Skip to main content

Day Off


This weekend was like most of my weekends. Busy. Clemency and I were on the road before 8 am on Saturday, opened some new flats at the Parata home in Gore, spoke at a Dinner in Gladstone, took part in a service on Sunday morning and then drove back to a service and dinner at All Saints Dunedin. In between events, time was filled by pastoral visits and by driving. I got home a little after 10 pm on Sunday, fell into bed and didn't wake until nearly 9 am which was the first great thing about today.

The second was Paul Dyer ringing soon after I woke up to see if I wanted to go sailing. The sky was blue, the breeze was steady and the sea was calm. Did I want to go sailing? Is the Pope a conservative German? There is something meditative about sailing. There is the whole ritual of preparing the boat and then launching it, and at the end of the day, the ritual of taking it from the water and washing and derigging it. In between is a journey that is, essentially, pointless: we sailed up the harbour and across it and back, traveling a few kilometers to arrive back where we started from. The whole journey is conducted at a less than leisurely pace, except for those few moments of rush and tumble to rectify some error or other. There is a slow, measured, conversation conducted as a subsidiary activity to the main business of the day: watching the wind and the sea and the sail and the angle of the boat, keeping all in a harmonious balance. It is an exercise in awareness. Like motorcycling, to do it well requires being present in the now, accepting and embracing what is going on and avoiding the impulse to struggle and impose oneself upon it.

I got home in the middle of the afternoon, and set about making a meditation stool. I've made three in the past week, and I keep thinking of ways to improve my design. This one is a folding one legged model, designed so that it can be carried in a suitcase. I made it from some of the old cedar weatherboards removed from the house when my new study was built. The cedar is 20 years old, so is dry, light and strong and, once it was planed and sanded, a beautiful light golden colour. I have made it so that the height and angle of the seat are adjustable. The first of its several coats of varnish is drying as I write this, but when it is is finished and assembled, I'll put a picture on here. Who knows? You might like to make one yourself, or, if you ask nicely I might even give you one.

Today has been, like the weekend, measured in Kairos, not Chronos; that is, felt time rather than objectively measured time. With lots fitted in the days seem longer and they are deeply satisfying. The sun is sinking behind the trees and the harbor and the hills. I think I'm ready to face tomorrow.

-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Glenfinnan Pl,Dunedin,New Zealand
Labels:

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
It's impressive that you could sink into awareness of the moment after such a long weekend. Just got back from a 2 week quiet camping vacation. It took me 3 days before I could stop having chatting conversations in my head and a week before I could stop thinking about work. You remind me to consider more seriously the quality of my day off. Is it renewing with space for silence...or is it catching up on errands?
2 November 2010 at 15:59
Simon Marsh said…
What a stunningly beautiful photo ... and reflection on your day, too.

Thanks, too, for your recent Charge. It has a usefulness and a significance on the other side of the world from your own present vineyard. Would that it were a little more convenient to hop across for a visit!

All the more thanks, then, from one of your fellow-blogging 'disciples'. As ever, Simon
6 November 2010 at 11:19
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more