Sardine speaks

"Let's be a totem pole, okay?"

Sometimes, at a subliminal level, something catches my attention but I don’t notice it properly because my conscious mind is otherwise engaged when the thing happens.

What (usually) follows is that the event/incident continues to quietly twitch my sleeve (“Psst. Hey, psst.”) until I slow down and look at it properly.

This happened in the last few days. Today, I stopped and looked properly at something that had been nagging away at my hindmind since Sunday.

Often but not always my daughter Buzzfloyd with her children The Blur (7) and Little Sardine (3) come over to our place on Sunday afternoon.

Now The Blur is 7, he is thoughtful, quiet, sophisticated, and highly knowledgeable about dinosaurs, super-heroes, ninjas, transformers, and other subdivisions of the essential.

Little Sardine, by contrast, has entered a disconcerting phase. A naturally sunny being with a strong nurturing instinct, empathic and protective, she has unearthed a new aspect to her personality: belligerence, now much in evidence. She doesn’t want to put her socks on. She doesn’t want to eat that thing. She doesn’t want to go with that individual. Fair enough. Tiresome, but fair enough.

Further, she has acquired a new and distinctly strange voice – what can only be called quacking. Loud, insistent, not at all easy on the ear, and arrestingly odd. She no longer speaks, she now quacks. Almost all the time.

Last Sunday, she followed me upstairs into the attic I share with the Badger, objecting to absolutely everything in a loud quack. I had with me my bum bag (US fanny pack), which I left on the chair as I no longer needed it downstairs. I collected the thing I’d gone up to fetch – a soft fleecy blanket for her to snuggle into while she ate Hula Hoops and watched Frozen downstairs – then turned to go.

Watching me closely, “Your handbag,” she prompted.

At the time, focused on sorting her out with a movie-watching kit so I could get back to my interesting conversation with her mother, though I knew what she said had caught my attention, I didn’t stop to look at why.

But today it broke the surface and I saw it.

When she said “Your handbag”, it was in a gentle, cheerful soft voice – her old voice, her true voice, quacking temporarily suspended.

And it told me that she notices and cares about others – somebody who looks out for the other person, has their interests and concerns at heart. Because, well, you know women and their handbags. Inseparable. If you have ever taken an old lady to the hospital – even if all her handbag contains is a half-eaten mouldy peach, an empty wallet and a dead torch – she will cling to that bag as if her life depended on it. A woman’s handbag has her money, her hanky, her spare shopper, her glasses, some sweets, her bus ticket, her credit/debit/reward cards, her phone, her house keys, her car keys – and in my case a crow call as well. A woman’s handbag is VITAL. And I realised that Little Sardine has taken this in.

So for that moment, because she cares about me (she sometimes asserts in a loud quack that I am her friend), she abandoned her channeling of Donald Duck and Oscar the Grouch, and let her true voice emerge for one moment. And when it did, that was to look after me, to see me right, to make sure I had not forgotten that most vital part of Everywoman’s equipment: my handbag.

What a sweet kid, eh?

Work

Work. I’ve had to re-think what that means, in my simplicity journey.

Like most people, I’ve been brought up with the unexamined assumptions that work is something you wouldn’t do if you didn’t have to, undertaken because it turns a profit.

For some time (decades, I mean) I’ve had my nose to the trail of a life and work shaped by particular principles.

1. An ethically responsible financial trail. The projects I do for money link me directly with those paying my fees. If what I do isn’t up to snuff, it stops there. If my books were no good, the publisher would have no compunction in turning down the next one. If my editing were rubbish everyone concerned would know at once. When people ask me to take funerals, it’s because someone recommended me. And the people who pay the money get the goods. It’s not like being an employee of a large organisation where accountability can be hard to trace and responsibility can be passed on. I earn money on a definitely what-you-see-is-what-you-get basis. Nothing hidden, remote or anonymous.  Same with the cottage I let out. I like it that my money is invested in someone’s home, that I am personally responsible for maintaining. No mysterious stocks and share holdings that I’m not quite sure where the money is invested. Direct, accountable, personal. That feels good to me.
2. Arising authentically from my heart, my faith, my soul. I have never created anything that could be described as ‘product’, and any publishers using that term in my hearing have lost their working relationship with me. My writing is not formulaic ‘product’, cooked up to tempt the appetite of passers-by. Into the books and articles I’ve written I’ve poured all the truth I know – the best light I can shine held as high as I can lift it, for those whose hearts are also hungry for reality.
3. Permaculture principles of zoning applied to relationship, with a system of priorities starting with personal integrity, moving out to embrace my intimate circle of family and friends, then those with whom professional commitments bring me into contact, then anyone else who by grace has showed up into my life. So, even in those seasons when I’ve had a very hectic schedule, the people close to me were my first priority, and that was non-negotiable. Still is.
4. Meaningful occupation useful to other people, put to the service of enlarging the Kingdom of God on earth – enhancing compassion, justice, kindness, truth, integrity and the wellbeing of creation.

So, for me, ‘work’ as a concept may have something or nothing to do with money. My mother was unwaged most of her adult life; I never knew anyone who worked harder. She worked constructively, she fed and housed her family through her work – but money came into it very little. She kept hens and sheep (raised orphan lambs almost given away), grew fruit and vegetables, bought and sold the homes we lived in for steadily increasing amounts. She avoided debt, preferring frugality, seeing what ingenuity could do.

I like to work, because I like to be helpful and useful. I am at Christ’s service. But work can be anything from hanging out the laundry to preaching a sermon to preparing a tenancy agreement to writing a novel to cleaning the bathroom to cooking the supper to leading a quiet day to putting out the dustbins to conducting a funeral. Some is paid, some isn’t; doesn’t matter. Work is not that which earns money – one’s income may be entirely unconnected from one’s work. A person’s work is the contribution they were born to make; as the robin is born to sing and the river is born to make its way to the sea.

Work is natural, it is joyous, it is vocation as well as occupation. It’s what Frederick Buechner said: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

 This is my daughter Hebe’s work:

This is my daughter Alice’s work:

Either of them could have earned more on the checkout at Asda – a useful and honourable occupation for sure, but not how they were called into this life to serve.

Can It Be True

There’s this song I really want you to know.

I feel as though I’ve been alive for simply ages, and certainly feel every minute of the age I am, but every now and then something catches me out that shows I’m not keeping up with time passing. This song, for instance. When I was fifteen and first a Christian, everyone was singing it – not least because the large numbers of teenagers learning to play folk guitar found it particularly easy to accompany. “What can you play?” “Well, I can manage Can It Be True?”

And I loved it. I thought it was beautiful then, and I still do. It takes me by surprise that nobody else seems to know it any more. I can’t find it anywhere at all on the internet.

Something else I love about it – this has come with the passing of the years – is that it’s written by a Franciscan whose name is given only as Brother William. Those of you who know my St Alcuins series of novels will understand that I inevitably have a soft spot for any Brother William who loves the Lord Jesus.

The copyright of the song belongs to him, and the copyright of the arrangement in Youth Praise belongs to The Venturers. I don’t know who they are.

Youth Praise is long out of print, and the ways of copyright mystify me, so if anyone is reading this who owns the copyright and is cross to see what follows, please contact me and I will take it down. It’s not here for fame or money (as you will realise when you hear me sing it); it’s here because nobody knows or sings Can It Be True any more, and I think they should. The point of copyright is to stop people stealing and making money from other people’s work. The point of this post is to draw attention to the song – so please think of this as publicity not theft.

It’s No 36 in this book.

This is the song.

This is how it goes. I’ve just washed my hair and it looks like old string so I put it up in a kapp to save you that distress. My singing is not good and I’m not impressed by either the sight  or sound of myself, but I remember St Francis saying we must be content not to be good and not to be thought good, so here you are. Oh – and for reasons I cannot fathom, my Mac camera films and photographs like a mirror. I can flip the photos but (so far as I know) not the movies. So everything is back to front. We soldier on. Here goes, then.

Anyone who saw this post the minute I first published it will have been in time to see that I initially posted the WRONG video – my out-take. Uh-oh. Anyway, I showed The Wrong Video to my family and it made them laugh a lot and they said I should put it in. So here it is. Excuse my 'French'.