Coffee at the Randolph with Mary

So on Tuesday I went up to Oxford, which involved going down to the station in the sunshine – about twenty minutes along the same route Hebe walks to the masonry.  We strolled along together, and met Shelagh on the way and stopped for a chat; that was nice.  She had her shopping in a proper old-fashioned basket - hooray! Then the Charing Cross train up through East Sussex and Kent, looking at the woods and farms and streams through the windows, watching out for rabbits and deer, phoning my mama just before the train set out, so that ten minutes later she could look across the valley and see it chugging by and know I was in there spotting her little apartment away beyond the wheatfields.  Then crossing London, dropping some change in the buskers’ guitar cases, from Charing Cross via the Bakerloo line to Paddington, then the Oxford train.  No AMT stand anywhere – then oh joy! Turns out there’s one on Oxford station, so I got my Chai Steamer after all.  Loafed around the city for a while, then a No 2 bus across to the Lion Hudson offices, and caught a lift back to Aylesbury with the Badger – nice to have an extra night curled up together midweek.

Then Wednesday morning, up while the lark was still yawning and checking its watch, back to Oxford (sometimes the Badger shows startling devotion to the cause!) arriving at 8 o’clock and catching a bus to the city centre, dawdling about in the shops having fun until it was TIME! 

Time, that is, to walk along to the Randolph Hotel to meet up with Mary for coffee – it’s official; this is the furthest distances a friend and I have ever travelled for a coffee.  She came from Kansas City. 

OK confession – she didn’t only come to have coffee with me, she was visiting with her daughter Jessica who is studying in Oxford this year.

Mary got in touch with me a few years ago to let me know she teaches my Hawk and the Dove books with her high school students.  She’s made some curriculum materials especially, and every now and then she lets me know what she’s doing and how the students respond to the stories, which is encouraging and lovely and fun.

Mary and her family upped sticks from wherever they were living before and moved across America to settle in Kansas City for one reason only: they wanted to live there because it’s the home of the 24:7 prayer movement and the International House of Prayer, which sounds wonderful.  There is someone in the Prayer Room all the time, even through the night, praising God and praying for the world.

Mary teaches at the Daniel Academy which is just one branch of the I.H.O.P. ministry.

So she and I have corresponded quite a bit, but we never actually met until Wednesday, when she was in Oxford with her daughters Jessica and Emily, who are so beautiful, as lovely as their mother.

And we met at the Randolph Hotel, which is one of my favourite places ever, and talked and ate delectable pastries and shortbread, and shared hot drinks as if we were the happiest people in the world, for an hour and a half.  And then I went off to Hastings and Mary and Emily and Jessica off to Bath.  

Er . . . Bath is an English town.

You can see a photo of Mary here,(scroll down to the post entitled Thanksgiving recap" and the family group photo) with Jessica: Mary is third from the left, back row, wearing a black and white top, and Jessica is standing next along from her.  And Emily is in the front in a green t-shirt.  You can hear Mary here, at a meeting in the Daniel Academy.

I am so glad we met face-to-face at last; and I know, I just know, we will meet again some day.

  

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365 366 Day 82 – Thursday March 22^nd  

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

   

 Oh, this is such a good book!  I recommend!  If you have a dragon of your own you will really enjoy this.

Stylle

Any day the Badger doesn’t have to zoom away and involve himself in Busy Work, we have our evening in the morning and chat in bed for a long time before we get up.

Today our conversation ranged over many matters.  While he was making a cup of tea downstairs I crawled into the attic space through the hatch in the eaves to survey the muddle that needs sorting out there, and dragged the various stored items into our bedroom for perusal and to give me access to face the Cleaning That Must Be Done.

Then, back in bed with a cup of tea we talked about our spice shelves delivered yesterday by a man who helpfully makes sets of shelves of any dimensions required.  The Badger said he is interested in making things so always feels curious about the mode of manufacture involved in such artefacts.  And I asked him in what language the word “make” originates, because the word “manufacture” has obviously a Latin root and it intrigued me finding “make” and “manufacture” side by side in the same sentence.  The Badger said he thought it probably came from the German “machen”.    Then we considered the other meanings of make – for example in the medieval song I syng of a mayde þat is makeles, in which makeles (makeless) means “matchless” in the sense of “peerless”.

And when the Badger later got up and oozed off into the world, I carried on thinking about that song and its beautiful second verse:

He came also stylle þer his moder was as dew in aprylle, þat fallyt on þe gras.

(He came all so still, there where his mother was, as dew in April that falleth on the grass)

It’s about Jesus’s coming into the world, uniting the being of the cosmic and heavenly Christ, the identity of the Godhead, with the human flesh of Mary.

And I stopped on the word “stylle,” which intrigued me because it’s a big word, having no adequate parallel in modern English.

It’s with us yet in German – Stille nacht, heilige nacht, that we translate as Silent night, holy night; and in the description of the Amish as Die Stille im Lande (the quiet folk of the earth).

“Silent” is only part of what is meant by the Middle English stylle and the German stille.  Full of peaceful, quiet, calm, restful – stylle means all of that.  And a person who is stylle will correlatingly be mindful – noticing, hearing, really present to any encounter.  The nearest we have lingering in modern English to summon the sense of stylle, is the adage “Still waters run deep.”

He cam also stylle . . .  There’s an old Spiritual, Steal away to Jesus.  “Steal” in that sense has some relation to this word stylle. 

He cam also stylle . . . It is saying, He stole into this world . . . as simply and unobtrusively as the dew that you cannot see falling, cannot see it at all until its presence accumulates on the grass.  Though you can feel the dew of the morning in the air all around.

It’s there again in Elijah’s experience of the Spirit as a still, small voice – elsewhere translated as a silent, thin sound.  Interesting.  In Middle English (that’s medieval English) there’s also a word smal, meaning slender or narrow – Chaucer describes the arm of a young girl as “smal” (heheh – my spellcheck hates these words and keeps rendering stylle as “style” and smal as “small”).  Slender.  Delicate.  The Spirit breathes into us as a stylle, smal voice.  Quiet, restful, calm, full of peace, unobtrusive, hard to pin down or define, slender, delicate, fine.

Sometimes people leaving reviews for my Hawk & the Dove novels criticise them for incorporating into the monks’ speech phraseology that seems modern.  They think I’ve got it wrong.  What they mean is that I should use eighteenth century idiom (if I went any further back they just wouldn’t be able to understand it).  But I didn’t get it wrong, I thought about every sentence, every phrase, every word – that’s how I write.  In my novels set in the medieval monastery, I have tried to capture the quality of earthiness and immediacy of medieval speech, and the down-to-earth, cheerful, almost casual conversational speech of monastics.  Sometimes that means using phraseology that seems anachronistic because it creates the right feel for both the time and the context.  But I love language – love Middle English, and exploring the landscape of language, tracing my finger along the roots of words to where they disappear into the earth where they grew.

In the book my publishers are currently considering for publication (that would be Book 7 of the Hawk & Dove series), the word bradawl occurs.  I spent a long time – maybe an hour or so – finding out about how and when and from where “awl” and “bradawl” had come into our language before I let it loose in my book.

But stylle is a beautiful word.  That will stay with me all day.

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365 366 Day 76 - Friday March 16^th   

 Assorted buttons, as you can see.  Put together with other things to make up a craft kit and Freecycled.

Easing life over the seams

Today, as well as the usual chores – cooking, cleaning, watering the veggies etc, I have been doing two particular things. 

The main task of the day has been to read through the 2^nd of the three novels currently with my publisher, Crossway, to prepare a ‘glossary of terms’ for the copy-editor to add in at the end.  This is necessary because the novel is set in medieval England, so some of the words in it – glebe, extern, villein, frater, reredorter for example – are not in everyday use and are likely to be unfamiliar, especially in the US where it will be published.

A long time passes between submitting a manuscript and getting it to the copy-editing stage, and several more months will pass before the time comes for it to be published.  This book, called The Hour Before Dawn, will be out in January 2012 and is part of The Hawk and the Dove series.

[The Hour Before Dawn is the one with your dedication in, Jeannie :0) ]

The second chunky task of the day was to alter three petticoats.  I was slightly changing the necks because they are a bit high.  I don’t know why but I have a particular aversion to anything tight round my throat – I can’t bear cap strings and bonnet-strings at all.  The dresses I’ve had made for me I totally love in every respect except that when the high necks pull against my throat it triggers this aversion.  So I’ve slightly enlarged the necks.  And now the petticoats show a little sometimes, so I’ve altered those too.  I am not an enthusiast for visible underwear!

The new hem to the neck passes across the shoulder seam of course, so in sewing there comes a bulky bit where the needle has to stitch through that seam twice folded as the hem crosses it, if you can imagine what I mean.   What I find is that if I am sewing fast as I cross that lumpy bit, the machine just goes mental, running on the spot and convinced it can’t do it and then seizing up completely.  To get past the hiccup it’s necessary to be sewing slow.  As a bomb disposal expert once said: “Walk towards the problem slowly” – a good maxim for anybody’s crises!

Sewing slowly I can ease the seam along, and sew the hem with no difficulty at all.

Sewing, like all manual tasks, is an opportunity for thoughts to germinate.  The Hour Before Dawn is part of a trilogy that looks at people passing through transition, struggling to understand themselves and each other and assimilate change.  Though it is set in a medieval monastery, it explores many of the life issues and family problems that modern people in the everyday world experience – forgiveness, trying to see the other person’s point of view, struggling to remain faithful to our calling, discovering what that calling might be – sometimes slowly and painfully.

It occurred to me as I was sewing and thinking about the characters in my story getting to grips with the adversities life had thrown at them, that helping each other through the traumas and difficulties which every now and then are part of ordinary life for all of us, is quite similar to easing that hem through the machine as it passes over the shoulder seam.  Life goes along smoothly for a while, and then it hits a lump.  When it does, if you go at it with all guns blazing you just bring the whole thing to a grinding halt, seize up completely.  But if you ease it along slowly and gently, mindful and careful, not rushing, going slow, you get past it ok, and come through to the other side, and things smooth out again.

That’s what I thought.

And I apologise, my friends, if it sounds like a trite diary column from a women’s magazine in the 1930s….

Just what you would expect in a strange, strange world.

Just the oddest thing happened to me yesterday.  I felt as though I’d been sorting out my clothes and discovered that Narnia really does begin at the back of the wardrobe.

Cast your mind back to my previous blog post, in which I said that I had just finished writing a very difficult passage of human interaction.

For the purposes of this blog post let’s call the characters involved in this Hugh and Eleanor, otherwise I won’t be able to blog this until 4 more books have been published and I want to tell you now, not in 2 years’ time.   And that’s strange enough by itself – giving fictional characters aliases to allow them to appear disguised in the real world!!

Well, Hugh and Eleanor have become very dear to me.  I believe this happens quite a lot with writers of fiction; the characters appear out of nowhere and seem to start telling their stories themselves.  All I have to do is take time out to really look and listen and concentrate, and their story kind of unfolds before the imagination, leaving only the task of actually writing it down.  In so doing, I come to love them dearly; they become as real to me as members of my family.  In fact, between writing novels, meeting people online and stranger-watching in the place where I live, what reality is becomes quite hard to define!

So Hugh and Eleanor fall in love, and through much adversity finally get to be together, only to find that in the daily domestic round living together is not as easy as they had expected.

The humungous row I had to write was Hugh and Eleanor struggling with remarkable lack of success to communicate effectively with one another.  But they do love each other dearly, and their path of love together forms a significant proportion of what the book I’m writing now is all about.

I finished wrestling with this difficult and demanding passage telling the tale of this couple in love on the evening of Valentine’s Day, and I read it to the Badger over the cusp of midnight into Valentine’s Day.  So somehow his and my love, and our stories, got twined together with Hugh and Eleanor’s love, and their story.  Their relationship is not a re-telling of, or even like, my relationship with the Badger, but it has certain ordinary human commonalities that he and I – and I hope all readers – can surely relate to.

So yesterday, Valentine’s Day, after the Badger and I had exchanged cards and a kiss, off he went to work and I went to check correspondence and opened my email.

I sat there stunned, rooted to the spot.

There, in my inbox, sat an email from Hugh and Eleanor, “With love on Valentine’s Day”.

How could this be?  I was actually quite frightened to open it, in case some weird hacker had somehow got into my life and knew what I had been writing!

Well, I did open it eventually, and it was a book promo from a writer whose work I have purchased in the past, whose first name happens to be Hugh, and who has formed a professional alliance with his wife, whose first name happens to be Eleanor, and they are marketing their work as a joint enterprise, using Valentine’s Day as a platform for their promotion.

But, cor!  What a weirdness in a world of weird!  I shall keep that email.  And I’m glad to know Hugh and Eleanor are watching me as closely as I am watching them!!

The Hardest Thing To do

Oh, wow!  I am so excited about this!  My favourite thing is writing fiction, and it is also fiendishly difficult, demanding and I am never really, really sure how good a job I have done.  Creating a novel asks of me all that I have and then some.

The trilogy I wrote that is now sold in one volume under the title of its first novel, The Hawk & the Dove, has been in print and selling steadily for 20 years.  I feel quite pleased about this.  So much so that I wrote to my publisher, Crossway, and asked them what they thought about adding another novel to the series, and they seemed keen, so I set to work.  Well, the tale grew in the telling, and I ended up with three more novels for them.  The first of the three new ones - therefore the fourth book in the Hawk & the Dove series - is called The Hardest Thing To Do, and it's just gone up on Amazon for pre-order, though it won't be out until July (don't you worry, I'll remind you!!).

Bringing these new books to birth has been a biiig deal.  I have relied on continual prayer support as I wrote them.  In crafting them I dug deep in my spirit and wrote about the life lessons and insights that the Lord has been teaching me over the last decade.  As I wrote them, I felt encouraged that I had tuned in to a depth of Holy Spirit, because every time I settled down to write, there was mayhem - big disruptions and family chaos and stuff I could not ignore and had to respond to.  But with the support of praying friends I kept going anyway, so that these things I really wanted to share could get written and you could read them and go on that journey with me.

The Hardest Thing To Do looks at human relationships, and explores the territory of forgiveness and trying to see things from the other person's point of view.

While I was writing it, in the evenings sometimes I read chunks to my family.  They all know the Hawk & the Dove series well.  My Badger, my husband now, was the original editor and publisher for that series, 20 years ago when we our lives were very different and we had no thought or expectation that one day we would be married.  And my daughters grew up reading the trilogy until it felt like the monks in it were part of our family (the tales are all set in a 14th century monastery).   They knew every character and every story in those original books.
And so it came about that when I started reading to them the new book, The Hardest Thing To Do,  I had this wonderful reaction from them.  It got to a certain point in the story and they began to shriek: "Oh no! It's not... is it?... it's... oh, no!  It's him !!!"    Heh heh heh.  How satisfying.  Him?  He's in the second book of the first trilogy, The Wounds of God, in the chapter called Who's The Fool Now?.  Yes, it's him, and he's back causing trouble.

The story takes us through Lent one year about a quarter of the way into the 14th century, at a Benedictine monastery on the North York Moors.  It's written like a journal or log, with an entry for every day of Lent from Ash Wednesday through to Easter Sunday, and it charts the gradual healing miracle of the compassion of Jesus shining through human frailty and human kindness.  I do hope you enjoy it when you get to read it in the summer  :0)

Writing this book has been a wonderful journey.   I am so excited to see it coming to fruition at last.

Head down. Work to do.

I came home this afternoon from our church parish weekend away. A very successful weekend from the point of view of the church, a bit traumatic from mine. A series of small happenings, remarks, emphases, things said and not said that added up to a lot. Sigh.

In the morning I must be up early. Tomorrow afternoon I am responsible for the funeral of somebody I loved dearly, and I have to prepare. The whole world will be a little less rich and less bright without her. Fanciful self-indulgence spins fairy-stories that when we die we turn into stars. In her case it is probably true.

I also must call the plumber urgently because our water tank has sprung a leak and is gradually soaking the carpet and floorboards in Hebe's bedroom and seeping through to the studio underneath. Double sigh.

Last week I sent out an SOS to dear friends to read through double-quick the manuscript for my new book (to be published in January, The Road of Blessing. It's to follow the same format as In Celebration of Simplicity, so requires a question-and-answer section at the end. I wanted the questions to be real questions that real people really asked when they read it, not posers set by the publisher's editorial staff. What a brilliant team my readers made! They have come up with some cracking good questions. Just waiting for a few more to come in then I will get into the answers, and that will be that one put to bed.

Also oozing into the Urgent Pile is the revison and expansion of my
Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People, again for the beginning of next year. The revision of the old text is now complete, and I have written one of the three new chapters which will be about the death of my previous husband Bernard, bereavement from causes other than death, and how to take a good funeral. Finished manuscript due in by the first week of August. Meanwhile I am determined that when my beloved takes his holiday this year (19th - 30th July) I shall not have my nose in a book manuscript working against the clock.

You will have cunningly detected that I have some brisk and sustained action to take.

If I come up for air I shall post here in the meantime - or I may just see y'all again in mid-July.

After that, things just about calm down again. I got my three-book contract with Crossway (hooray!!) for three new books following on from The Hawk & the Dove trilogy. The first is written and on their desk, the second three-quarters written, the third half-written. All to be done and dusted by the end of October. So that's my project from the end of July into the autumn.

Interspersed with that I hope I'll have enough space to work on my online Wabi-Sabi Jesus.

Waving to you my friends, then - see you intermittently as the summer goes on. To those of you who pray, let me say your prayers make an amazing difference to my output, in terms of quality, focus and protection from the constant and relentless interference of every conceivable variety (kind of crazy spiritual radio crackle) that sets up the minute I begin to write - you name it, it happens! I appreciate you have lives and needs of your own to attend to, but your prayer support is always, always most gratefully and deeply appreciated. (The Lord Jesus says 'Yeah, believe me - she needs it!')