Joining Ginny @ Small Things for Yarn Along and Frontier Dreams for Keep Calm, Craft On today!
Knittingwise
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It's been so very long since I joined up with yarn along. So many projects cast on and off my needles since November! Here is a small selection from last month's photo archives :)
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| " Little Dorrit" Little Dorrit was Nola's Christmas present. Her tunic was knitted up with a ball of wool that I spun on my drop spindle a couple of years ago. It was so much fun watching how the colours worked their random way into the pattern. |
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| Autumnal Vest finished for Tilly and another one to match for Fina, photos to come next week fingers crossed! Reading wise * I have been so enjoying Sister Wendy's latest book on Prayer. It was given to me as a birthday present on my kindle and I'm finding myself going back over different parts of the book again and again. The book draws me into a lovely meditative state. I can almost see the gentle morning sunlight illuminating the stark bare stone Carmelite convent walls as I read. It is a book that offers the mind a wonderful still, space to dwell and wonder in. I can also hear Sister Wendy's voice clearly in the writing after watching her series of art both on TV years ago and now on DVD with my girls, and that only adds to the charm, as you'll know if you've ever had the pleasure of hearing her yourself :). Here is a brief excerpt about "Christ and the Samaritan Woman" 13 - 1311 by Duccio de Buoninsegna ...  "The apostles have gone into the city to satisfy their hunger. They emerge in a compact bunch, supporting one another, protected from the clear light of His presence by the fortress of the world, their own self sufficiency. Their hands are full, they clasp them to themselves, satisfied hands with the food of this world in their grasp. But the woman stands alone and exposed before Jesus. Her emptiness is seen not only in her hands, but in the most noticeable detail about her, which is the large empty pot on her head. She does not hide her poor human emptiness: she exposes it, but the exposing is to Jesus. She is a living symbol of our need for Him. She stands still, an image of the stillness we choose at prayer. But Jesus does not reach out His hand to fill hers. He does not come to her. Jesus sits by the well and asks her to give to Him: her need is met with demand - again, a moving symbol of prayer. God gives Himself, not obviously, not in terms tangible or visible, but in holy contradiction. It is in giving that we receive: we, us. Our prayer may seem all nothingness, all giving, giving of time, of energy, of struggle to be present. Jesus may seem to have only asked, not given. But that is how He does give. The woman went away, wholly changed, fed and renewed to her innermost depths. Yet she was given no water, no food. Jesus told her to draw her own water, and He revealed to her the shameful inner truth she carried. Yet this apparently merciless treatment was living water, was life, was communication of God at such intensity that there were no human terms in which the woman could see or judge what had happened to her. But she believed, and the whole city of her personality her whole self, all she was and could become believed with her." |
