Jon likes real ale and good wine.  They have a tiny yard which inexplicably manages to fit in composting facilities, herbs, roses, vegetables, a patio, outdoor-eating furniture, a chimenea and a small lawn.  They work all day - Rosie in the university as a receptionist and Jon in music for schools; and they work most nights and weekends too, playing in theatre orchestra pits or marching bands at civic occasions, or weddings/funerals when the harp is in demand, or in brass band competitions the length and breadth of the land.


So that's how we stitch it all together.

And there we must leave them, like animals in the hedgerow on this hill rising up from the sea, playing in the warm sunshine . . .

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365 366 Day 185 – Tuesday July 3^rd

Ah, this was a sari petticoat.  How beautiful saris are, how practical, graceful and feminine.  Like Plain dress, I found them to be obtrusive, snagging attention everywhere, so I didn’t keep them.  My clothes now seem to work very well, and fulfil my criteria of modesty, plainness and simplicity, but they certainly lack the elegance of saris.

365 366 Day 184 – Monday July 2^nd  

An enamel soup ladle.  I had two.  One had gone into the lives of my family, and one I kept.  When we were re-united in one household, the streams of ownership blended again.  I liked this white one.  They liked the orange one.  I was outnumbered!

Today we are halfway through the year.

When I began on this year of pruning out possessions, giving away 366 things, I didn’t expect so many interior changes.

At this point, my mind is drawn ever back to relationship with:

Silence

Money

Electricity

Solitude

Immediacy

Silence has a connection in my mind with Gelassenheit and humility, with waiting: as the Tao says, “Who can wait until muddy water becomes clear?”

Money – well, I have gone through my accounts of the last few months, and am shocked, really shocked, by the amount of money I spend, and how pointlessly and easily.  I am thinking through my relationship with money, and how to sit more lightly to money.  I have read intensively in recent times (and am still reading and researching) about modern-day people who live without money, and how they make provision for their lives, their choices, dwellings and daily occupation.  From what I have seen, it appears necessary that for each person who lives without money there must be a substantial network of people dependent on the usual money system.  In other words, the moneyless people are gleaners.  I have no objection to this, just am interested.  It is part of their contribution to society – treasure-hunting amid the waste, demonstrating that what is discarded was in fact valuable.  I have not so far come across a moneyless group that includes children, old people, frail, chronically ill, dying or disabled people.  I cannot see how they could manage without significant injections of money – not without great suffering.  But I am interested in the idea of living without money, and at the moment I am drawing the information I can glean from moneyless lives to intercept my relationship with money, which needs taking right back to the root and re-growing.  So I am gleaning from the gleaners.  They live on the periphery of society, in it but not of it, and make a strong prophetic contribution to society as a whole.

In thinking about electricity, I have become interested in the change in balance made to my/our life as soon as powered facilities enter the equation – electric light, power tools, fuelled vehicles, central heating and so on.  The changes to the overall structure of our lives are radical and no doubt beneficial – but they ramify into the deepest parts of who we become.   I would like to begin disengagement from the powered life – when I say begin, I mean make a gradual, incremental change, a lateral drift.

Solitude is becoming increasingly necessary, and the stimulus of engagement and interaction makes my head spin.  I am intrigued by the lives of solitaries, and I read about them.  I’ve added a small list of links in the right-hand pane on this page in case you are interested too.  I think my father was by nature a solitary.

All these things – silence, solitude, money, electricity – are bound up in immediacy.  In silence, one faces the wilderness of wild beasts and angels in one’s own soul very immediately and inescapably.  In solitude, one clambers about among the rocks and ravines of the spiritual territory, learning little but experiencing much, assailed by the terrors of peace.  Money and electricity both create distance and isolation (oddly, isolation and solitude are very different things).  They hold the living world with all its teeming vibrant richness, at a remove.  Money and electricity are the means by which we refuse to be at life’s mercy, override the natural rhythms of day and night, health and sickness (even death). Money and electricity alter our sources and expectation of food and clothing, warmth and shelter.  Without them we are plunged into a sudden urgent immediacy of life – what we can glean and gather, the necessity of firewood and the value of daylight, the grateful warmth of a sunny day, the precious arrival of rain, the treasure of wind to dry wet clothes and air the house.  Making with our own hands is slow and mindful work, and we find our soul has gone into the finished creation.  When we eat the potato, the cherry, the apple, the bean, everything about it is full of the memory of the long cold spring, or the dry spell in June, or the relentless winds of March that held up the planting, or the late frosts that took half the crop.  If we ride in a trap pulled by a horse, we notice the comfortable back and forth rhythm of the pull-and-slack, quite different from the driving of a powered vehicle.  When we go on foot, we know so much more of the terrain – the gradients, the wild flowers, the creatures who live there, the variations of shelter and exposure, the composition of the track.  And when we go barefoot, the information magnifies exponentially in its immediacy.  Life without immediacy is only a shadow, a husk, of what it was meant to be.

I am not sure of the place in my life of silence, solitude, money, electricity and immediacy, but it has become clear to me that these are the areas needing focus and revision – touch-stones or flash-points or something.

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365 366 Day 183 – Sunday July 1^st

These small acrylic cups were packaging from store-bought desserts.  Disconcerting.  Unjustifiable.  I kept them for a while to use as glasses, and for the Wretched Wretch to play with: but in the end I faced that they were clutter and rubbish, their manufacture and purpose an inexcusable cost to Mother Earth.

365 366 Day 182 – Saturday June 30^th

Small cards are a form of clutter I have observed to be increasing.  Store gift cards or loyalty cards, library cards, fridge magnets, appointment reminders, cards for blood donation, cards with sentimental verses for recipients to tuck into a wallet . . . every passing thought and intention and obligation seems to require bringing into permanent material form. 

Wondering about Wednesday

Where does everyone go on Wednesdays?

Alice says statistically it’s a day when people feel low and depressed.  Woeful Wednesday.  Weary Wednesday.

Whatever, it’s a jolly good day for getting things done.  You want to go to the shops for groceries, see a film at the cinema, go out to a restaurant to eat – Wednesday’s your best day; because nobody else is there.  Why not?  What’s wrong with Wednesday?

My friend Tom Cullinan says you get on better in life if you want what no-one else wants.  When I was studying at York University at the age of eighteen, I quickly discovered that going to bed early and getting up early was brilliant – it was like living on campus by yourself.  Since those days I have treasured the early morning as a workplace where no-one else is.

To live frugally, effectively and peacefully: choose what’s out of fashion, go to bed at 9pm, start work at 5.30am, if you want to lunch out arrive at 11.45am, and only go into town on a Wednesday.

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365 366 Day 179 – Wednesday June 27^th

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

Smart jacket.  I think wherever I am now, ‘smart’ does not apply.  I’m not sure that in the US ‘smart’ means the same as it does in the UK – stylish, formally elegant . . . 

365 366 Day 178 – Tuesday June 26^th

I was pleased with this. For ages I’d been putting off going through my needle-case and sorting out the needles that had gone a bit rusty.  I had too many anyway – they accumulate, goodness knows how!  I don’t remember buying any.  They just arrive.  I sent some off in a Freecycle craft kit, kept some, and these were the ones that needed to be moved on to the Great Needle-case in the Sky.

Now I know

All right, now I know!

For some time I have been turning over and over in my mind the kind of place I would like to live, and at last it has all fallen into place.

I should explain that this depends on my books suddenly and inexplicably becoming best-sellers and making me two million pounds minimum.

This is my plan (contingent upon that eventuality).

I intend to purchase a (very) large estate with woodlands and streams, near a main road.

As far as possible from the main road my dwelling will be constructed.  That will be a very small brick-built house, just big enough for a door with a window either side.  Inside will be a big ingle-nook fireplace, a bed built with 2 drawers underneath, a small hutch for my food and utensils, my chest of drawers and bookshelves, an armchair for guests, and my nightstand.  I will have a lean-to shed for firewood, and collect rainwater from the roof (which will be slate with a solar panel to charge my phone and computer).  I will have a standpipe for drinking water.  No gas, no mains electricity, no mains water.

Around my little house I will have a walled garden with a henhouse big enough for three hens free to roam in the walled garden, an orchard of trees, meadow flowers and lots and lots of herbs.  I will grow wild roses and honeysuckle against the wall.

A mile or so away on my estate will be the cottages of my workmen.  They will be my ostler/farrier, my game-keeper, my wheelwright, my gardener, my woodsman, my farmer, my general handyman and my shop manager.

There will be no public roads running through my estate, which will include woodland and open meadows for my goats and cows.

On the border between one of the meadows and woods will be Hebe’s cob house that she built for herself, with a green (living) roof, and a well. 

Everyone else in my family will live nearby too, in dwellings of their choice – but NO CARS are allowed on my estate.  Anyone with a car will have to live on the border near the main road, and park their car in the car-park, bordered with stout wooden bollards, near the main entrance.  The Badger will have a large grand house with its own sweeping driveway onto the road, with plenty of garaging for his cars – a classic car, a Toyota Prius, a very fast sports car and anything else he fancies.  He will have his own garden with the kind of weird trees he likes – tall thin conifers, eucalyptus etc – and a simply enormous fishpond.  He can have his own cook and butler and housekeeper.  I will pay their wages for him.

Needless to say, Alice and Hebe will have a range of studios for their work, and a special stoneyard with all the right equipment.  And there will be a playpark with swings and a slide, a climbing frame, a roundabout, a paddling pool and a small boating lake for the Wretched Wretch’s special pleasure.

At the estate entrance will be situated a general grocery store selling organic, ethically sourced, earth-friendly, socially just, minimally packaged, healthy, traditionally made products sourced from small independent family businesses within a 250 mile radius of the estate.  All my shopping will come from there, and this is how I will get it: –

On my estate, as well as a large market garden and a small farm for hay, grain, sheep, cows and goats, will be a large pasture with big shady trees and a field shelter for my Percheron horse and companion donkey.  The horse will be helpful for hauling firewood and also for pulling my personal transport, a simple cart/trap with bench seats, big enough to seat six to eight people.

A couple of times a week, the horseman will get it ready and come by my house to collect me to go to the shop at the estate entrance for my groceries.  The estate will be traversed by a winding road that goes all over it, past the farm and all the fields and the market garden, past the homes of my family members.  Because it winds back and forth all round the estate, the road will be about six miles long, and it will take about an hour and a half for me to ride along it in my horse-drawn cart all the way from my house at one end to the shop at the other end, once you count in all the stops at the houses where the people inside will be dashing about getting a basket ready to drive to the shop.

And so I will live out my days in happiness and peace, writing wonderful novels, with no street lights at night only the stars.  I will have long skirts with large pockets, and a big shady straw hat, and large floppy jumpers I make from the yarn  have spun from the fleece of my sheep.

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365 366 Day 177 – Monday June 25^th

A really excellent camping toilet of the bucket variety.  Useful and practical.

I preferred something that would tuck away, and also I didn’t really like the shade of grey, and I am not a big fan of plastic.

So my own system now looks like this – with feline approval!

Film

Yesterday we watched one of our favourite movies: The Scarlet Pimpernel.  If you aren't familiar with it, YouTube has it (it's the 1982 film) Fab. 

"Sink me!!"

:0)

Something said by Sir Percy Blakeney caught my attention:

"If we are to succeed we must persist with our anonymity."

How right he was.  The power of the hidden life should never be underestimated.

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365 366 Day 173 – Thursday June 21^st

 This cool bag for transporting frozen goods home from the supermarket would be a most useful possession were it not for two things: 1) We mostly do our shopping bit by bit on foot and take a shoulder bag to carry it home. This is more for car shopping.  2) On the occasions when we do car shopping we always forget to take the cool bag.

Thus we accepted that the reality is, this was surplus to requirements.

365 366 Day 172 – Wednesday June 20^th

This looks like an unexceptional thing to part with, but a lot of my clutter was, and still is, composed of items like this.  This is a copy of the preaching Plan of the Hastings Bexhill & Rye Methodist Circuit, dating back a few years.  Its calendar is out of date, but I kept it as a useful directory of various Methodist preachers and ministers, lest the need arose to contact them.  Though it’s a joy to keep in touch with Methodist friends from time to time, I no longer have a need to contact any of the preachers by phone these days, so I recognised that keeping this document was better categorised as hoarding not practicality.  Even so, casting it out felt like scattering beloved ashes onto the water of the Ganges.  But that’s how it is: life flows on.

Walking through the valley

We chose carefully when we moved to our present home.  Hastings (where we live – well, we live in St Leonards but it’s all part of Hastings) is right on the coast, and like most places by the sea it’s very hilly.  Much of the town was built in Victorian times so many of the houses date to just over a hundred years ago.  Almost any view of the streets of Hastings includes terraces of tall thin red brick Victorian houses clinging perilously to the steep hillsides.  Some of them are so tall and thin that basically you’re buying a staircase with alcoves off.

I’m not sure if US friends are familiar with terraced houses – I think it’s a UK term. It means where all the houses are joined together in a string attached to each other rather than standing separately.  I’ll show you some photos of our town one day.  But you can see the kind of hillside terraced housing I mean just by looking out of our Alice’s bedroom window.

There are terraced houses right opposite us too, but the crucial difference is that our road is flat.  Here are the three terraced homes immediately opposite our house.

There are hardly any flat roads in Hastings.  Mostly you have to walk up a hill either going out or coming home.  There’s a level walk from our house to the shops and the bus stop, and my how grateful we are for that when we have heavy bags of groceries to carry home!  Also our house is built on (almost) level ground here at the top of the hill rising up from the sea.  This means that although ours is a tall Victorian villa, any time we have to have regular work done on the roof – like clearing the gutters – we’re in with a chance that a ladder will suffice.  Many of the Hastings houses need a scaffold up to do any work on the roof – and that comes at £500 a pop.  That’s $785!!

So that’s one of the special things about our house – level ground. 

The second special thing is that the little network of roads where we live doesn’t go anywhere – it’s not on the way to somewhere else.  So though we have plenty of cars belonging to the people who live here, there’s no through traffic.  What a blessing!

The most special thing of all about our house is that we are one of the lucky families whose homes back onto the park.  Alexandra Park is a beautiful green space running through Hastings and St Leonards.  Because this is a seaside town, it’s built around rivers running down to the sea.  That made some of the land hard to build on, so they made it into a park instead, God bless them.

And every day when Hebe walks along to the stone masonry to work on the headstones, her way runs through the park.  It’s also the way to the baker’s and one of the Co-op stores where we like to shop for groceries.

We go down the steps and down the hill towards the river valley at the centre of the park.

It’s a favourite place for dog-walkers.  Can you see the little Jack Russell who came scudding across just as I took the photo?

The Victorians built ponds to dam some of the water – beautiful open spaces where the seagulls gather.  Can you just see the carp in the water?

Look closer.

So we walk on past the pond and then up the other side of the valley, by this patch of grass starred with daisies at the foot of the tree.

Then up past our favourite tree, a gnarled old chestnut.

The path rises steeply after that.  Hebe says on days when it feels like hard going it's easier if you take your shoes off and walk up the hill in bare feet.

Off to the left runs a little badger trail.

On the way home, the path looks even prettier as it winds back down towards the pond.

As we walked along to buy a loaf of bread today, Alice said the path we go reminds her of Tolkein’s poems/songs about roads.

It also reminds me of this poem by G.K.Chesterton.

And of the song There’ll Always Be An England, that starts:

There'll always be an England, 

While there's a country lane, 

Wherever there's a cottage small 

Beside a field of grain.

Home again, time to have a bath and put my feet up for a while :0)

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365 366 Day 171 – Tuesday June 19^th

A pretty sarong given me some years ago by a friend.   It has variously served as a scarf, a headcovering, a tablecloth, an altar cloth and a curtain.  Finally it went to be part of a textile craft kit I made to give away on Freecycle.

365 366 Day 170 – Monday June 18^th

 A picture I made of a wonderful quotation from Thich Nhat Hanh and the beautiful cover of a journal Hebe gave me.  I kept this a long while as a reminder that though it is true that “Here we have no abiding city”, nonetheless it is also true that “the Kingdom of God is within you” – we are always at home even as we journey on.

The Quiet Way, the Open Road

The things people say sometimes linger in my mind so that I go on thinking about them for ages and ages. 

During the week I visited with a friend who lives just nearby a church where they still have the Book of Common Prayer (1662) as their worship book.   I love the old prayer book, the wisdom and humanity of Thomas Cranmer & co, and really appreciate the opportunities as they come to join in the forms of worship that recall days now for the most part vanished.  Of course in a traditional church like that, women priests aren’t part of the agenda.  They do have a lady deacon though and, as they’re in an interregnum just now, she was the officiant for Evensong, which I went to with my friend after we had a cup of tea together in her home.

And while we were drinking our tea, my friend (musing on the present state of this particular church) touched upon the limitation to women’s ministry there, not complaining but with a tinge of sadness and frustration.  As she talked about it, she spoke of the attitude of the lady deacon, who had said to her: “I know my place”. 

And those are the words that have lingered on in my mind: “I know my place.”

This morning (Sunday) I went to the 8am Mass at our church – which is Church of England but the Catholic end of things.  As I sat quietly in my seat before worship opened, being aware of the early sunshine flooding onto us through the coloured glass of the east window, and the carved wood of the new statue of Our Lady, and the pale stone of the pillars, and the rich cloth of the altar, our priest in his vestments and his lady curate in hers sitting in their stalls waiting for the clock to ring the hour, I turned those words over in my mind, “I know my place.”

I thought about our lady curate, now a deacon and in formation for priesthood.  She has chosen her place and knows it.

I thought of Amish women, under the authority of their husbands, living within the wisdom of the Ordnung in a world of segregated tasks.  They know their place.

I thought of the prioress of the Carmelite sisters with whom we will stay when we go to take the stained glass panel next month.  Her vocation seems to me very secure, and with humility she accepts the ministry of the priest who comes into the community to celebrate the mass for them.  She has no wish to usurp his authority, and embraces with reverence the hierarchy and dogma of the Catholic church.  She knows her place.

My mind looks beyond to Thich Nhat Hanh, revered leader of his community at Plum Village, books on the Buddhist way and practice streaming from his pen, advising with humour, wisdom, gentleness and experience how to conduct oneself according to the Noble Eightfold Path, the Five Precepts, the Triple Refuge and all the rest of it.  He knows his place.

I look back to yesterday lunchtime when the Badger and I ate with dear friends who spoke of the reservations their eldest son feels about the faith journey they have made, away from their conservative Evangelical roots to a more inclusive style of church, prompted significantly by the need to find a faith community that could offer a welcome to their youngest son, who is gay.  But their eldest stands firm on the ground of the traditions in which he was brought up.  He knows his place.

And as I turned these things over in my mind I realised, I do not know my place.  I’m not at all sure I actually have one; only a journey.  The impermanence of everything is very apparent to me.  I do not share the view that this earth is all illusion, but I see that in the eternal scale of things it is fragile and transient.

I attach no value (personally) to priesthood or monastic vows or Amish community – I mean, I revere them, delight in them and love them, but they are not for me.

Catholic, Evangelical, Church of England – I can see a value in the different worship streams, and I likewise hold very precious the dharma of the Buddhist and Taoist ways.  But I do not recognise in any of them what I would call “my place”.

If I had to identify a place for myself here on earth, there are some scriptures and old hymns that speak my mind:

How dear to me is your dwelling,O Lord of hosts!

My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. 

The sparrow has found her an house

and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young;

by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts,

my King and my God. 

Happy are they who dwell in your house!

They will always be praising you. 

Happy are the people whose strength is in you,

whose hearts are set on the pilgrims' way. 

Those who go through the desolate valley

will find it a place of springs,

for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.

(from Psalm 84, the Book of Common Prayer translation)

I can identify with the sparrow, the swallow, that asks to make her nest under the eaves of that great establishment of God’s Temple on earth – the church.  In it or maybe under its wing, but not of it somehow.

Then there’s the hymn (Orlando Gibbons wrote the beautiful melody to which it’s set) that Henry Baker translated from an unknown source for Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1861:

Jesu, grant me this, I pray,

Ever in Thy heart to stay;

Let me evermore abide

Hidden in Thy wounded side.

If the evil one prepare,

Or the world, a tempting snare,

I am safe when I abide

In Thy heart and wounded side.

If the flesh, more dangerous still,

Tempt my soul to deeds of ill,

Naught I fear when I abide

In Thy heart and wounded side.

Death will come one day to me;

Jesu, cast me not from Thee:

Dying let me still abide

In Thy heart and wounded side.

“In Thy heart and wounded side” – that feels like something I could embrace as a permanent choice, somewhere of which I could say “I know my place”.

And this hymn, by J. Conder, that also found its way into Hymns Ancient and Modern, from the Congregational Hymnbook:

Bread of heaven on Thee we feed,

For Thou art our food indeed;

Ever may our souls be fed

With this true and living Bread,

Day by day with strength supplied,

Through the life of Christ who died.

Vine of heaven, Thy love supplies

This blest cup of sacrifice;

'Tis Thy wounds our healing give;

To Thy cross we look and live:

Thou our life! O let us be

Rooted, grafted, built on Thee.

“Thou our life! O let us be rooted, grafted, built on Thee.” Those words sometimes come into my mind as a prayer, and offer a concept of which I could indeed say “I know my place” – rooted, grafted, built on Thee.

But I can go no further than that really.  For the rest, the friend that speaks my mind is the writer to the Hebrews:

For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no abiding city, but we seek the city which is to come.  (Hebrews 13:11-14)

Another hymn comes to mind, that I knew only in childhood – we use to sing it at the primary school I attended.  They called it “The Seekers”, and it was not in a hymn book.  We copied it into our exercise books off the blackboard.

Only searching for the full text of it now do I discover it was a setting of a poem by John Masefield.  Our school followed Dyson’s substitution of “But the hope, the burning hope, and the road, the open road” and “the hidden beauty”, for Masefield’s original “But the hope of the City of God at the other end of the road” and “a hidden city”; and these words spoke to my soul.

Friends and loves we have none, nor wealth nor blessed abode,

But the hope, the burning hope, and the road, the open road. 

Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind,

For we go seeking a city that we shall never find. 

There is no solace on earth for us – for such as we –

Who search for the hidden beauty that eyes may never see. 

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,

And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again. 

We seek the City of God, and the haunt where beauty dwells,

And we find the noisy mart and the sound of burial bells. 

Never the golden city, where radiant people meet,

But the dolorous town where mourners are going about the street.

We travel the dusty road till the light of the day is dim,

And sunset shows us spires away on the world's rim. 

We travel from dawn to dusk, till the day is past and by,

Seeking the Holy City beyond the rim of the sky. 

Friends and loves we have none, nor wealth nor blest abode,

But the hope, the burning hope, and the road, the open road.

I believe that in the Buddhist way there is a concept, "Going home", which explores the phenomenon familiar to many of us that in the ideological journey we make in a lifetime, we often end up at the place we started from, yet it is not the same - not because where we started from is any different but because we ourselves have changed.

Going Home.  The hope, the burning hope, and the road, the open road.  Here we have no abiding city.  Rooted, grafted, built on Thee.  In Thy heart and wounded side. The sparrow has found her an house.  I know my place.  Or not.  Hmm. 

I'm changing

That's all it is

I'm just changing    (Sarah Joyce) 

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365 366 Day 169 – Sunday June 17^th

Actually to be fair I’m not sure this should have gone in the list, because we later decided that to make our living room comfortable we do need a sofa, just not this one.  But at the time it went on its way we had no particular intention of replacing it, so I guess it can stay in.  Things come and they go here.  We just try to keep it so that they don’t accumulate.

365 366 Day 168 – Saturday June 16^th

I hung onto these books longer than most.  The one at the back, Living Buddha Living Christ, is an excellent work by Thich Nhat Hanh.  It’s gone to a friend training as a Methodist Local Preacher.  God bless her studies and her ministry.  The other two I hung onto as resource books because I did so want to write a sequel to The Clear Light of Day.  I had it all planned out and started.  But insufficient people bought that novel for a sequel to be required.   I don’t personally own a bicycle.  Sending these two books on cycle maintenance on their way was all part of a larger picture of putting a tired old dream to rest.

365 366 Day 167 – Friday June 15^th 

The Badger did some research on our house insurance a while back and discovered that we could drastically reduce our premium by changing our insurers, but that the new firm would require a more challenging front door lock than the straightforward one we had.  This was my key to the old lock, but there’s more to it than that.  The Badger ordered a lock and keys for all of us from the locksmith, but when the man came to fit the lock he’d forgotten about the extra keys.  Of course we could easily go to the shop and get some, but I thought why bother?  If the rest of the household is out and the door locked, I can just as easily go in at the back door.  So when I threw away (metal recycling) my old front door key, I no longer had a key to the front door at all.  I think that earned it its place here.  It’s also here as an example of clutter that accumulates, in that at the beginning of this year I had several keys (I think  still have two) that had quietly gathered in my life without my being able to remember what on earth they were supposed to open.   There is an Eternal Mystery that is essential to meaningful life and a Pointless Mystery like having a key when you’ve forgotten what it’s for.  Avoiding Pointless Mystery is a happy by-product of chucking stuff out.