Working

I spent most of this week conducting a Special Character review of Craighead Diocesan School. This morning I dropped my colleague, Anne, at Timaru airport around 6.00 am and then drove South. When the sun rose, I was in my old Parish, and passed the ponds on the farm that used to belong to John and Erena Hay, so stopped briefly to take a nostalgic photo.

Craighead is a simply stunning school. Tucked away in a quiet suburb of Timaru it has been a girl's school since 1911 and an Anglican one since 1926. The old buildings are tastefully and practically modernised and a confidence in the school's future has seen them continually upgraded. The guys in hi-viz vests are still putting the finishing touches to the latest iteration of that development, a new gymnasium sports fields and classroom blocks. At the heart of the school is the chapel whose dramatic modernist stained-glass window is East facing and therefore catches the rising sun every morning when the girls file in for prayers. But beautiful as they are, it's not the buildings or the grounds which impressed me so much as the articulate, confident, grounded women I met: the students of the school and the staff who taught, nurtured and guided them. It was an engaging and rewarding three days, and a sign of things to come for me, as last Monday I began work with the Anglican Schools Office on a part time basis, and will be doing a fair bit of this sort of thing.

Also on Monday, I received notification that, after a quite lengthy application process, I am now a member of the New Zealand Association of Christian Spiritual Directors. Some of my time is now taken up in conversation with those who seek me out to discuss their inner lives.

I stopped in Hampden for poached eggs and coffee and got home at nine, briefly shared my week with Clemency, looked at the latest ultra sound pictures of my imminent grandson, went and saw my professional supervisor, pruned some roses, and sat on the couch for a bit. So this is what retirement is like. It's not as quiet as I'd imagined.

Comments

Kate said…

It sounds lovely though!

25 August 2017 at 20:59

Elaine Dent said…

Thus one of the gifts of retirement is that we may not know what our next work will look like, and we have the time and space to figure it out. Thanks for the reminder.

25 August 2017 at 21:44

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