bits from my journal...

Have come down to the rocks by the sea again while everyone else is asleep. There is a mountain rising out of the mist out to the right and to the left there is only ocean. The waves thunder on the rocks around me like a bass drum and shoot up on each side like white fireworks. Suddenly there is a freak wave which sweeps over everything and I am entirely drenched and slightly surprised. And then the lifeguard comes along and blows his whistle at me.

You can hear the thudding heartbeat of the town all night. There are orange bodies and neon signs and british pasteboard over everything and there is still a river of loneliness cutting straight down the concrete streets. There are black volcanoes with snow on top in the distance and rock and sea and roaring waves and there are people pretending not to see it at all.

(From the aeroplane) There are clouds like arctic deserts and frozen dunes on dunes, clouds like
furrowed fields and purple carpets; clouds like crumpled fire and burnt paper... Not afraid of flying anymore.

Peace… it is as if you have turned the sand timer upside down so that space is on the inside and it all runs the other way round. You are such a curious river; where do you run to? I wonder how it is possible to stay in you. 

It is strange how a space can be so still and yet at the same time so full.  The closest image I can find for it is a frozen pause over a giant moving breathing ocean. But I wonder if this communicates to you what it articulates for me. I mean that the questions are still there but they are become wings to soar on; the mystery has not vanished but it has become the sky vast and magnificent overhead; the pain and the memories and the future have not been deleted, but they are like the sea beneath us and the distant horizon and do not need to be held onto. And it feels possible to stay here for some time; but it feels like if is reaches in any deeper I won't have any words left at all.

And the oddest thing is strangers stopping to ask what it is. How is it possible to respond? Maybe for now listening to them is the only thing to do.

Dreamt about shipwrecks all last night; I wonder if that was an effect of the sea. And spent lots of day immersed in working out how dialogues and conversation shape identity; that’s dissertation but also life interest stuff there. And it links back to the sea again, but that's another story.

Also just received a ransom call for a koala so if anyone
has 500K they could lend me that would be helpful. I forget where he said to
leave it though… poor koala. Oh well there are more of them aren’t there.

Do
you ever have moments where it feels impossible to take the time to
know the people you have already met, let alone the bigger part of the
six billion you haven't? When i feel like this i go and fling myself
around on the trampoline for a bit and it feels a bit better.

The only thing nearly as beautiful i remember from today were the tiny globes of water balanced on the blades of grass that I saw when lying in the grass this morning when the sky was still made of beams.

And one quote:
‘The rationality which we attributed to it led to superficiality, not only of judgement, but also of feeling… I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as ait, the surface of the stream without any contact with the eddies and currents beneath.' --- Keynes,Two memoirs

Today I was thinking about how grace is the poetry that transforms our stories into open-ended adventures.

I mean this:

Say the stories we tell are rooted in ourselves, originally. With them, we
strive to organize the world in relation to us in order to make meaning from it and to make ourselves safe. We adopt some of the bigger stories we hear around us (‘meta’stories; ‘metanarratives&rsquo to help us do this, some of which are pretty convincing, but at the end we still keep ourselves at the centre of them.

But the thing about the story of jesus is that it points to a poetry outside itself, a grace that existed before it, a love that gave life to it in the first place (so a ‘mesa’narrative instead of a metanarrative? An inner story pointing outwards instead of an outerstory that tries to contain all...).

So as people in the bible experienced the poetry of grace through an encounter with his otherness (his radical love, his miracles and, the topsy turvymess) like peter they hit the ‘oh I see’ moments which allowed them to see what his stories (or 'parables') were talking about. The stories heard and poetry experienced gave their lives new and transformative meaning – they were freed from their fixedplaces in me-centred stories and filled with a desire to follow Jesus, the person: to GO.

Because the poetry is like water that pours into us from the outside, or like an eternal spring that bubbles up inside us, pouring out of us again and again into the lives of others in the form of meaningful stories and loving actions and grace all over again...

We decided that the race should be run the other way up.

This (arguably) set off a

It all began cycling back; when passing over the bridge into my favourite corner of cambridge - those ancient narrow streets by caius with spires and domes and the bronze sundial peering over the red crumbly walls, and thin slit windows in the stones that have looked out onto the cobbles for centuries.

And all at once the bells inside the college began to peal. Not your regular chime of the hours, or a jangly torrent of wedding bells, but a solemn regular gonging, that sounded again and again…

I had to stop, the effect was so strange; it echoed all around the otherwise silent street with an unearthly vibration in the walls, and made the air feel older, the light brighter, the sky almost gothic.

jedi children and wandering rabbi, and then there was home. There was absolutely no point to this exercise as far as I can fathom, and isn’t that wonderful.