Lockdown and haircuts and beards -oh my! If you’ve met me online over the last 12 months you will have noticed a lot more facial hair. One of the things I decided in lockdown and home-working was that I’d see how growing the beard went. Sometimes the hair has followed suit -at the moment it’s […]
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr. We are ‘hoping’ that life will return to normal – but what is normal now? My […]
Although cultivated and cared for, the garden and our public outside green spaces are also uncontrollable and wild. I like the cracks in the stone and the flowery weeds; those uncontrollable beauties that help the host and guest remember that hospitality isn’t about controlled perfection but instead making a space of welcome. Often when we […]
Many of us have been waiting for many months. Waiting for restrictions to be lifted which will allow us to be face to face, two metres apart, in a garden with friends and loved ones we haven’t seen for so long. It’s not a stretch for anyone to imagine that kind of waiting and longing. […]
Image by: Jürgen Matern (from wikimedia commons) Paradise is a garden or a park. We got the word from the Latin via French and it was borrowed from the Hebrew ‘pardes’ which in turn had borrowed it from old Persian. The kind of thing in mind seems to have been a walled garden or park […]
Things are either natural or man-made. It’s completely natural. A natural remedy. The natural response. Natural sounds good. Words associated with man-made: synthetic, artificial, manufactured, unnatural. It’s a man-made problem = it’s our own fault. Man-made sounds a bit rubbish. What is it about nature, the garden, or the rural, that makes people think of […]
I used to be an RE teacher when I started going out with my husband, David Wilkinson who was then an astrophysicist turned Methodist minister. He was travelling the country lecturing on Science and Religion when I confessed to him that I always avoided teaching the optional Science and Religion module on GCSE RE, because […]
Photo credit: by Viola-Ness – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84661675 https://www.liveenhanced.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/8-Andy-Goldsworthy-Art.jpg I can’t now recall when I first saw a photograph of Andy Goldsworthy’s art. I do recall being stunned and amazed by the colours and shapes in a ‘natural’ landscape -produced by leaves, rocks, spittle, mud, water, thorns … All the more so […]
