The monk and the spaceship baby meet up soon!

Father Laurence and Father Justin meeting at St Catherine's`

In exactly a week's time, Father Justin, a Texan born Greek Orthodox Monk from Sinai will be getting off a train at St Neots station where we will meet him.  I have never had a Greek Orthodox Monk to stay before and at the same time, the baby who once slept in a space ship incubator and was so tiny, she could fit in your pocket, will be staying here.  What will she make of a tall, thin saintly man with twinkling eyes, all dressed in black with a long long beard and his long hair tied in a pony tail and what will he, fresh from Sinai, what will he be thinking of us!  I look round the kitchen all full of photographs, pots of spoons and jars of marmalade.  There are books and felt tip pens waiting for that small child to draw her circles and lines making  birds and fishes, giving them eyes and naming them, bird and fish and then handing us the pen to do the same.  Will he join in that game?  He can't be used to small children curious about everything and she won't have seen anyone looking like him.  I know why he's here, he is coming to give two talks in London and to have a day in Cambridge with us beforehand but she will just see a new person in Granny's kitchen.   She won't be interested in his spiritual message, just whether he can draw a bird.

Will she ask him to follow her into the garden?

And what will he make of us, of the countryside, wintery now and so English, different to Sinai where the desert yields a little green in the garden of the Monastery and deep water has made an oasis with peach and almond trees, dates and a few vegetables.  Will he borrow some wellington boots and stride alongside us walking the dogs round the fields?  Will he be happy here?  You can come and meet him too.   If you live in London you can listen to him talk on November 28th at St Martin-in-the-Fields at 10.00 am.  He will be part of a programme where he and a Benedictine Monk, Father Laurence Freeman tell us about the mystical tradition of both Eastern and Western Christianity.  This event is free and open to all but if you live in another country you can hear Father Justin speaking the same evening via live stream.  If you register for this by clicking on this link, I will send you the access information  a few days beforehand. And I will tell you after all the talks are over and Father Justin has gone back to his desert Monastery, how he and baby Bea and the dogs got on in the kitchen of our house! And there may even be a photo of them all together.

St Catherine's Monastery right under the God trodden Mount Sinai 

Finding space to meet the other whoever he or she or it is

Revd Archbishop Rowan Williams

By chance and good fortune, I happened upon this talk by Rowan Williams and Ben Quash which happened just recently at St Martin-in-the-Fields.  It couldn't have been by chance actually because it was so much the message which resonates in my own heart but which I couldn't have found the words to formulate in the way that Archbishop Rowan and Revd Professor Ben Quash did and which that Church of the ever open door allows.  It is about how we should encounter that which we think is other than ourselves, other races, other sexes, other colours and of course, other religions without relinquishing our own identity.  Such a great question and they answer so well.  Perhaps this was the answer to my prayer to the Absolute, it expresses a way to find the space which is without colour, race or religion, without prejudice or partiality, outside our everyday world and to find the way to ease the constrictions which can be felt when differences bind and don't celebrate otherness. 
If the stone placed on Peggy's gravestone worked, this was pointing the way to the answer

offering it through Aunt Peggy, a good woman

There is a story of an orphan in India who desperately wanted to go to School but he had no money to pay.  He asked a wise man what he should do and the answer the wise man gave was this; write your request in a letter and put it in an envelope addressed to God, the Absolute, the all knowing.  The boy did this, he followed the suggestion and then he waited.  That letter went to the sorting office and the sorters were uncertain what to do so they gave it to the postmaster (a most important position then when there was no internet)!  The postmaster asked if they could find the boy and bring him to his office.  They found him, the postmaster adopted him and sent him to the best school. That boy became a judge.  The person who told me this was actually told the story by the judge!

Shingle Street, white shells and stones amongst the others

Now the person who told ME, suggested that when you had a problem you just couldn't see your way to solving, that you offer it to God, to the Absolute, to the all knowing.  I have a problem, one that can't seem to be resolved so I took a beautiful white stone collected from the beach at Shingle Street and I wrote on it.  I wrote my prayer asking that there could be resolution to the problem and then I wondered what to do with it.  Just over the wall from my house, there is a beloved Aunt's gravestone. She was a devout Roman Catholic who, as a young woman had faced incredible obstacles, helped Allied servicemen escape from Belgium, been interrogated by the Gestapo, escaped herself over the mountains and come to England, married an English escapee and lived her life in Suffolk, much loved by family and friends.  Her gravestone has an inscription which is the motto of the Comet Line, the line which took servicemen and helped them escape.  Its meaning is Fight without Blows.

So, I am fighting my problem which is a little war of truth and untruth with a prayer which I hope that Aunt Peggy will find and present the message on the stone to the nearest angel to take straight up to the highest Authority for help.  Go, Angel Go!

Seeing through her eyes

Getting used to being a Grandparent who plays cards!

I watched as the car drove away.  The two of them, two grandparents like us had been staying here for a week with their large family joining them for different days and nights.  They came from Cornwall and it was a big effort to drive all that way to Cambridgeshire and back and they weren't young.  They were the same age as us and we had so much in common.  Numbers of children and grandchildren, similar family holidays involving sea and sand and walking and swimming and climbing.  She, the grandmother was the one who caught my eye as the car drove away; it was the look in her eye, a yearning it seemed for the times when they were all around her and she was mother.  Her look caught my eye because I recognised so clearly some of what she was perhaps feeling.  Time passing and everything changing, babies becoming toddlers, toddlers to children, children to teenagers, teenagers to students, to careers and partners and their own babies coming and becoming the toddling ones.  I had watched the grandmother as she played with the small children, watched her shepherding them up the ladder to the wendy house, watched as she pushed them on the swing, watched as she sat with them inside playing games and colouring pictures of cows and goats and gruffalos!  She loved having them here and it was clearly a wrench to go.  I watched as the Grandpa rather tenderly opened the car door and in she got, he driving, she looking out and perhaps both of them remembering how they had packed all those children when they were small into the back of the car and taken them on holiday, taken them to school, and then maybe to university and then watched as they graduated, cheered as they got their first jobs, invited the girlfriends and boyfriends to join them for lunch and then hoped that they would be happy if they married, would be able to withstand all the pushes and pulls of life and the ups and downs of their families.  Hoped for the best for all of them, loving being with them, sad to leave, sad to go home to the house and garden in Cornwall and there to wait for the next chance of seeing them all together again.  A mixed feeling but maybe now they are settling down to Sunday television, they are over the sadness and have spoken to all of the now grown up children and heard they are all alright.  They have slotted back into their lives again.  That's the way it goes but we, the grandparents didn't think it would ever happen to us, we thought we would be ever young.

Brian Hodgkinson's heroic history of the way civilisations come and go and give us our heroes

Agamemnon walked home through this gate! True!

Brian Hodgkinson

I have a friend who looks just like an ordinary person, walks and talks like everyone else, drinks tea and coffee, smiles and moves around just like everyone else but HE IS SO CLEVER!  He would probably say that he just reads a lot but then so do I but I don't retain the information.  He does, his brain must have so many places full of interesting and accurate facts that when he sits down at his desk and concentrates on what he wants to know, he can bring a decade, a whole century or even a millenium to mind and have it in an order which he can then explain in such a way that someone like me, a person of very moderate understanding, can feel the texture of history in my own bones.  He has written both poetry and history and his name is Brian Hodgkinson.  I have been reading his extraordinary new three volume book which is so beautifully written and crafted it could be called poetry.  The three volumes cover The Advancement  of Civilisation in the Western World, and that is just what it is, a great panorama of millenia which makes sense of who we are now and what we might have been and what we could be.  Hodgkinson weaves myth and legend into factual evidence so that Homeric heroes have their feet in facts and turn out to have their descendants in every heroic action performed by every person we recognise today as heroic.  His starting point for the beginning is way back in the foundation of time, farther back than the written word, back into the mystery touched on in Scriptures which try to describe how something comes into being from consciousness alone and takes form through words.  This may sound fanciful but when we begin to see that all our understanding of anything from the most sublime to the most prosaic is expressed in words in our minds, this capacity words have to create makes sense of In the beginning was the Word....

Now, this great work from Brian Hodgkinson, my friend who I am glad to introduce to you is available to pre-order from Shepheard Walwyn publishers at £65 for all three.  

I have been zooming through the first book because it has pace, isn't dry and dusty and have just ordered one copy for myself and one other.  It might be for YOU!!!

Copies should arrive in October and great Autumn reading ahead.

Dr Jonathan Sachs takes us by the hand through the Moral Maze which faces us

Dr Jonathan Sachs has a nice face too!

We aren't going to hell in a hand cart! But we need to know the pitfalls and the avenues which have curiously always led to hell.  Dr Sachs, former Chief Rabbi has compiled a series of programmes which you should listen to, you should listen quietly, picking one at a time following the journey he has taken us on looking for Morality in the 21st century, where is it to be recognised and do we measure up to its call?  Do we want to?  And here is a good question, why do we want to?  Do we want to be good moral people to feel smug or do we want to be good moral people in order that our families and communities and the wider world don't suffer from our immorality.

It is going to rain this weekend probably, the evenings and drawing in and the mornings are later.  You could just sit in your bed, or even lie there having clicked this link and start the adventure he sets before us.  Why not start with Episode 14 where Melinda Gates talks about using all her good fortune in small and large acts of kindness.

I went to Sinai and this is what I found!l

Desert, where would you put your sleeping bag? Or find your bathroom

I went to Sinai with my friend Mary.  She has given me books across the years of our friendship and this journey started with my reading her Christmas gift of The Sisters of Sinai by Janet Soskice (you can hear her talk about them by clicking the link.)  These two sisters and their journey to discover what really was written in ancient manuscripts stored at St Catherine's Monastery and their connection with the Monks was our starting point. My friend Mary has always inspired me because she has a stillness about her and as an artist has a discerning eye.  I am the one of this friendship who can't resist taking action and having read the book and found a journey going to Sinai led by Sara Maitland (click for info), I persuaded her that we could do it, we could camp in the desert for a few days not realising we would really be out in the middle of the sandy desert with no tent, just ourselves in a sleeping bag and the stars above us, no loo, no electric rollers, no radio, no i phone, just 12 people scattered over the desert gazing upwards and watching the light of the sun and moon changing our days into nights and our nights into days.  As we woke, we would see others sitting up in their bags, getting dressed in the bag, clambering out and walking across to the one tented structure which contained the hole in the ground which if we had been American, we would have miscalled the bathroom.

Inside the Monastery

We were a long way away from England, from Sainsburys and what we thought of as our lives!  And we finished our time there by visiting St Catherine's Monastery which is where the next part of my adventure began.  This was where hermits and ascetics travelled from the earliest days of Christianity to be at the foot of Mount Sinai where so many old and new testament stories meet and where since the 4th Century there has been a fortified Monastery which over the centuries has filled and emptied with Monks according to the desire of men to renounce the world and which has the most exquisite collection of icons and manuscripts.  At this time, there are perhaps 29 monks attached to the Monastery, some very old but interest in it has increased as the realisation of the threat to religious freedom has risen and polarisation and misunderstanding has threatened so many buildings and communities.  In an age where we preach liberalism in so many parts of life, true freedom to worship has been reduced to a point where instead of enjoying the diversity of ways to approach and pray to God through the pathway we have chosen, people feel threatened by the ways of others leading to extreme thinking that 'my faith is The One faith and No other should exist'.  

Father Justin

Here at the Monastery, while following with devotion and absolute adherence to their own programme of worship, pilgrims and visitors just interested in the history of the Monastery are welcomed.  Here is where I knew I wanted to return, to return over and over again, not just to stare and wonder at the treasures, but to simply be there, attending or not, the services I was allowed to go to, sitting in front of the icons, not understanding or knowing enough to translate anything into my own language but to allow the place and the feel to enter my heart.  And so growing to love the place, being of an active nature, I wanted others to know about it and to take it to their heart so that it would continue to be protected.  This year, Father Justin, an unusual Monk given that while he is a Greek Orthodox Monk, he is a most erudite and intellectually sharp Texan born, quietly spoken man.  He is coming to England and YOU can meet him too.  He will be here on November 28th, speaking at St Martin-in-the-fields in the morning and at Mandeville Place in the evening.  You can read about all this and register for both events by clicking this link to the newsletter with all the details.  

If you never get to camp in the Sinai desert and you never manage to come with me to St Catherine's Monastery, then register now to hear Father Justin and book your ticket to London from wherever you are.  This is an opportunity not to miss.

So pleased to show off the renovation work in the library

Summer leftovers

The Full Team

We saw you all, every single one in July and August and now you are gone, the stocks are low and we are trying to keep our spirits high.  Not so difficult because summer takes a breath at the beginning of September, there is a natural pause.   All the burning hot long days are dissolving into damp dewy chillier mornings and earlier cooler evenings and a change is clearly in the season and in the air.  We wave you off, the last of our own summer visitors today just as the swallows are dipping and chasing and practising their loop the loops across the fields, landing on the telegraph wires and seeming to chat to one another.   Grandpa sits  in his chair with his feet up reading the paper then falling into the sort of sleep that Grandpas need after a long summer of entertaining and gossiping with sons on the front step with an evening cigar and perhaps a glass of this or that.  There is comfort in tidying up, it keeps sadness away when you have all gone.  The fridge is full of leftovers, little bits of slightly wrinkled green pepper and a few old pots of yogurt, well past their sell by date.

The summer house beckons

The best leftover of the lot though is the once teeny tiny space ship baby, now pointing things out and wandering around finding new words every day, new skills and developing distinct character.  She and I get to spend this leftover day together and we end up with a leftover ice lolly together on the front steps.  There is nothing like this time of year for peacefulness, all the rush has settled down, most of the harvest here is in, GCSE results and A Level results with their attendant joy and relief or the opposite are delivered; jobs which change location are mostly in place and I am absolutely desparate to get back to regular meditation which doesn't have thoughts of washing or food preparation.  I feel the pull towards the early morning summer house quiet right through me and tomorrow will be the day!

Parents and Grandparents have their place

They only look tiny!

me and mine

Her and hers

I catch a glimpse of an old photograph hanging on the wall, a photograph of a beach in North Devon with two tiny figures walking into the distance.   There they are, a tiny pair, in the photograph the size of my little finger nail.  To me, although tiny, they are unmistakable, there is something so familiar about them, the way they incline towards one another and their coats; his, a lightweight showerproof jacket and hers similar but longer.  I think they must have just replaced these over and again because in my memory they always wore coats like this.  I have seen this photograph often but this time it creeps up on me and has a new poignancy because although I think that they were old then, I am probably now nearing their age and stage.  I find this image arresting and somehow feel closer to who they were, as if our experiences are the same now, the experience of being and becoming and passing on.  In the middle part of our lives, we feel as if WE are the real deal, our lives have a substantiality about them which isn't really true, it is a trick of nature to divert us from any sense of impermanence, to underline our sense of duty to pass on what we think is best for our children.  So, we will feed them with the best we can find, send them to the best schools we can find, perhaps take them to our Church or our place of worship, we take them on holiday, we embrace their talents, nurturing their piano or violin playing (if they happen to be musical), washing their rugby, football, tennis clothes, we meet and approve of their friends and generally we hope for the very best for them.  We think though that we are the real deal when we are just passing through their lives, wearing our fleeces and crocs, definitely still interested enough to keep them in view but also aware of both our mortality and our immortality.  That is the message of the photograph, you, we, I am both mortal and immortal and it is good to  meditate on that looking kindly both ways, to our now tiny fingernail sized parents to the growing grandchildren who will follow us.  

Your mind or mine is like a fish tank

You may find at the start of the journey of meditation and self-discovery that your mind is like an aquarium filled with all sorts of life.  What you thought was you yourself turns out to be a seething mass of these fish like slippery shapes, like fish amongst predators who rise from the deep and swirl with their great strong tails, snapping and snorting their way around the smaller fry.  Your (our) job is to watch them all, large and small and discern what emotions they provoke .  This is your chance to change the legacy of your mindset.  So, here is a guide to the way the Aquarium works;  first, remember that it isn't natural, it is a quasi real environment and remembering this is the most important thing.  So remember that this mind and its shenanigans  aren't the natural way of being;  this set up of aquarium/mind is a world made to resemble reality where  the water and food are brought in by the owner, that very person also chose the fish who would be in there.  You (or I ) am the person whose aquarium is being watched.  In my aquarium/mind I can see the movements of the fish ideas, little familiar flashes of this and that, no threat at all to the peaceful clear water but then something moves on the back of a sound, maybe a name is spoken and stirs an emotion, a memory and then swirling up from the bottom of the tank comes a dark shape, a shark or a whale sort of shadow and with it fear or anger or resentment moves the golden tiny fish into a rush.  This is where you (I) watch unmoved and our watching of the tank of our mind over time will make the dark sharks and his friends smaller and eventually even totally disappear.  It is the oddest thing that the sharks and sharks mates were ever allowed in by the keeper of the aquarium but they were and our job is to let them go again and again and again until they never rise again.

Do they get newspapers in heaven do you think?

An icon in a Monastery keeps the faith

When my imagination runs away with itself, I like to imagine heaven like a very nice English country house hotel with angelic butlers and smiling maids looking after a thoroughly good clientele.  God in this particular version of heaven is probably like the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey.  In this version of heaven, the newspapers are delivered and laid on marble surfaces for God to examine.  He, having lived as long as the whole creation and been several different important people in many different places and centuries, is used to seeing the changing ideas.  Today, he will have picked up the Times (I'm sure he reads the Times first) and sees right at the top the headline LOSING RELIGION CAN BE SERIOUSLY GOOD FOR YOUR WEALTH.  He sighs and confides in an angelic Mr Bates that he has seen it all before in cycle after cycle.  Religion and Wealth;  one rises, one goes down and at the moment Wealth is in the lead.  The people outside the gates of Downton Heaven are less religious now and have rejected the idea of God and this has been proved by academics who have found by asking questions and noting the current answers that nations become increasingly secular the wealthier they are.  Surely everyone knows this, says God, Wealth has always promised that if you believe in her, you won't need to make any provision for your future, wealth will pave the way, will in its own way become a God to you, she will look after your children's happiness, offering sweeties and trips to the zoo and rides on bumper cars.  To you, the sweeties will take on a different shape, perhaps just high class chocolates but maybe high grade cigars and cognac and more, trips to the zoo become extravagant safaris in faraway places and rides on bumper cars might deliver you a Porsche or a Bentley.  Nothing wrong with that but once your run of luck along with your wealth  runs out and you can't drive the car because you are too old, or travel abroad for the same reason, no more skiing or safaris, no more dinners out in swanky restaurants, you might feel a bit depressed especially if you hadn't read the health warning on the packet.  Wealth, it says, runs out!  Now, if wealth departs from you and health too, that is one thing but if wealth departs from the society you live in and economic health declines, where are you going to turn because there won't be any money in the coffers to pay for your benefits?  Maybe then, if we are lucky, there will be some old man or woman or some old Rabbi, Monk, Nun Priest or Teacher, a holy person, man or woman who will have kept the words which religions are built on, words which tell of the God who takes the form of light and air and water and earth, of life itself.  Those are the words you are going to be treasuring when everything in your world has gone a bit dark and those are the words that this old grandmother would have wishes every one of her grandchildren to have heard so that they can find them when they need them.  That's why religions work in hardened times, they have the words you really want to hear.

It's true by the way! but not the bit about God being English and like the Earl of Grantham!

Tears are doing their own thing

My  friend  is a really good cryer, I am not!  I think that it isn't grown up or very British to cry.  So, having found myself crying a bit I have taken a look at it and here is what I have found.

The word tears, means not just those briny wet things which come our of your eyes, it also means to split, to tear apart, to rip. That word with its different apparent meaning is meant to be like that.  It takes a split or a tear to send the tears out to wash your face and purify your heart

When you are a grown up, particularly a really really grown up sort of Granny, about to be 70 years old for heaven's sake or you are Grandpa, you don't cry over things, you pick yourself up, maybe meditate a bit more determinedly but you know that your role is to accept things and keep the show on the road.  Tears don't fit in!

You, the two old grandparents don't even cry together over things because you try to sort them out, you are after all a grown up.  Then, just when you are off your guard, you watch some innocent thing, a baby, the Queen's face at the RAF fly by, you hear that those 12 boys and their coach are all rescued, you hear a hymn or just a song which has meaning or God forbid, someone plays you the Pacobel Canon perfectly, up they come, they come creeping into your voice while you are trying to speak clearly and running down your cheeks and generally making an outlet for all the sad things which you haven't been able to cry over.  Tears are your humanity and they connect you with the sadness of human beings and others everywhere.  They can be tears of sorrow or tears or relief.

If you know you have a bit of well of tears waiting to come and show themselves, better to go watch a really sad movie (I took myself off to watch Breathe) where in the dark in St Neots Cineworld you can just let them roll down your face and not even bother to dab your eyes or your nose which also shares the rolling stream.  Somewhere in the tears is the reason for them and the reason will be about kindness or lack of it, it will be recognising that you and all human beings are the same, have the same needs and are looking for kindness among people.  That is why, it is the beautiful and the kind and the innocent that suddenly tear the fabric of your 70 year old brave face.  

If tears have to come, you know that inside you, there must be love because if you didn't love, you simply couldn't cry about sad things happening to you or to others and they wake you up to the fact that your needs are just the same as another persons and maybe you will watch out more carefully for the signs of sadness on another person.  You certainly won't be wanting to add sadness to them.

A Love Affair, a Marriage and Then....

See the golden light behind all the figures

If I said to you that taking up Meditation was like a love affair you might not believe me.  You might say that meditation is there to help relieve stress and cope with life and although it may, I maintain that if you are lucky, it is like a love affair which can turn into a marriage which will carry you towards the real goal of your life.  Now the real goal of your life turns out to be finding the key to the life and death conundrum.  It is a conundrum because like a love affair which doesn’t go anywhere, life can offer you its treasures and its pleasures, its fun and its frolics, its power to succeed and its power to be wealthy, healthy and beautiful, life like that is only on loan, it will withdraw all those things from your body and mind and hand them to the next generation.  It will appear to dump you.  Now the trick is to find out what that life really is, to concentrate, to meditate on it so that you are so married to it, so united to it that you follow it to its source.  Now this is how meditation works, you are given a mantra perhaps or a method and you practice.  Maybe to start with you have wonderful transcendental experiences, you soar out of your body to realms where angels dance but you are so taken by the experience that you forget the method of concentration on the word or the point of light which is the real focus.  Meditation is going to take you on a journey through all the worlds and ideas you have ever had, it will test you with good ideas, great bright inspirations for books and pictures and even a shopping list, it may flash up scenes which belong in films and try to shift you from your seat of contemplation into action. This is the marriage taken place, not just the wedding but the long old slog of marriage where everything must be faced together, better or worse and all the rest of the opposites.  You just sit it through and then perhaps suddenly, just when you need it, the word, the mantra, the point of light will bend towards you and completely wrap your individual self in its loving embrace and you will know the power and completeness of love, life where there is no dying off.  Now that certainty is worth the hour you give to it each day.

Easter Message for Sophie,Lottie, Lala,Max, Sebastian,Grace, Willa,Archie,Isla, Benji and baby Bea

3 and 4

1 and 2

Number 6

9

The reason I write a blog is to put words in the great space which doesn't need a book or a letter, to leave you a feeling for what Easter might really be about and why it is so important.   Looking for meaning  is a sort of Easter Egg hunt where you you have to look for the sweet reward. Imagine two centuries ago what it must have been like if you thought you had got rid of the nuisance threatening your belief system, you had persuaded all the people to vote and shout for Jesus, an innocent man to be crucified just because he threatened to expose the false idea of human beings  being separate from God.  Imagine how those who thought they had disposed of his influence at the point of his death panicked when the power of his dying caused the veil of the temple to tear smack down the middle.  Imagine how they had to try and mend the great hole which had torn into their very identity as a good religious persons, leaders of a community.  Imagine too the panic they must have felt when  after the tearing of the veil, although they had employed security guards to keep people away from the place Jesus body had been put, when they had blocked up the tomb where his body was laid, they heard that, in the night, the security services hadn't even noticed when the huge stone had been rolled away and the body had somehow escaped from its bindings and left a heap of white cloths behind.  I bet those security guards got the sack!  

8 and 9

You may not hear so much of the story of Jesus as we did because somehow, the story and all that goes with it has been largely left to grannies and grandpas to preserve as best they can until more people need to hear it.  It is usually when  lives are under threat, when there is a war or we are ill or things have gone wrong that we look for someone to make sense of what we are apparently going through.  Jesus' story is both what he taught and what happened to him.  People interpret it differently and some people don't even think about interpreting it at all especially if they haven't even heard it.  Some people think it is a bit of history and no longer relevant. 

11

But what is relevant about it is this....2018 years ago which is a drop in the ocean of time, a teacher who knew What really was Truth was born, lived and was then killed (but then wasn't really killed, that's the thing) because he had told everyone who could hear it that God was in them and they were in God and that they wouldn't actually die. That message was what threw the switches of everyone who had said that God was elsewhere not everywhere.  He, Jesus showed that he could pick up his body at will and he did so to come back and tell the people who would listen that they were more spirit than body and  that spirit lives on even when the body doesn't.  Now that is the real message in the Easter Egg and that is the message worth finding out about even if you are now 16,13,10,9,8,6,5,3 or only just one year old.  I think you only really find it out when you have exhausted everything else!  So, if that happens, you will find that words like mine are floating about in the great space and they will always come to help you. Actually you may not need the words, you may find it just by yourself by becoming still.

Every Donkey has its day

Me

Lovely lady in blue

I had heard that long long ago we donkeys were very important players in the old stories.  We carried Mary, the mother of Jesus to Bethlehem and then carried Him into Jerusalem where he was to die.  My mother told me these stories just as all donkey mothers have always told their donkey children but I hadn't imagined in my wildest dreams that I might be playing a part in this story!  Today I found out that donkeys are still central to the story of the Man who came to wake people up to the Truth of who they are and whose story still does.

A basket full of crosses

My keeper with a shovel!

Singing to Nelson

This morning I woke up in Hackney in the city farm expecting a normal Sunday with children coming to visit and giving me a few more carrots than than I get on a week day when into my stall came my normal keeper with a brush and he set about smartening my tangled fur.  Next, into the City Farm transport and we set off.  I have no idea where I am going, none at all but at 10.00 am, we arrive and all of a rush, my keepers get me out and I find myself in the middle of London in Trafalgar Square.  A woman in a long cloak comes to greet us, she is a bit worried that we may be late.  Late for what I think.  In Trafalgar Square there are literally thousands (apparently 10,000) of people of every age and size and shape and colour with multi coloured tops and all of them have trainers on.  I am wearing my normal shoes and I wonder if I am to join them?  But no, my job is to accompany the other lot, the nice lady holding a cross, the lady in the black cloak and quite a number of people in red and white.  I have two baskets tied onto a strap round my middle which have small paper crosses in them.  We set off, right through the  multi coloured trainer wearing people who seem pleased to see me and we go right through the middle of them and right through the middle of Trafalgar Square, people kindly moving to let us pass.  We are joined by a band with trumpets and drums and we stop beside Admiralty Arch.  I notice that the red and white people are singers and out of their red and white long robes, they produce coffee cups for a quick swig before we set off back across the Square.  The runners stop, the red and white people who are the choir, sing hymns, the lovely lady in blue with the cross leads us across the Square where even the people waiting to run pause to let us pass.  The runners run onward, we stop and sing again before arriving at the huge Church which is at the top of the Square.  Before I get back into my special transport, I am invited into the Church where I walk steadily up towards the front.  The Church is called St Martin-in-the-Fields and is called after a Saint who gave his cloak to a man who needed it.  It is full of people who watch me for a bit before I have to leave.  It was a different sort of day for me but for this morning I was a most important donkey and donkeys for years to come will wish that they could do this too.

Following the red and white people across Trafalgar Square

Going backwards towards the future

Chester Station

We take the train up to Cheshire where both of us were born and were children and teenagers.  We lived there until we joined the stream of young drawn to London for training and trying out a touch of independent living.  Some stayed, we both did; some returned and continued their lives there, either bringing home new wives met in London or marrying local girls.  We girls, mostly met our future life partners in London and settled there or perhaps in Suffolk or Warwickshire, Oxford or Cambridgeshire, Scotland and Wales.  But looking out of the window of the train as we travel up for the funeral of a fine family friend, we feel the welcome familiarity of the lay out of fields, a rich landscape where Cheshire cows crop the thick grass precursors to what we will enjoy as thick rich  cream and Cheshire cheeses.  As we get off the train at Chester where we are met by an old and most dear friend, one who did return and marry and bring up her family there. We can almost feel or do we imagine what it was like when we were met there by our fathers who have been dead for over 20 years now,  they, still young or as young as we are now, are somehow palpable in our memories now tuned back in to our growing up place.  Of course, it isn't the exactly the same and the cars and the shops and the road layout have all evolved into what we recognise as 2018 but driving along the Chester Road, there are still those deep red sandstone houses and rolling fields which were there when we were driven along to ballet or horse riding or later on to parties at Mollington Banastre, Craxton Wood and the Devon Doorway, tentative teenagers suddenly waking up to romance and meeting boys!  

We are here for a funeral and there are familiar faces, familiar backs of heads in the Church in front of us.  The funeral is for a lady of 96, not so many left of that age so most of those attending are our age and above.  We are handed a card as we go in to record our attendance but we get the feeling that perhaps the undertaker is offering future services to all of us!  We search amongst those in the congregation in front of us for some of our old dance partners!   There are a few there and we have fun chatting to them afterwards about our children and theirs and our grandchildren and theirs.  There are daughters, grandchildren, cousins too, it is their mother and aunt who we are remembering affectionately.  We find that there are 4 of us who went to primary school together, one of them is daughter to the lady being remembered.  She lives in Scotland so returning to Cheshire is the same mixture of thoughts and emotions that it is for us.  We are so pleased to see one another.  It is a chance to remember, literally re form in our minds, that old life, the parents and their aspirations, their lives, shaped by war service and return from the war.  The life shaping what created them was the foundation of the way they brought up families, did charitable works and lived alongside one another, cousins, aunts, friends, all hoping that it would always be peaceful and that life would continue in a kindly trajectory for all of us.  Of course, there are changes in the way we go about things, and changes again in the way our families live, but there is a link which can't be denied and which is as palpable but invisible as the feeling of our fathers being there at Chester Station.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt! says who

None of these allowed

If you have ever had the thought that you wished this oh too too solid flesh would melt a bit, join me! For sure, once you reach the great and honourable age which I am about to reach, along with the years, the oh too too solid flesh also gets added on around the parts of you that used to slip into jeans and bathing costumes, not to mention bikinis.  And it takes more than an hour of meditation every day to take it off.  You wonder why I mention meditation as a way of taking off the pounds which have accrued to your person and you think I must be dotty to even mention meditation alongside weight loss but hey, in my newspaper today, it is claimed that meditation will vastly improve your sex life!  Now, in my very reasonable thinking, meditation is meant to lessen desires, to elevate you to the heights of almost bodiless bliss and not to add impetus to the parts of your life more concerned with sensual pleasure!  

So, here are Grandpa and I meditating away each day and also during Lent, going without crisps, chocolates and alcohol and we should be shedding both the too too solid flesh as well as the things which tie us to it.  But, let me tell you that it takes time to both reduce the body as well as its desires and having added 10,000 steps a day into the wine, chocolate and crisp free existence, the oh too too solid flesh is melting rather slowly.

None of this either

A little about Ruth and a good life

Her name was Ruth.  She died today and she was ready to go.  Let me try to paint a word picture of this woman who was Swiss by birth but found herself, a child, living in Germany at the outbreak of war.  Her older sister was sent home to Switzerland but she, her mother and a younger sister remained whilst her father, a master baker was conscripted into the German army to bake bread for the troops.  They were left living without him just on the border with Russia and that was not an easy place to be.  First Russian troops crossing and pushing lives around in front of them, no care for the women and children trying to find a way to live, trying to find where their father was and if they could just get out and go back to Switzerland, join back up as a family.  The Russian troops weren't kind especially to her mother and to her aunt and that pushed these women to flee them.  Pulling her mother who was weak and ill on a sledge, with her younger sister, Ruth found the way to a repatriation centre and miraculously their father found them there, he had followed their trail. 

She told me all this story some years ago, we had become friends, we shared the same birth date.  This was only the start of her story because she came to England, found work and found a School for adults interested in what were the causes of the fortunes of men and what was behind it all.  She took up meditation and practiced it regularly.  Did she think she was good at it?  Probably not but she was a woman of discipline and she believed it was a good thing.  I think it must have served her well because in the last years of her life she was always bright and cheerful even when unable to do much.

She had a nice home, she had a car, she had friends and everyday she called her two sisters in Switzerland.  First one sister died, then the other developed dementia.  Ruth became disorientated, her sight and hearing began to let her down.  She could no longer drive, no longer study or read and eventually moved from her flat with a few favourite pictures and books to a residential home.  Her friends began to dwindle away for the same reasons, losing independence and some of them dying but there was the good man Bart with a gentle voice and utterly kind who visited her each week, saw to it that the staff looked after her, saw to it that she was supplied with what she needed and read to her from books which meant a lot to her, books of Wisdom and Comfort.  I visited her some months ago and found her resigned and calm, always polite to the nurses and still so nice to me who she probably no longer recognised.  There were plans to move her to a nursing home, she wasn't keen so when we heard that her heart had stopped, we felt that she had made her way to her own home and how well deserved that home is.

There are probably more unsung heroines who braved out times of difficulty and forged a life to be proud of.  It is worth finding out as much as you can about them while they are still around. Their legacy is their steadfastness and courage and kindness.

A long line of mothers going backwards and forwards.

My grandmother and my father (left)

my grandparents

We hear people arriving for early Church from the Church Cottage bedroom and we zoom out of our pyjamas and brush our hair and whizz out just in time!  The Church is where Grandpa's mother married his father in 1938, so 80 years ago.  We have the photographs; photographs of that time, with the male guests dressed in top hats and their ladies in flowery hats and furs.  The bride is so young, 21 which seems so young today and the bridegroom, with his own aeroplane, so dashing and the one gazing at the other.  The poor bride was taken on honeymoon in the small aeroplane by her dashing husband and was promptly sick into his boots.  She was a mother within a year and then it wasn't long until the war broke out and time together was limited by his postings.  Another baby, Grandpa arrives, the war ends and life goes on.  

Your great grandfather. the dashing groom

The Bride

On Mother's day we think of all mothers, especially the ones who mothered us and who aren't around any longer.  We think of new mothers as well and are amazed at how extraordinary all mothering is.  Mother is the word which arrives with the child and we get to pin that word to our heart for all the years of mothering and with it we get the package which contains all the love and patience needed until the child grows up and grows beyond us and then we pass the word on to the next generation of mothers.  We have just been one in a line of mothers and we honour all those, behind and in front of us and wish them all well.

Taking small steps!

walking with babies and children

Thanks to those kind people who have sponsored me already to walk the 10,000 steps.  March is the beginning of the challenge and March is tomorrow.  I need sponsors to shame me into making sure that I do those steps.  You can be one if you follow THIS LINK.

Rising from my accustomed idleness towards the goal of 10,000 steps, I find (thanks Rachel) that there is an app with a heart which tells me how many footsteps I have taken each day.  About 4000 does the dog walk once, 2000 is round the house and up and down the stairs and then there are the very teeny tiny small steps I take attached to the once teeny tiny now nearly walking baby who is back for a short stay because her mother has the flu.  I realise that meditation is not physical exercise and nor is tapping away on the computer and that both those non-activity activities haven't prepared me for doubling my daily walk.  Even if I take very small steps on the dog walk, it doesn't add much so I realise I just have to double the effort.

Walking round and round the kitchen with the about to be walking baby gets easier as she gets taller because I don't have to lean over so far.  It is a most interesting thing watching a baby grow up.  We are excited by each new step, thrilled when she pulls herself up but then realise that shortly all the kitchen cupboards will need to be made Bea proof.  I am thinking as I walk round the kitchen and up and down the hall with those small fingers tightly gripping mine that before long, she will be off, she will be walking around by herself.  And then she will be walking out of the front door attached to a hand and eventually she will be out of that door, will have passed her driving test and be waving us all goodbye as she takes 

off to University and then into life and perhaps off to foreign lands.  When you are in the midst of rice cakes and broken nights you can't imagine the day when that baby who seemed to actually belong to you, has taken her or himself off into his or her own life.  It is partly a triumph and partly a rather sad part of being a mother or grandmother.

Ray-zing money for nurses because of the three times free Ray

Watching the last few weeks of a life highlights important things.  One of them is good nursing.  There is nothing like a good nurse with the relevant skills to relieve pain, to give confidence and comfort and to work with the person and the person's family.  If that person knows that their body isn't going to dominate and pain cloud the mind, they can begin to move in their own way towards the exit gate.  Now that requires love and skill.

 Without nursing in place, finding the exit gate can be a horrid horrid experience for the person going that way and for their family and friends.  Our three times free friend, Raymond got the best of nursing at the end but it had to be fought for because this service is strapped for nurses and strapped for cash.  He was able to be just where he wanted to be and it meant his family who had walked the steps of his illness up to then could confidently keep him company without being overwhelmed by unnecessary anguish, his or theirs.

Its a daffodil walk in March

But nurses are in short supply and good nurses need to be trained.  People who have nursing within them, need to be encouraged that this is a great great career even if it isn't the best paid job in the world.  It is great because it allows great love to flow naturally and that doesn't happen in every job.  Other professions require different qualities but good and loving nurses and doctors are what makes the difference to a person in pain or fearful.

So, I am going to walk 10,000 steps a day through March which doesn't sound too bad does it?  It is also lucky for the dogs and lucky for me who currently am far from fit and far from thin.  I am doing it because Marie Curie promises to give more people the sort of care which makes the difference but they need the money to do it.   I am also doing it because I saw what a difference it made to Ray and to all his family.  I also saw how pressed the services are to provide it and that they need all the support they can give.  If you would like to help me raise enough money to fund a nurse, go to the just giving page.  I will do my very best to walk and will be hugely encouraged by support.