Awake with the Dawn

I am feeling smug… and stuffed…and exhausted. Out of those three feelings, smug is the best feeling so I’m trying to focus on that one.

The other two are self -inflicted. I’m exhausted because before 8 am this morning I had done an hour and half of weeding in the front and back gardens, then I washed the car and then I thought what the heck, let’s hoover it out as well.

I am stuffed because in the course of all this activity, I have consumed TWO breakfasts. But, what the heck, by my reckoning two breakfasts is fair compensation for waking up at 5am on your day off.

I am smug because now the sun (which was gloriously buttercup wonderful while I gardened) has disappeared behind grey clouds and all those ‘slug-a-beds’ who haven’t got up yet have probably missed the best part of the day. (Nor will I allow any tendency to snooze in the late afternoon rob me of my virtuous start).

Anyway I didn’t come to the computer to bleather on about my early start but it did remind me of a poem I wanted to share in tribute to a rather wonderful person I met a few weeks ago.

(Spell check doesn’t like ‘bleather’ or ‘blether’ – nothing wrong with either of them in my opinion)

Here is Betty – on the right, Joan is her friend who lives in Nairobi, Mum is on the left.

They are all wonderful amazing women with lots of life stories to tell and they all met up at Mum’s house a few weeks ago. Betty had not seen me since I was about 6 or 7 (yet claimed to recognise me when I picked her up from the station!) and hadn’t seen Mum or her friend Joan for about 24 years. I don’t know how Joan and Betty met but Mum and Betty were tennis partners in Nigeria where I spent a large chunk of my childhood.  Their friendship is a wonderful testimony for faithful letter writing.

I won’t reveal ages but Mum and Betty had their eightieth birthdays some time ago now! The prayer poem below is for you Betty, I came across it just after you left and it seemed to sing with all the ‘joie de vivre’ that you have about life in Nepal. Betty lives in Kathmandu where she still treks twice a year with a Sherpa and joyfully invited our son Matthew to ‘drop in when you come to Nepal but… ‘she added ‘don’t come in January, because I go to Thailand in January. It’s too cold in Nepal and my house has no heating’. I asked her what she did in Thailand for a month, thinking that sitting under a palm tree and reading books would be a good pursuit for someone of her age.

‘I stay at a beautiful nature reserve next to the ocean in order to go snorkelling every day’.

She must have seen the surprise on my face because she felt the need to add an explanation ‘God’s amazing underwater creation is just soooo beautiful, it just has to be seen’.

It does indeed, Betty, it does indeed. But it also takes a special kind of openness to see God’s glory in all of creation and to revel in it as you do.

Long may you be able to do so. Namaste, Betty, ‘I honour the God spark in you’ and the earrings you gave me will remind me to sparkle too.

Awake with the Dawn

Anyone who has not wondered

At the dawning has died

During the night, or has never lived. 

Each day should awaken us to wonder and awe, 

To a fresh reverence for each creature. 

 

Everything I touch burns with a presence. 

All that I see dazzles me with its radiance. 

A single sound fills my ears with it’s call. 

Events flame in my heart, revealing Love. 

How can I survive such wonder and awe? 

 

They say I should not be so sensitive, 

In allowing such glory to mix with the earth. 

Lord, how can this be, for it is reality? 

A handful of soil can open the eyes of the blind. 

I have seen heaven and earth are one. 

 

David Adam from Music of the Heart