A splash of orange paint

Choices can be stressful! When the opportunity arose to repaint our entire living area, I agonized over the colour: keep the light, bright yellow that attracted me to the house in the first place, or tone it down? In the end, I toned down, but stayed with yellow; and it works well.
Next was the choice of something BRIGHT for my new study-area: two walls in a corner of our new bedroom. Friends encouraged me, gave practical help about where to get a paint sample. My husband painted on the trial colour, Touch of Sun; and now I have two bright orange sections of wall to inspire and energize me when I work.

Somehow, this venture into colour-choice has enlarged and changed my perceptions. It's as if the splash of orange has lit up many areas of my being, including the spiritual. I am more confident in my own creativity and personal taste; and have been more open to God-moments (such as offering to pray for someone, or inviting a new acquaintance to church).

Such a visible affirmation of a good choice - the walls in their new paint, whether pale yellow or bright orange - reaches deep into one's psyche, sending down roots of confidence and spreading upwards into openness-to-change, with side-shoots of sheer pleasure.

I'm not quite suggesting that you splash on some orange paint (although it's not a bad idea!); but I do hope you will take time to recognise and revisit the positive choices you've made over the years, and to reach towards some new ones. And who knows, maybe there is a new paint colour among those choices ahead!

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".