Reading a Rembrandt in starlight
The whole sky
The passage of time on eroded rock clock
Sometimes the absence of nothing
The big wind and the small act of breathing
The sigh
This skin-bag for bone and incomprehension
Will hold me just for a while
See if you can work out what is happening in this shot…
or this one (it has not been photoshopped, honest!)
Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12
We are just back from a lovely holiday week spent in sunny Englandshire- firstly Northumberland, then Yorkshire and finally Lancashire. We swam in the sea, climbed mountains, and made the pilgrimage to Lindisfarne, barefoot over the sands (with some mud!) at low tide.
It was great to spend some time with my lovely family doing seaside things- and to appreciate again how lovely England is, with its layers of history laid down in a rolling landscape and in buildings of stone and brick.
We also fitted in celebrating the wedding of our friends Stacey and Bob. Congratulations to them as they start their married life together.
Here are a few photos- particularly of the magical walk over the sands to the Holy Island;
We have just spent a couple of days over on the East Coast with my brother and his wife (and wee Jamie.) They live in Haddington, and took us for a day out in North Berwick, a lovely seaside town with a proper beach, a tiny harbour and even though it is quite a posh place it still had that evocative seaside smell- a combination of fried food, seaweed, and salt.
We walked the beach and encountered a faire set up to make money for the lifeboat society, so we joined in. I won the welly wanging contest (and Will won the junior one too!) I am thinking that this really should be an Olympic sport. Our prizes were two £5 ice cream vouchers.
Just off shore from North Berwick is Bass Rock- a small island famous for it’s Stevenson lighthouse, and its vast colony of Gannets. When you first look out at the island, it looks like it is covered in snow.
Then when you look a bit closer, you realise that what you are seeing are thousands and thousands of nesting Gannets. It is simply stunning.
Image taken on Yorkshire Moors Railway, 2010.
Thanks to today’s minimergent;
This side of Paradise, people are with God in such a remote and spotty way that their experience of Eternal Life is at best like the experience you get of approaching a place at night in a fast train. Even the saints see only an occasional light go whipping by, hear only a sound or two over the clatter of the rails.
The cogs of my brain synchronise
To some machinery
Deep in the sea.
The background hum of its engine room
Drowns out the tick tock
Of this human clock.
We have just been here;
Along with some friends, we spent the long weekend camping on the Ross of Mull, overlooking Iona- which is the most beautiful place I have ever been to.
And here is the evidence;
We walked a lot, swam, ate, cooked bread and baked spuds in makeshift ovens made of sand and driftwood fires.
Whilst there we heard of the mother of one of us having become seriously ill in hospital. The distance and ferries stopped any rush to her bedside- all that was possible was to stay and pray. To sit in such beauty with such a burden must have been an incredible rush of emotions- but it felt as though the place, and our community, was holding us.
We are delayed only by our hearts beating.
And each one beats with all the treasure of the universe.
We are back after a wonderful few days out in the wild.
This year the Aoradh wilderness trip did not venture out to one of the islands- a few people dropped out and so the boat charter would have just been too expensive. We decided that we would stay more local, so I scouted out a location half way up one of our lovely lochs- Loch Striven. Five of us walked/canoed in from the road end and spent two days and nights in silence, in community and preparing lavish outdoor meals.
This time we managed to bake bread in a biscuit tin oven, bake potatoes and apples, cook mussels harvested from the shore in front of the tent, and spend hours sitting round the campfire talking and laughing.
Even though the weather was mostly lovely it was unusually cold, which was a shame as I took advantage of the trees to use my camping hammock/tarp set up- which turned out to be rather chilly.
This trip was very different to our other wilderness retreats but still really great- it made us appreciate again the wild places right on our doorstep here in Argyll. We also wondered whether it might be a chance to offer people short taster sessions of what wilderness and spirituality together can offer.
I also got to do some canoeing too, for the first time for a while. Andy and I clocked up around 18 miles of paddling. In the process of which we saw seals, porpoise and countless sea birds. Today we canoed to the head of the Loch and Michaela came to collect us. Lovely!
this fragile tent 