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Showing posts from April, 2022

Photographs

Wake while it is still dark.  Dress.  Light the fire.  Make coffee.  Read the New Testament.  Sit in silence.  Here is the scaffolding I use to construct the day, a frame which gives shape to and bears the weight of everything that follows. The silence wraps itself around two concepts too big for right now: intention and consent; perhaps I'll try and speak of them at another time.  And then, when the light turns blue silver, before it gets all directional and golden, before the sky has its brief fling with the long end of the colour spectrum, I drive around the harbour.  The light plays and dances. Light off the sea is reflected, and therefore polarized so it has a different character from that which is flooding the new sky. Light filtered through clouds is softer and bluer than the fresh edged stuff, which has only had to contend with air. There are shadows and lines and colours and reflections everywhere. There are photographs lying about at every turn, but I don't need to po

70

This photo was taken by my daughter Catherine, when I was about 50. I think she did a pretty good job.  The number 70 has a kind of Biblical gravitas. It’s the number of elders appointed by Moses to lead the recalcitrant Israelites, and the number of people who went down to join Joseph, in Egypt. Jesus sent 70 disciples out to minister in his name, and the first Jewish Sanhedrin had 70 blokes in it. And, of course, there is Psalm 90:10:  “ The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore, yet is their strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away ”. All this has some personal import because I turn 70 today, and can no longer fool myself that I am middle aged. I’m old. And before you feed me one of the lines of balderdash that pass for wisdom in our culture - “you’re only as old as you feel”; “70 is the new 50”; “age is just a number” or some other such nonsense, let me tell you that I am happy to be old. Deliriously