creating change without shouting
In ordinary time the grass keeps growing, brambles continue their offensive against my legs, and the thrush sings beautifully in the trees above the house. In ordinary time the lake is drying up, a young squirrel is stealing my wild strawberries, and I catch the scent of wild honeysuckle and smile. We keep on working, … Read more
We want to rush ahead. To get there, because here is …… (fill in the blanks). Yet there is nowhere, except we reach it from here. And here, this place, this time, requires us to be patient with the only things that will get us there: questions and hope. Questions, because they hold keys for … Read more
CARRYING THE DUST We are formedby wherewe’ve been, Shaped bythe placeswe’ve inhabited. We carrythe dustin our souls, And bring itto this spacewe call now. ~ I’m reminded of the strawberry fields from my home farm in Kent when I taste these tiny wild strawberries growing through the cracks in the paving outside my study.
Watching the Welsh summer drizzle, it dawned on me: we don’t hear raindrops. Yes, we might hear their impact. The splash on leaves or puddles. Or thud on the roof and splatter on windows. What we don’t hear is rain falling. Interesting. However, we do experience being in the rain. From the fine mist that … Read more
“Humans have a responsibility to their own time, not as if they could seem to stand outside it and donate various spiritual and material benefits to it from a position of compassionate distance. Humans have a responsibility to find themselves where they are, in their own proper time and place, in the history to which … Read more
Questions have a home. They are earthed, embedded in time and space, and especially in place. We hold them in the here and now. If we treat them as delicate, otherworldly baubles to simply gaze at in their conceptual beauty, their essence will fade and not benefit us at all. The questions that make their … Read more