Autumn colours from today
Bujana with her tennis racket in the garden this afternoon
Eliyan's rose. Still Blooming.
Sweetcorn flowers, shivering haze of misty lilac and gold upon elegantly poised green stalks.
Below.
A snapshot of the dining room table laden with voyages to undiscovered lands and distant horizons.
We have started to read the new testament from beginning through during morning prayers.
This morning we reflected on the journey of the magi.
From their simple yet profound trust in God's guiding star, the following of it out of their own culture across their own boundary lines. To the dream that warned them not to go back to Herod.
The gifts they gave and the deep meaning within each of them, and of course, the taking of a different route back to their own lands. Each segment a testimony, a lesson, a journey in itself.
And there is a profound truth here. For don't we all take a different route back to ourselves, our ways and our lands after meeting with Jesus? Somehow after finding Him, we too, find ourselves a little way beyond the boundaries we've built, both internal and external.
Even on days when every sinew seems tightly wound, twisted into unnatural shape, when conversations go on in my head as a kind of background noise, and I can't even finish a sentence without losing the thread or even the very next word I was going to say in the melting pot that becomes of my brain.
A few moments with the sacred, just draws out the toxins and I am, once again able, to inhale deep drafts of oxygen.
Somehow the return journey to the world, that is my life, takes another route.
Across the wide open spaces of gold and green.
Yesterday when we reflected on the birth of Jesus I could only imagine Mary's pain.
Taking that long journey to Bethlehem, only to give birth to her first child in the midst of strangers, in the cold, cold, air of a rustic stable.
She lived an obscure life up until the resurrection and the founding of the early church.
A life of sorrow, sacrifice, mundanity, all struck through with the faith to see beauty and life in what may seem ugly and dead to other eyes.
Today, before lunch we stopped at the park.
It was a proper blustery Autumn day, the ducks flapped about the river touting for bread crusts.
Sadly we forgot to bring any for them.
Here we have come to the end of the day.
Fina is talking to her little "pets" Mummy owl, baby owl, little owl and Egbert the chick (her favourite stuffed toys :) in her cot beside me.
Matilda and Bujana are running and laughing downstairs.
Dishes lay piled, Mashed potato curdles upon the still warm stove and upon the air lingers a small, whisper of prayer still.
Hardly uttered, yet known and embraced all the same by the One who hears without a word being spoken.