Shifting slates into the future
A friend started it years ago- asking me if I wanted to come on one of his wilderness retreats. The idea was simple: a group of people travel to an uninhabited island – a different one each year- off the West Coast of Scotland. I said yes, reluctantly: I’ve never been a fan of camping,…
Age is just a number
Today, apart from the death of a few thousand cells, I am the same as yesterday when I was 59. Yet it feels different: if I live that long, I’ll get a state pension this decade and I will retire. Mortality feels closer and although fairly active, what I want to do and what my…
Be still…
I was searching for a poem to begin a staff meeting: I think it is something that would deepen most business meetings and get all of us that can’t step back and become too intense and focussed to think in a different way, but I digress. I was looking for something that was Christian in…
Back from an island…
I got back from a wilderness retreat a week or so ago. I’ve taken part in these for some time now; the experience grows in my mind and imagination even more when I’ve left. We pick an island and sail: this year it was going to be Insh, but the tides didn’t work out, so…
Islands and bad poetry
“My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond…
Easter Sunday
I’ve written before of my struggles with images like this that are used when we wish people ‘Happy Easter’. Sometimes, we who believe post them on social media- accompanied by fonts so sickly sweet that Hallmark would baulk at putting them out- to tell others of our faith, often tongue tied in what to say…
Good Friday
(Extract from above poem- Gerard Kelly ‘I see a new city: poems of place and possibilities’ Chamine Press, 2000) The priest who gave the thought at our Village Good Friday ‘stations of the cross’ read this poem today. ——————————————— ‘Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani’ (‘My God, my God: why have you forsaken me?’)
Lent?
In an instant news age, we tend to judge more and do so more quickly. Access to information is constant and eventually the algorithm will get you with delicately curated gobbets designed to ramp up your outrage. I confess I have succumbed. I confess that I still succumb. There’s a temptation for those of us…
59
I remember once reading that your late 50s and early 60s are a time when you can get the most conservative and resistant to change: the siren call of nostalgia- ‘things were better then’ , an awareness that everything that is touted as ‘the next big thing’ you’ve seen in at least three different iterations…
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Wearily Hopeful 