Ganeida's Knots

...summer in the light, and winter in the shade. ~Charles Dickens




Spring is here ... sort of.  It got warm round here & we started removing the layers of clothing, started removing the extra blankets on the beds but we didn't pack anything away because the cats haven't started moulting yet.  No moult, there's still cold weather coming.  It arrived with a vengeance with the westerlies bringing down trees & power lines, stripping the sails out of the trees, squashing the baby lettuce & miniature silverbeet.  The bananas stood firm.  The cats reverted to being indoors cats & Kirby cowered in the bathroom while the rain thundered & the wind screamed & whistled round the eaves & roared across the bay.

So for two days we have been picking up the dead wood & burning, burning, burning.  Dino & I did a massive overhaul of the house that included several trips to the tip.  Now I am eyeing off Liddy's room...;P  Star & I have been collating her work to take in to her umbrella on Wednesday.  I am calculating money for new tires for the island car &  a tune~up for the mainland car so Star & I can take a trip up north.  Star has complicated my life by taking up the violin again: prac & theory!  Two hours we were there but as Star says, she's older now, she knows what is required, she is prepared to do the hard yards ~ & she is eyeing off a better quality violin! Um. Yeah.  Wednesday she is doing  private singing lessons.  The word eisteddfod got mentioned.  Star had better get her driving together fast!

We go on school holidays at the end of the week.  I so need to regroup!  It has been a really messy & complicated year so far, not helped by my son, who thinks the 3 minute drive to the jetty at 5.15 am is the perfect time for deep & meaningful theological discussions.  Doesn't he know I drive on auto~pilot at that time of the morning?  I am barely functional, let alone at my theological peak! 

 Now Dino is one of my doers, & the only one of my children who has never been a reader.  Why read about it when you can just do it, right?  For years I have been saying to this kid,"You want to know God, you want to know God's will for your life ~ then you need to know your scriptures!  You need to know them inside out & back to front", but like so many before him Dino thought there must be an easier way, one that did not require so much effort on his part to do something he wasn't madly keen on.  The penny has finally dropped & hit bottom with a resounding clang!  The kid who hasn't opened a book since he left school & has never, ever read for pleasure is steadily working his way through my theological library ~ a library that is not for theological wimps!  We have been here before but Liddy's mind rolls along completely different tram tracks, so much so she has bought her own library.  Dino's mind works scarily like mine.    He is experimenting with meditative prayer & wants to compare notes, wants to know what's on my shelves that discusses this.  Foster, that's who.  Like others in this house he is touching on the prophetic & now he has borrowed my book on fasting.  Am I rejoicing?  You betcha!  I am also flipping out a little...ok, I am flipping out a lot.  I rabbit on about this stuff here but there's lots I don't say.  It is intensly personal, unformed, raw.  I struggle to give expression to the lived experience, to articulate in a way Dino might understand & I am being forced to expose parts of my spiritual journey that I have kept carefully hidden because  the waters are deep & treacherous & few venture into them.  The Lord wasn't joking when He told me he would undertake my children's training Himself!  Liddy was straightforward compared with what's going on with Dino.

There's not a lot of the peace, the quiet, the stillness I need to recover & regroup.  There are days I envy my cats: a patch of sunlight, a cosy bed...mmmm, bliss.