sea of blue (-bells)
I finally got my essay done and went off in search of bluebells….
Crazy Amaryllis
Someone gave me an amaryllis bulb for Christmas… I finally planted it and look what happened!
I haven’t seen the ‘candy-stripe’ flowers before. Why does God bother with so many designs? bit of a show-off perhaps?!
pansies with attitude!
these pansies have some serious attitude… if you can’t quite see what I mean, squint as you look at the photo! should I feel safe with these in the garden?!!
smell the roses…
Generally, in every day life, I’m pretty darned good at ‘smelling the roses’ – I notice little beauties of life and even literally stop to smell the roses when I’m walking through a neighbourhood and plants overhang the pavement/walkway.
What i’m being reminded of just recently is that I need to do that in my whole life too.
I have things i want to happen in my life – and i get impatient. I try not to ‘go on’ to God, but I kind of end up being just a tad repetitive in my requests (sorry God!).
What’s so easy to miss though, is the love and blessedness in my life now.
To be looking forward impatiently to a future i dream of, and miss the fact that my life right now (though not untouched by pains) is actually blessed beyond my imaginings. In fact, I’m ridiculously over-blessed.
For my future hopes, I have felt God tell me so many times, ‘It’s all in hand’, yet I find it so hard to ‘leave it there’ and get on with today.
I want to be better at ‘smelling the roses’ in my friendships, enjoy and savour every moment of joy that comes my way, to abandon myself to God in the ‘now’, to learn the lessons God is teaching me directly and through my amazing, beautiful friendships right now.
I mustn’t waste the lessons of now, or miss the fun of now, by only waiting impatiently for hoped-for future joys.
Grey waters
Someone wonderful recently introduced me to R.S. Thomas… here’s one of his poems that I already love! (thanks SL!)
Sea-Watching
Grey waters, vast
as an area of prayer
that one enters. Daily
over a period of years
I have let my eye rest on them.
Was I waiting for something?
Nothing
but that continuous waving
that is without meaning
occurred.
Ah, but a rare bird is
rare. It is when one is not looking
at times one is not there
that it comes.
You must wear your eyes out
as others their knees.
I became the hermit
of the rocks, habited with the wind
and the mist. There were days,
so beautiful the emptiness
it might have filled,
its absence
was as its presence; not to be told
any more, so single my mind
after its long fast,
my watching from praying.
– R.S. Thomas
in Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975
The Monastic Way
“When we look at the world around us we see
the earth,
the sky,
the water,
the plants,
the trees,
the animals
and people.
But what we have to do is look behind all these phenomena
and discover their hidden source.
Most people stop with the phenomena:
they appreciate the earth or sky or flowers
or the sun or stars,
they admire the beauty
but they do not try to find the hidden source of the sky and flowers,
of every single thing.
We see beyond only when we look with the eyes of the heart.”
– Bede Griffiths, OSB
weeds?!
of all the lovely things in the garden, I confess I have quite a soft spot for some of the alleged weeds…
Eleanor Blakely Dickinson’s poem, ‘Forget me not’ ends with these words:
….Like thoughts of home in climes afar;
Like evening’s still returning star;
Like tears which fall when the heart is sad,
Almost as sweet as that heart were glad;
Like friendship found where we sought it not;
In bower and garden, in field and grot,
Spring thy fair flowers, Forget me not.
It’s not an original thought to wonder who decides which things are weeds, and who decides what ‘the right place’ for them to grow is anyway… maybe something beautiful always finds itself in the right place?
new life in old twigs
i literally jumped for joy when i saw that the tree outside my window was starting to leaf and showing tiny signs of blossom!
i love this time of the year when things are ‘coming alive’ or ‘waking’ again. it’s wonderful… and nature’s parable re-enacted: that the cold barren days, the waiting in darkness, the dry brittle twigs weren’t really signs of all-is-lost, but of things waiting for their time (their ‘kairos’).
this is the kind of thing i meant before (over easter) when i wrote about death and resurrection – the experiences in the ‘here and now’ which feel like endings and loss, the cold/lonely/barren times that feel like wasted time, that are sometimes actually just the gateway to something new. not always what we expected, or what we think we’d want, but somehow blessings of new life.
hold on for the light…
“yes, I can see a light that is coming, for the heart that holds on,
and there will be an end to these troubles, but until that day comes,
still i will praise you, still i will praise you…”
(Matt and Beth Redman)
legacy
with thanks to people I don’t know, who used to live in my house, and had the kindness to plant bulbs in the garden that I now enjoy…
what a nice legacy they left :0)
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