Bits and pieces

She's pretty cute - I had to catch up with my beloved niece Magda today - even if it meant crossing a suburb or two and braving rush hour traffic home. That's her, in a cafe with me, SO GOOD TO SEE her after so long. Sheesh, you'd think we lived in a different country or something.
. . . and this was last Friday night, with six of us enjoying our first journaling evening - putting together and making a book each, with pages filled with bits an pieces just waiting to be written on.

Time's Up

I was just thinking, sitting up here in bed with my tea and toast, about time. How many mornings have I awoken just like this – got cup of tea and then lain gazing at the sun filtering through my net curtains and thought about what I may do today. Why am I always surprised by this turning of the daily cycle – the coming and going of the sun – is it because I am a being who has always existed and whose life is sourced from another realm? I feel a bit like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, where the main character relives the same day again and again. I was thinking about my tremendous capacity for a ‘fresh start’ or a new adventure – where does that come from? Why don’t we settle like automatons, in to the dull onward turning of the times and seasons, instead of (and maybe this is a personality thing) the continued zeal to ‘seize the day’. I think, deep down, I am a little irritated by time – its forwardness, its predictability. A deep craving to ‘get off the bus’ exists in me – but I don’t mean the bus of Life, I mean the bus of TIME, with the wheels of the seasons turning forever onward beneath it. I feel that I came from somewhere where the surprises exist in full measure and it is not necessary to sleep to regain the energy to enjoy them. Where life is the dream, and the light is not bound to an orb turning on a system bound by laws of gravity and attraction. Mathematics. A place where, finally, 2 + 2 never equals 4, but always more. Disappointment does not exist where I come from. My own heart is so full that it is as natural as breathing to let it bubble up and overflow with joy – love never ceases. I look in one direction and my eyes behold love looking back, and my heart receives a surge of the joy that just left it. There are people I see, no, not people, closer than family here, who look at me as if I am their treasure. Each one seems to me so different in expression and yet so vital to me, I long to be with them.
I turn in another direction and there are more closer-than-family I feel just the same about. The place where we are changes constantly, the quality of light perfect for every setting; golden, muted, radiant, soft – the light is not impersonal but (distinctly personal and) KNOWING. He illuminates everything; flowers, trees, faces, forms with colours no longer restricted by a measured spectrum, but perceived beyond the limitations of what has been here on earth. It seems now, that life here on earth is a colour-tinted black and white experience.
Did I mention smells? It would be an assault to my fallen nostrils to receive even one blast from the air around me in my real home. I would faint. Everything has its own scent, and that scent is carried in the light, and both are . . . organic.
And that’s just the setting.
There are as many activities going on as there is imagination to conceive them, and none of them are compulsory or to do with survival. They’re to do with LIFE. They go on as long as there is love to inspire them.
That love never fades or diminishes but is multi-faceted and shows many faces. It is no wonder that I feel a deep detachment to the things of this world, and yet there are so many resemblances to what I ‘remember’ of my real home, that I can actually live here as well. In many ways, it is like a long sleep, full of dreams. Except this sleep is intensely active and rigidly bound by the meters and rhythms of time on the surface level, and the only peace and rest must be sought by turning deeply inward.
By comparison to my real home, I am living in a battle zone, with casualties all around me and the endless cry of discord. The fact that I know it as such, that the wrongness of it disturbs me, is a sturdy reminder that it is I who am the alien here.
When I read (Hebrews) ‘there remains, therefore, rest for the people of God, for he who has entered his rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us be diligent to enter that rest. . .’
I think of the REST we enter as not so much a passive, sleep-laden relaxation, but more a laying down of the shackles of this world and the chains of time, and a letting go completely of the taint of the culture of Adam – bequeathed to us since the Fall. In returning to the state of our natural being, with the added experience of having lived in these ‘chains’ on this world, (and yet seen the light of Christ here,) I am a fuller, more appreciative soul than otherwise I would have been. Like a profoundly blind man who sees light and colour at last, who knew it existed, whose world was flavoured by it through language and the touch of living things that grew because of it, he who finally sees it after knowing OF it all his life.
Nothing can really prepare him for what sight is in all its brilliance and subtlety, but as much as he is able, he has been aware of it, and the physical presence of his own eyes has assured him of its existence. Multiply that example one hundred fold – more – and you see the beings we ‘children of light’ are, here on this planet.

‘But here, we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come’ Heb 13: 14

‘For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands. Eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven. If indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened not because we want to be unclothed but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed by life. Now he who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has also given us the Spirit as a guarantee.’ 2 Cor: 5 . . .

Making the most of Queen's Birthday

Come with me, into the Cascade Kauri walk situated about 40 mins from Auckland out in the West Auckland coastal area. Helen and I walked this on Saturday, really enjoying the crisp air and the bird song, and the sight of the massive Kauri trees from which the walk got its name.
NZ's native nikau palms. . .
the enticing path dappled with light. . .
One of the Kauri trunks - impossible to fit the whole tree in the picture.
Sister just ahead of me on the swing bridge


and that's it! Enjoy that? the fragrant air, the moist atmosphere, the sound of tuis and bellbirds. We came back and sat on a picnic table (it was still a bit damp) and ate a light lunch of blueberry muffin, banana and apple.
Lovely.