beached

a year passing ...

If I hold this year up to you, I wonder what you may hear?  Perhaps the sound of sand slipping softly through my fingers, the low caress of streaming time.  Or maybe, the mechanical tick of some strange, unwinding clock, spiralling out between us into the blackness beyond.  A spring loosed.

It's exactly six months to the day our eldest returned home with her two small sons in tow.  We had less than an hour and a half to prepare, and yet this strange streaming, unleashed sand spiral has brought so much.  The sound of tears, the sound of joy, the sound of a family at work.

God has been here too.  Healing, saving.

In just two days time our little family unit departs for a new home but fifteen minutes from here.  Let me hold the future to your ear, and ask what noise it makes.

circling chill

Dancing naked in the snow, the crisping icy bites! So good to be alive - we can fight back the circling chill here if we just stand our ground.

Look to the trees in the distance and wolves pad softly in the flickering lace-curtained light. Treading down the furrows.

a gift

Past pale dawned stocking laughter, the family gathers once more on our bed.  Oranges and apples and chocolate-coins tumble and a little baby looks up in adoration at our milky-breasted eldest.  He twists.

A Villa tooth-brush and matching rosy-apple sweets fall into the hands of our son.  He is happy.

The present spinning, and by turns we venture through Christmas together, gathered at the foot of our bed.

it's my party ...

so, this is christmas ...

The radio plays on my journey through rime-frosted trees.  A heart beats in time to the wolverine heat, and do we believe in Father Christmas? I wonder.

So here it comes, tumbling down in orange-peeled, candle-wax .. the crib filled and donkeys lowing.  I watch the flickering lights fill a Methodist chapel and rise on the sweep of a carolled wave.  Skewered fruit and a sash of crimson-licked blood to gird this world. And we wonder.

He is here with us.  Smiling and alive.  Could it really be any other, this Christmas day?  There are no parcels to unwrap, for He is all.

The flight in mist to another place.  Fire consuming the Norfolk balm, where a flotsam heart hangs still and bloodless from the wall. Are these faces I see in the bleached driftwood of a wind-whip walk the length of the sands?

So, this is Christmas ...

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