Found

I read the story I have read a thousand times, of Moses and Aaron doing magic tricks before Pharoah, and then the anguish of the Egyptian mothers and the hurried meal and the impasse before the vast waters. Perhaps because I am reading it all in one piece, I notice for the first time, the rhythm of the repeated motifs and the beat of the language and the rising cadences of powerful emotion. This is a masterful piece of storytelling.

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I wrote the paragraph so long ago I hardly remember it, but I am struck by how clearly it speaks to me now. This insight has, I now realise, been sitting with me, unrecognized, for a very long time.

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I flick through the tens of thousands of pictures on my hard drive, looking for one in particular. I don't find it, but I stumble across others which I have taken and then never looked at again. They are so long forgotten it is like looking at someone else's work. And, like someone else's work, it refreshes and feeds me.

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It's one of those events which fills my daily schedule, a meeting to plan a meeting, It must be done and I am pretty sure how it will go. She smiles and sits across the table from me, and as we exchange pleasantries, says something she has said many times before; but this time, for the first time, I hear her and understand. And there, over the coffee cups, the light shifts and falls on my soul from an entirely new angle. I see the contours  and the shadows afresh. 

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Everything is there, waiting for me to learn to see it. Waiting for me to forget my forgetfulness.