Garden jewel

This spider is about 5mm across, plus legs. When the sun catches it, it sparkles, the colours turning metallic. I took about 20 photos, trying to capture its dazzling patterns and the sheer perfection of it...

I identified it later as a Silver Marsh Spider.

Big Book

The Year of the Tortoise has delivered another surprise: the gift of writing a short children's book on astronomy. A "Big Book" is designed to be read aloud to the class; and ours is to cover 5 areas: Earth, Moon, Sun, planets, and stars.

Did YOU know that the Moon rotates about its own axis? - or that we see Venus as the Morning OR Evening "star" but not both at once? 

The whole project is filled with God-incidence and "wow" moments... But they must wait til another day. In the meantime, may I challenge you to step outside and look up at the stars?

 

Song of September

It's a song of snow, and floods; of new stories; of miracles and mundane things; birthdays and baking..Above all, it is a song of a God who is completely involved in our lives, who is beneath and above, interwoven in our daily fabric, so much part of us we forget He is there - close as breath, more precious. And in spring-time, the Creator God is so clearly visible: a shimmer of green, a riot of pink blossom, everywhere a great shout of praise and life.

When the bird sings

"There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens." (Seamus Heaney, "Song")

Clearly, today's "what happens" is Spring in all its golden warmth. A week ago, floods and snow; today, glorious sunshine. The birds are thrilling to its touch: every bush and tree is alive with twitter and song, as if some kind of liquid energy has been uncorked and cannot be contained. My whole morning has been framed and infused and delighted by robin-song. Drawn out by his ceaseless invitation, I was rewarded by a flash of orange wings, as he changed "stage" from one tree to another.

Spring has arrived; we are revived.

Seamus Heaney

This great and wonderful poet* died last week. The news caused me to return to some of my favourite poems of his. I was going to share some with my Saturday morning students, but they are mostly primary-school kids, and the level of language and the very Irish contexts seemed too difficult. Perhaps I should have read some anyway - poetry has a way of reaching the heart, bypassing word-for-word understanding!

In one of his most well-known poems, "Digging", Heaney is sitting writing while listening to his elderly father digging in the garden outside his window. His father worked at digging potatoes and cutting turf when Heaney was a boy. In the closing verses, he admires his father's skill, and affirms his own, very different one:

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


Try some "digging" of your own: capture a childhood memory on paper, or reaffirm one of your skills...If you've no-one else to tell it to, tell me!

*I hate it when I'm confronted with a name whose pronounciation I'm unsure of: his name is "Shame-us Hee-nee".

Tree...

A wire baobab graces the desk. Its sturdy trunk extends upwards into short, perfect branches. The artist has fashioned it so that the strands forming the "shell" of the trunk become the branches. Like the living tree, it is all of one piece; an organic form. 

Tonight I had a picture of how my tree can become my daily inspiration and organiser. Steven Covey uses the visual aid of "placing the rocks in the jar" to describe setting priorities. Place the rocks - the vital things - first, and you can fit in all the others too. The picture I had was of hearts or leaves, each with a priority written on it. These could be hung on the tree - placed in the jar - daily, or weekly... I visualize thin wooden painted shapes; but maybe I will begin with cardboard, or else I won't get started... 

I even have a name for it: Priori-Tree.

(If this idea goes global, remember you read it here first!)

For Kathy

How many ways can you say, "Hello, boys!"?  The variety might seem endless, and include a number of great movie scenes: mob boss greets muscle-men who have yet again failed to nail the hero; same hero surprises said muscle-men in final show-down; bar-lady addresses regulars (add "tiredly" or "sultrily" according to your preference)...I'm sure you can add many more.
In the real world - my real world - "Hello, boys!" is a greeting I often hear directed at my two sons. Grannies and granddads use it; Dad uses it; I use it myself. Just yesterday, we heard it, as the two boys and I arrived (late!) at church. As we moved up the path, we encountered a man pushing a wheelchair. The greeting, "Hello, boys!" came from the lady in the wheelchair; and it was only later, when I thought about how natural and normal it sounded, that I was moved to tears.
The words came from a dear friend who had been in hospital for two months after a stroke; a friend who has been in and out of "reality" for all that time. So "confused" had she been that all but a very few visitors were kept away; and now, here she was, about to enter a hall full of people, and her precious mind making the connection to these two young whirligigs she hadn't seen in months: "Hello, boys!"

I was so glad of that serendipity: the blessing of meeting Kathy as she arrived at church after such a long absence. A few minutes later, I drove away from church again, off home to complete some work while the boys went to their classes. The irony of it hit me: Kathy had just arrived, and here I was, rushing away. What had it cost Kathy and her husband to get to the meeting that morning? Why was I giving up that precious thing, the fellowship of the saints, to attend to the tyranny of the urgent? I could rationalize it in many ways; but I realized that such things must not be lightly reasoned away. For who knows when we may next be able to enjoy them?