Still, expectant.

I pass this dinghy often when I am biking or walking or driving around the Otago Peninsula.
I like it.
The boat that is, although I like the peninsula also. And the biking and walking and driving now that I come to think about it. I have photographed this boat many times. Every time I pass it looks different. Every time I see more of it.
Re - vision.
The boat is obviously cared for, useful to someone but I've never seen it used. It's waiting, expectant, hopeful.
Like me, tonight
I finished my services today for the last time in a long while. The old pattern of the week is shelved for a while because this week I start my sabbatical. In the past, sabbaticals have been frantic fact finding mission with some urgent purpose so that I can justify (to myself) the time out and the expenditure. This time it's going to be a little calmer. Clemency has a limited amount of time off, and when I do the bit with the airliners she's going to come with me. In the meantime, the doctor is wanting to think about some question marks he raised the last time he leeched off some of my blood, so I can't do the mad galavant around the country examining Anglican churches that I had originally intended. I need to be home for a bit within easy range of a doctor with more sophisticated leeches, so I'll not be getting too concerned with the Anglican church and its ministry models. Instead, I'll be reading Emmanuel Levinas on the philosophy of being . I'll go back to tussling with Meister Eckhart. I'll be trying to rethink myself and what it means to be a consciousness in a body. Revision.

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Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

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Kindle

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