1st day of Spring?

Today started, spring-like with a walk to work watching signs: blossom, daffodils, catkins, birds calling in the trees to each other, furry magnolia buds fattening.  Spring is creeping along and it makes me chirrup with joy!  The darkness is going!!

I've had a day of slightly hysterical laughter, trying to figure out how I am supposed to know who has attended courses when they: use a different name at work/haven't updated their records/are called Janet but known as Gail/signed the attendance sheet in such a scrawl/share a name with at least four others.

To say nothing of the person who left their pink and blue unicorn patterned lunch bag - whose name is nothing like the one on our training database!  Her healthy lunch of crisps and chocolate had us beady eyed, clock watching as it ticked towards 4.30 and the bag hadn't been claimed...she turned up....ah well, yogurt and fruit was much nicer.

Faith in the Fog

I'm reading Jeff Lucas' book "Faith in the Fog".  A book which puts the encounter of Jesus and Peter under the lens of a skillful writer with a reflective heart.  I'm loving it. Touching on disillusion, depression, shame and wrong beliefs about God, it is hitting where it hurts.  February is a diffident month, a month of snowdrops and sparkling mornings but also hazy dank soaked days like the one above.  When you wear a woolly hat walking at 7.30am not because it's cold but because dripping water vapour makes fine, baby soft hair turn into unruly spikes - just the look I want to cultivate at work!

Sometimes I feel like I am walking in fog in winter.  But I do need to enjoy moments like taking this photo.  Because it turned into a pretty decent day when the mists cleared.  I love reading books with my bookclub - they suggest ones like the author above that I have never heard of. Conversations open up with others when I'm caught, deep in a book in a public place.  Stealth evangelism is my style - I am always delighted and surprised when a book opens a conversation to a little deeper glimpse into someone's heart.

As a child I devoured books, as a adult I am not much better!

Black Humour

It gets me in trouble at work.  Regularly.  But it also keeps me sane.  I have a dry, black and decidedly cryptic sense of humour.  Some things just make me smirk.  My favourite this last couple of weeks - the unknown delegate who uploaded a picture of him and his mates at a train station with pints in their hands instead of his smoking cessation certificate.  Another who uploaded his smiley photo.  And my favourite of today - "grow your own staff nurse" !!

I haven't answered the email yet. I can't quite bring myself to do so. I have a dear friend whose wise advice, gently probing questions, generous heart and pockets and reflective honest spirituality I have so appreciated over the years.  She knits, and has a knitted family of doll like characters.  I am ashamed of my humour when I tease too much.  But it's sharpened my appreciative hunt for things like "knit your own nativity", knit your favourite star wars character" and this one - grow your own staff nurse!

What do you need to do, I wonder?  Plant a student? Put said trainee on the rack - I think the NHS does that kind of torturous pressure already according to my medical friends. I have daffodils in pots at work.  Should I try to find "staff nurse" bulbs next time? 

But it's actually serious I see:

"Care workers are being encouraged to apply for an Open University course which allows them to train to become nurses while continuing to work full-time in the health service.
Training takes four years, and there is a particular drive to expand the university’s nursing programme in rural areas where health boards struggle to attract and retain workers."

Oh well, it made me smile.  That's good 

Morning's minion

Today was a brightly polished type of morning.  Sparkling with frosted roofs, grass and distant hills.

A bright, fresh, clean, patterned light sort of day.  I didn't have my camera - just my phone as I was trying to log up some miles before church.  It's not often I see a heron up close - they are usually standing on the weir, patiently fishing.  It made my morning, as did warming up with a coffee and a book before church.

Minion - no not the blue and yellow thing but Gerald Manley Hopkins beautiful salute to the falcon.  He is a poet whose rhythm and love of the outdoors have resonated with me.

"I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!"

Race at your pace

My friend has got me hooked on "Race at your Pace"  It's a medal a month challenge for walkers, bikers, swimmers and runners.  The medals are solid, well crafted things, shiny with snowflakes, or Christmas holly, frosty blue, raspberry red or the black and silver skating on ice January one.  I never won anything at school.  They didn't give prizes for reading and being away with the fairies, thinking.

So getting a medal as a middle aged adult is a thing of beauty!  I'm ridiculously pleased with them.  It was hard to swim 5 miles in December and hard to tackle 125 walking miles in January.  It got me out the bed, supplemented the medication that has kept me stable for 9 months now.  It's built muscle and must be keeping my lungs in order too! The medals now hang, like Christmas decorations, off the rack that holds the CD player and my CD collection.  They clink if I hit them and occasionally I have to say I have put one round my neck.  Because they mean a lot to someone who carried inadequacy as a teenager who came from such a sport loving family.

I'm a bit of an evangelist for them too.  I now have two friends in addition to me who are taking on their own challenges.  It featured in conversation at the doctors - her receptionist has done couch to 5K and hated it.  Remarkable.  It's easy to talk about things you love and find helpful.  Which I guess is why I find it easier to talk Jesus via books.  Because the tottering book stack grows.  Because I can't not read.  I have tried - a little - to limit the books.  Because of the expense.  But I'm curiously book hungry, word hungry. And I love it when I get to share.....my passion in life!!