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Early morning in Timaru while waiting for the hospital to be ready for me to visit Clemency.  Nikon D7100 set to Sunset Scene mode; 18-200 Nikkor VR zoom @ 95mm. f5.6 1/125 @ iso 250  A package arrived for me this week. It was a pair of Salomon Cosmic 4D 2 GTX walking boots. They are the shoes I will wear when Clemency and I walk El Camino Santiago del Norte in about 6 weeks time. A pair of boots like this will last about 1000 km on hard surfaces. My current ones were bought halfway through last year's Hikoi and while they are still in pretty good nick (my guess, about 250 km of wear left in 'em) they won't carry me the almost 900 km from Irun on the French border to Finisterre on the Atlantic coast. Just to make sure they were OK, I wore them for a stroll around the block, about 6.5 km, and put them back in the box. What with one thing and another, I don't feel nearly ready, this time around. Clemency has been assured her sternum should mend in time, and she...

1. At 4.15 the sunrise is still a couple of hours away. The sky is black and the familiar constellations are scattered across it in unfamiliar patterns. The moon is half gone but its light still shines off the snow, stretching to the mountains in every direction around me, with such brightness I could read by it. My breath freezes. The frozen snow crunches under my boots as I walk this most beautiful quarter hour of the day along the dirt road to the monastery chapel. The coyotes call to each other from valley to valley. Is it really only half a dozen times I have done this? 2. The only illumination comes from the moonlight in the tall stained glass window depicting the Madonna and child. How can a space so simple and bare be so holy, so beautiful? The monks gather on the steps. The old one, whose name I do not know, begins the plainsong, his face aglow with the seriousness of these words he has repeated every morning for, what? Decades? "Whoever drinks the water that I g...

The flight from Auckland to LA was perhaps the bumpiest I've ever experienced. There were no hot drinks served for the duration, but they did get the meals to us on time. I had a good seat - right at the back of the plane where the fuselage narrows there are 2 seats instead of 3 in the side bays and I got one of them, on the aisle with a wide space beside me and extra legroom in front. I managed some sleep. Then it was LAX, with the terminal looking all modern and clean and neat, and a large staff of uniformed people keeping the swarms of us moving through their system. It was surprisingly and pleasantly efficient, quick and friendly. Then I had about 20 minutes of walking from terminal 4 to terminal 7, a couple of hours in a lounge and a couple more in a Canadair regional jet. We flew over that vast swathe of California and Nevada that seems devoid of trees and full of canyons. I saw Las Vegas below me, then the dusty grey brown landscape became speckled with snow as it ...

The view from our deck about a week ago, 7 am Tomorrow I fly to Aspen Colorado, and, after a few days wait will go just out of town to Snowmass, and St. Benedict's Monsastery where I'm taking part in a ten day post intensive Centering Prayer retreat. It's silent, not even any eye contact, and involves many hours a day in concentrated meditation. Am I looking forward to it? Well, actually, no. There will be no escape, nothing that must urgently need attending to, no knock at the door or phone call to save me from facing myself. But I know that's where I need to be. And I know I will be in good hands. There's no internet and no cellphone coverage, so I'll be out of touch. Clemency and Debbie will have a phone number where I can be reached but I'm not expecting either of them to use it.

A little more than a year ago I planned a study leave. With a completely open and free choice about what I might want to spend the time on, I planned to address one or two of those pesky little questions that have been bothering me for a while: what and who am I and why am I here ? There was also the side issue of what on earth the Anglican Church had to do with those questions. I had a plan of action: visit the Holy Land, make a tour of New Zealand Anglican churches and read some fairly heavy duty books by people like Emmanuel Levinas and Jaques Lacan. I suspected that the Medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart might be useful in providing a Christian framework in which to work out the philosophy of Being described by the French philosophers. Of course, as those of you who have read this blog for a while know, the best laid plans of mice and men etc etc. In the week after I had taken leave of my parish to do all this thinking, my doctor told me I had dry rot and it might be rather a g...

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 ...