Temple Cloud

I used to think the flowers of the spring were colour-coded.   Apart from the early, winter flowers like snowdrops and crocuses, spring began properly in March in a blaze of yellow: primroses, daffodils, celandines and forsythia.   April was white with wild garlic, stitchwort, cow-parsley, and blossom on the apple and hawthorn and wild cherry trees.   Then May brought the blue of forget-me-nots and bluebells, before summer turned this to the bright pink or purple of thistles, orchids, foxgloves, woundworts, willowherbs, and cranesbills. Of course, these were arbitrary distinctions.   But there used to be some sort of pattern of what order the seasons came in.   Okay, a few years ago I remember seeing daffodils, and birds building nests, before Christmas, but that was in Southampton, which is both an urban heat island and a port town on the south coast.   Rural Somerset must be different, surely?   Somerset gets actual winters, as in ‘You can’t get to...

While tidying my desk for Christmas (okay, trying to clear some of the mess of papers off my desk for the first time in years, and finding all sorts of letters I hadn’t responded to or hadn’t even noticed or opened, including letters telling me to make medical appointments, and personal letters from friends who are now dead and whom I can never respond to), I found something triggering. I know people overuse the word ‘triggering’ a lot, to refer to anything that annoys them.   However, this really was a reminder of trauma which caused me to relive the trauma to some degree.   Specifically, it was a handout from my therapist, which reminded me of a session which had gone horribly wrong and which was one of the reasons that I no longer go to therapy. I had been telling her about an insight I had had which was important to me.   I can’t remember precisely what I told her.   Maybe it was the realisation that the cute sayings we get taught in Sunday school like ‘The k...

Happy New Year!   Are you making any resolutions? Of the various challenges I set myself last year, I seem to have been successful in keeping one: getting back into voluntary work.   I have now been working at the Oakleaf Café for over a year, and at the Sue Ryder shop   for ten months.   In both cases, there were times when I got stressed or close to a meltdown and felt like storming off, and had to take time off until I’d calmed down – but I came back.   So I do seem to be getting marginally better at controlling my temper and keeping a sense of proportion. On balance, it seems to be more helpful to have general aspirations than specific rules.   This afternoon, PDB11 and I have been discussing what we hope to do in the next year, and jotting down intentions like ‘Go for walks more,’ ‘Hoping to go on European holiday by public transport – practise language skills,’ ‘Be more sociable,’ and so on.   Making rules like ‘At least one all-day walk pe...

Okay, I know I set myself a goal of posting every day during Advent, and haven’t done so for weeks.  But in my defence, the date of Christmas (and therefore of Advent) is highly ambiguous.  Still, let’s start with a carol:   Rejoice and be merry in songs and in mirth, O prai se our Redeemer, all mortals on Earth, For this is the birthday of Jesus our King, Who brought us salvation; his praises we’ll sing!   So says the carol .   But of course, we know Christmas isn’t really Jesus’s birthday, right?   After all, the Church just decided to make 25 th December the date for celebrating the birth of Christ because it was already the date of a popular Roman holiday.   (Well, mostly that – it was also that someone decided that for a perfect life, someone would die on the same day that they were conceived, and we know Jesus died in spring, so – let’s say he was born in the winter.)   Still, does the Bible give us any clues as to when Jesus r...

When I was at school, my classmates (who hadn’t studied the Bible in much detail, but assumed that they knew more about what it said than I did because they weren’t Christians) sometimes tried to tell me that the Bible nowhere mentions the Virgin Birth.  They said that the whole idea just arose from a mistranslation, and that the word translated as ‘virgin’ simply meant ‘young woman’. Like many factoids, this one has an element of truth.   As I discussed in yesterday’s post , the line in Isaiah which Matthew quotes as “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” might, in the context of the original passage in Isaiah, not refer to a woman miraculously becoming pregnant without ever having had sex. Nonetheless, the gospel stories told by both Matthew and Luke do seem to say that Jesus was miraculously conceived without Mary having had sex.   At any rate, they emphasise that he wasn’t Joseph’s son. Matthew tells the story of Mary...