Retreat

After an utterly frantically busy couple of weeks dealing with the tax quarter numbers I am departing on retreat later. My first. Excitement bubbles, mixing occasionally with anxiety and anticipation.

In odd moments of downtime I have realised that my very unMethodist fascination with the Catholic Church and the spiritual writings of the saints began in my twenties when a friend went on retreat and I was envious beyond measure. Life here was such that back then you had to be Catholic to go to a Catholic Centre and no one else did retreats. Even though I have been Catholic for fifteen years now this is the first occasion when I have been in a position to go, family wise, work wise, health wise. I suspect that I have been emotionally and mentally to vulnerable to do this before now also.

Now my husband and Small will manage on their own, and my assistant will run my office and all of them will look after Os the small kitten that joined our family last week.

The preparation for this retreat has had its ups and downs and it has been on and off again at least twice. Now the day is come and I set off for the Benedictine Monastery and Mission isolated in the rural area's this afternoon. I will not have connectivity, and as I did on holiday recently I look forward to being unavailable for four days.

Dad

Tomorrow it will be a year since an aneurysm tore Dad's heart apart.

I am still tender, still miss him, still struggle sometimes to deal with my own conflicted feelings about him. No big surprise really.

Today I choose to remember the last time I saw him. It was a good day but I didn't know that he would be dead the next. He had come for lunch. My mother was holding a charity bridge tournament and he fled some twenty ladies who would be there for the day. We had such fun, he and I. Talking intensely as we always did. Subjects as varied as the global recession, wills and estate planning, running a professional accounting practice, birds, gardening and family stories. He reminisced about Great Uncle Cecil who was never quite right in the head as a result of spending three days stuck in a tree in 1910 with a pride of lions eating his horse below him. Back then Zimbabwe was still largely wilderness!

We talked also about his will. It seemed on his mind. He made his wishes clear and wound up by asking me to look after my mother. I didn't think about it much. Mum and I had never been really close and so I imagined that my sister can do that bit and I'll do the money. Easy promise to keep I thought.

As ever that's not what happened. My sister decided to leave for England and left me to look after Mum in the broadest sense of that word. Not that she is helpless for she is fit and strong at seventy nine, but she needs time and attention as we all do. Astonishingly a year later we have learned to like each other, and to have fun together. Yesterday we laughed and laughed at the antics on Os the eight week old kitten Small came home with last week.

Here is perhaps one of Dad's final gift to me. A relationship with my mother that is worth having and which I am beginning to treasure.

Hope......

Curious thing today.

But I was in the car a lot. Tax quarter again so doing the rounds of all my clients.’

It was hot today. Wind dropped and the cold disappeared with it. And it has been hot and very, very dry. The sky is white. I wondered why this is always my favourite time of year.

I get it. Suddenly I get it…………It is the season of unreasonable hope.

Hope when it is dry and hot and the last drop of moisture is being sucked out of every plant.

Yet the tababouya’s are blooming bright daffodil yellow, the jacaranda’s are nearly in full bloom, the bougainvilleas are magnificently magenta, acacia’s are bright green with the flush of new leaf. All with not a hint of rain, not even any humidity. We all know that it’ll still be weeks before the rains come. Yet all around me are signs of life. The plants believe that the world is a good place. And they trust that it will rain in due time. So they flower and leaf and do what they do, well before there is any proof that it will. Rain that is.

Hope when there is no good reason for it to exist.

And I guess that is faith.

So I love this season.

Harvest Moon

Heavens knows why we here call this moon Harvest Moon also. Weird habit as we are going into summer and after six months of dry have absolutely nothing to harvest but we do. Periodically, I recall that it is a Northern centric world......but that being so

and given that it is for the Southern hemisphere the vernal or spring equinox in a few days....

Moonrise was spectacular this evening. Lifting just above the horizon before true dark and blood red from the haze and dust in the atmosphere. Standing out in the warm evening the frogs seemed to form a chorus heralding the return of longer days and warmth and fertility. Presently though, we are in the deep dry, six months of no rain with the temperatures rising sucking the last remaining moisture out of plant and beast and man. In another month or so perhaps we will have built up to the first of the summer thunderstorms. For now we hunker down, dusty, sky white with haze and hold on. Early mornings smell of the faintest edge of damp on dry, dry grass.

This evening I reflect how often my life has seemed arid and bone dry, where even the deep wells have run dry, and I have not seen the promise of rain and green and verdant, abundant growth that the full summer holds.

Hope. Lost, scattered like ash before the wind.

Tonight I remember to hope.

As a deer pants....

Maria played the opening bars of our post communion hymn "as a deer pants for the water, so do I long for you" and the tears started to flow this morning. Tears from a long week that held two funerals and a even more time with bereaved families, set against the back drop of Dad's impending anniversary.

Breathe, I told myself. Breathe.

Let the tears come, as the merciful Grace of God comes. Unexpected, flowing, abundant.

Breathe, breathe.

The Spirit  moves softly, holding my tender, bruised heart.

Breathe. Gently Breathe.

The rhythm of Mass takes over carrying me forward, acknowledging my longing for God.

Rhythms

Today I am struck by the rhythms that pervade life.

Just at the moment I am caught in the slow, murmuring rhythm of grief. More deaths that I am really able to absorb. Deaths unexpected and expected, deaths of  youngsters just beginning to live and deaths of oldies who have lived long and full lives.

Running through them all the long, low, sighing, pulsing, cadence of grief.

Widow's and widower's and mothers and fathers and siblings and friends asking in fresh sharp anguish "will this feeling ever go? will I ever feel better again?" And the soft, gentle reply from those who know, who have been in this land....no, it never really goes away. But you are resilient, you can endure the unendurable.....even when you don't want to....

Over and around this murmuring the practical of meals cooked, visits made, cakes baked, passengers collected from airports, eulogies and testimonies written, and readings practicised. The doing that overlays the being. Life and death bound together, intertwined, inseparable. Sunshine and shadow.

Patsy

Patsy is a school friend's mother. She and I have been close friends for years and have lunched once a week since my boys were old enough to stay at school till the afternoon.

She died this morning as she wanted. Just her and her Lord in the wee small hours, crossing over without fuss and without undue melodrama and mostly without efforts to resuscitate her. The leukaemia which has made her so frail and gave her so much pain these last few months finally overwhelming her body.

But never her spirit.

Never her spirit.

Sing joyous songs with your Lord Patsy,

for I am singing a sad song this night. How shall I get on with out your faith and love and presence?