posts appear before your very eyes..

so i just went to wales. i'm always taken aback with how much i love wales, but its like the border is some kind of magic portal that absorbs some of the memories when you cross it and go back into england, so that every time you return its shocking how beautiful it is.
me and sal cleaned the house on saturday and then left, had the funnest drive we've had in years together, took a wrong turn at wrexham (ah well) and ended up going the slightly longer way to our holiday...but the hills, i daresay mountains, were wonderous..we sang like ginny, smoked like old women and were quiet when appropriate..see, sa is one of those few people whose appropriacy when it comes to silence so often coincides with my own. and when the two of us are silent, its not as surprising and outsiders would imagine. i can see their problem, two of the most chatty people they know, in a car, for hours, mostly quiet. never. but yeah, and it works and its good for us. i think it got me ready for the days ahead.

my favourite single minute of the holiday was the last morning, communion just ending, mrs p singing like it was 1965, about the united nations letting my people go, rusty playing his drum like he's heard the song a hundred times before, and people singing. just singing, making up their own words, no acetates around, just singing about people being let go.
and then after that the jollities of BH Monday ensued, monday lunch at the pub, laughs with dan cate mrs p me and rusty, then more beach with lying around.
the beach on saturday was so much fun. the deep well of a sand dune we found ourselves secluded in was perfect..we had enough space to be friends together or friends in corners or up hills on our own. the time on the very top with mrs p telling her life story, what an epic, then emma cowan telling hers and people sitting around suddenly realising they did understand her...is there anything finer than a life story told in an hour that is so honest that all it takes is an hour....well done indeed girls...
the first night i was hugged more than i can remember being hugged before.
garden state with duvets at 2am on the sunday night was such a treat.
midnight frisbee with sal in the middle was hilarious on the saturday night.
peeling potatoes with emma and claire in the kitchen was a definite highlight for me.
and finally the drive home with rusty and the tired beer drinking that followed in the shire was the nicest way to finish it all..more stories, alot more laughing, you know, following the general theme
friendship is marvellous.

a well-masked past..

last night my dad went up in the loft to find something, and came back down with boxes of things so familiar to me, it was as if a 13 year old na had been hidden up there, and he'd found her.
oh man, the hours that followed i spent reading, laughing, really laughing, viv-thornton laughing....
the box of letters, notes, secrets and epic sagas written and passed between myself and friends in class.....talking about what we'd do at lunch...or what we had done at lunch..mainly involved finding the best vantage point from which to stare at certain boys..naming not one name here..they had code names anyway...journals covered on one side with the beatles' picture and the other thom yorke's...mixed tapes...ballet shoes...dt coursework...school tie..earrings...oh lord..but there is one thing that has left me giggling inwardly all day..ok..i'm not sure how to tell this one..bear with me..it was primarily on the part of my sister (the box was half her stuff too) but i believe i had initially led her into it.....and the evidence was all uncovered in that one box.....we sat on my bed last night, in pyjamas, laughing until we felt sick......i can't believe i'm about to blog this..it was 1994 man, there's no excuse for it i know, but well it was a boyzone thing.
i hid it, really quite well, i think.....i loved blur, i was at mile end.....i screamed country house at anyone who was rooting for roll with it, i looked like the hippy my mother had been in '72...i wore my hair in two plaits and a doctor marten on each foot..(yeah yeah they were still cool then). and yet this secret lurked, all the while, threatening to expose me as a fraudulent 'alternative' type. i loved shane lynch, he was my favourite...fiona loved keith duffy....well, at least my one isn't now in coronation street..
so there you are, i could elaborate. i won't
it passed, by the end of fifth year...then sixth form came along with all the boys, cigarettes, essays on the cuban missile crisis and virginia woolf you can imagine...they were happier days, i had no musically-criminal secrets to keep guarded any longer. it was 1997 and we only knew good music. as miss w will attest, music has not been that good since, so i was safe from having to look elsewhere, i mean not only was the music good, those indie boys were lush.....man, hands up who's favourite year was 1997..

vertigo

"uno, dos, tres, catorce..."
this means
"one, two, three, fourteen.."
why is it that we hear what we want to, or perhaps what makes the most sense to us, our assumumptions must make up a large part of what we hear or think.
anyway i've been assuming god was gone, or cross or not arsed. turns out he meant four.

today, i fell in love..

with these people..
i've never read an article about a band and loved them so immediately
haven't heard them yet..
even so, this morning, on the 94 bus, thanks to the friday review, i fell in love..

es mas de una senda que el camino..

flights are now booked to santiago de compostela..if you want to look it up, just google it for images, and look at the wonder that is a really beautiful city, dare i say it, even in the rain..
i'm so excited to be going back - and with celine! and for my birthday!
thanks god

empathic understanding..

This evening I attended Session 3 of my Introduction to Counselling Skills course..Regular readers will know that Capitalisation is not usually part of my blogging register, but I just feel like them today.
We studied empathy this evening. Its such a strange thing to talk about - something so vastly abstract and so indefinable, it was good for me linguistically if nothing else. It really did make me wonder though, why the word doesn't really appear in the Bible. It seems to me like such a Godful emotion, and surely a founding principle in so many things such as mercy, compassion, love and also intercession. How interesting that we live in such a time as this, that psycho-babble and spiritual principles can overlap in such a way that so much of what we believe actually is being expressed in places like the seminar room this evening, just without anyone actually talking about Jesus.
Am still enjoying God's company.
That's about all for now, I think.

who knew..?!

ok look, if you have ever heard me say "who knew?!" in response to something i've not heard/known before, please let me know. hewo was insistent all weekend that its like one of my pet phrases, and that it always reminds her of me when someone else says it. is wear i have no recollection of saying it ever, let alonge all the time..
bizarre
but..i'd like to say it now..!
who knew weetabix actually tasted of anything?
in the new world dietary order of me, weetabix are the essential start to everyday, and without sugar, it turns out they have a taste all their own..who knew? not me that's for sure, this morning i was like, mum, did you know!? yes darling...good one na
so things with me and god are good. no, no weetabix related analogy. give me time..
i think i get him a bit more, like i can see now that loving him is the most important thing, and that stages of the journey with him are about gradual discovery and slow but steady increasing obedience and commitment....i think i tried for years to catch up, like everyone i knew was so far ahead of me, so i always had these standards, like points to reach before i could know a certain thing, or understand another. but always in the light of other people and how they related to god. and so often living my life with him, in such close connection to the lives and loves of others, that i never quite knew what was my understanding of him or what he was telling just me, blurred in the community of believers that share thoughts and walks. but now its like we're just friends, like i want him around and i don't care if we don't have a chaperone. i know he knows what he's doing with me.
don't be mistaken, dear reader..i sound giddy, but i'm not.
just quietly glad, and steadily figuring that staying still in him is what i want to do with my time just now.

isn't there a song about glorious mud?

so yesterday was my favourite day for ages. i went to visit claire this weekend, in bath, and we got spoiled by her parents and sat in the summer house (i know not one other person who has a summer house) and talked. and talked. then yesterday morning we ventured over to hope. arrived late, got coffee, split the last bagel, and generally felt relaxed. at church.
so we stayed all day. in the afternoon we went to our favourite place in bristol, boston tea party, had coffee and talked in spanish...it can't be hard to see why this was my favrourite day for ages, surely..?
we went back to hope to go to this prayer thing...i think its like their new prayer school they're starting.
and i was still scared of god. i knew he wanted to change something for me, right then, but i was really scared because i realised as i stood there trying to pray that i'd kind of forgotten how...
so i backtracked to the day before, in the summer house, and this is why that helped..
claire and i were talking, about me and god, and how i felt so far from him, that i'd been awol from him for many months..etc, and she just in that great way of hers made it all a lot simpler: na,you want god don't you? yes. You don't feel any desperate need for him in any one particular area though right now, do you? no. and you don't feel emotionally needy towards him or emotionally screwed up by confusion concerning him? no. so..what's your problam? for ages you've wanted a relationship with god that wasn't based on your feelings or needs, but was boiled down to the fact that you still know life with him to be better than life without him. i guess. so
there i am, at church, with quite a few people i love in the room, and i realised she was right. that things aren't actually that bad. that really i haven't strayed that far, and that well, i'd got what i wished for.
he got me on my own, the last six months, and i think i can see why now.

blogging at work..

yes that's right, blogging on company time..although i suppose its really taxpayers' time..ah well..my contribution to society is as follows
thanks for the calls to blog, i have been aware of my neglect and cannot truly say it has been accidental.
i'm stuck in some pretty severe muddy mud. and we're not talking glastonbury, *oh the sun will be out in a couple of hours then we'll all dry off and anyway then we'lll be home in a couple of days and we can shower..oh and bothered because look, there's the brand new heavies..*
or even the other kind of glastonbury mud that provokes the most rage i can recall feeling - the kind that makes you think *this is the exact opposite of where i would like to be right now*
nol, not that kind of mud at all
on the other hand..
neither is it the miry clay of psalm 40. nothing half so dramatic or story-worthy.
the fact is, i think i've decided that in answer to jack black's wonderfully-put rhetorical question in high fidelity, *it is better to burn out than to fade away?* unfortunately i think the latter chose me instead of me thinking clearly enough to opt for either.
i'm talking of course about god.
there has not been a conscious decision to stop talking to him,. nor has there been some new theological, grouded rationale behind this temporary separation. but it has happened, and is still happening. i cannot find the inclination to go to him nor the resignation to decidly walk away. that's kind of like mud, isn't it....a naturally occuring phenomenon that if unheeded can encase or at least entrap you before you know it. it was once something else - soil, clay, bits of crap, but rain came or something and while you were minding your own business doing something else....(working hard, paying debts, not going insane, watching the oc, seeing friends, not blogging, etc....) it turned to mud and now you're screwed.
not irrevocably, of course..
other than that, life is pretty good. my counselling course is full of grumpy old women at counselling, its pretty hilarious. i'm learning more about renewable energy, more about why the people i work for are so opposed to windfarms, and finding myself loving the great benevolent machines (the wind turbines, that is, not the inner workings of the civil service..) more than ever after my trip to cornwall at the weekend. i'm also learning about why some countries just are poor. *the end of poverty* by jeffrey sachs is more or less just an easier to read version of *development as freedom*, but lets face it, the same book can get written over and over under different names and from different continents' perspectives, it doesn't matter, as long as more and more people are reading them each time one gets published.
i have very much enjoyed the election. particularly polly toynbee's idea of going to the polls with a peg on your nose because you have to vote labour as a progressive, social-thinking person, but the stink of the war taking any pleasure out of seeing tony and gordo back at the helm. i do think they are right for the country right now, and i think they have policies of the last five years that need another five years to be proven useful and beneficial. interruptions not needed at present, i feel. so well done britain, you have voted them back in even though it hurt. what a glorious day for free will. OHH and i watched *garden state* last night, and while i hate to be the last of my friends to start raving about something (so i won't), suffice to say, its wonderful. can't believe its the same idiot out of scrubs. acting works..
chaps i'm off, i really should work, much love to you all.