Grow

It's our wedding anniversary today. We've been married for 42 years, or about 2/3 of our lives. A marriage isn't an entity, but a process. Like everything else in the Universe, and like the Universe itself, we are, all of us, in a constant state of flux and change and it is an extraordinary gift to be able to make most of those changes in company.

John's Gospel begins, In the beginning was the Word. Which means, I think, that this vast process of growth and transformation - life, marriage, Being - was spoken into existence; which is a way of saying it has purpose and meaning.The journey towards that meaning is A long pilgrimage in the same direction, to steal Eugene Peterson's phrase. For Clemency and me. For all of us.

Photos: I took the top photograph in our flat in Abraham place in Auckland in 1977. I would have used a Canon FTb, a 50mm lens on Ilford FP4, developed the film and printed it in a darkroom I had set up in my study at St. John's College. (enlarger, trays, firehose through the curtained window, rubbish bin for a sink) I reproduced it in 2005 using a Canon 300D with its 18-55 kit lens @ 49mm, 1/60, f5.6, iso100. Bottom photo: My son in law somehow acquired a large pile of gnarly old tree stumps which then sat in his driveway for a while. So last week we cut them into firewood. I did the cutting and Clemency (aided on occasion by Noah and Ada) did the stacking. Bridget took the photo with her iPhone.

Comments

Merv said…

Much joy to you both this day.
I will steal Muggeridge's phrase and suggest that you are creating 'Something Beautiful for God'.

11 December 2018 at 07:54

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

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

The Traitor

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Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

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