So, what HAVE I been doing lately?

Somehow we seem to be at the very end of August - the last gasp of summer (though it feels to me as if we've hit autumn early this year, with a chill in the air tonight that means a search for winter woolies before we depart for Greenbelt tomorrow).
I seem to remember that last year I had time to enjoy a new puppy during the school summer holidays...This year, I've been quite pushed to find clear evenings to enjoy the company of my own children. I guess that's an inevitable product of having been here longer...more contacts across the community = more demands on time. That's a good thing, of course - but it does make for rather full days, with little time or energy for writing.

So it is that I completely missed my own blogging birthday (Good in Parts turned 5 on the feast of the Transfiguration)...that I've failed to celebrate the Dufflepud's rather splendid exam results (or, come to that, his safe return from Africa)...that I've said nothing about the extraordinary evening that was my first big gig - U2 at Sheffield a week ago.

There has been some time to pause and breathe, and I've really appreciated that.
After a mornings meeting at Church House, I slipped into the Cathedral where there was an exhibition of contemporary icons filling that wonderful space.


I loved the absence of chairs - that in itself has a huge impact as you walk in.
I loved the icons themselves - both as art and as visual prayers.
I loved the words posted about the place

"It is not the viewer who judges the icon, but icon that judges the viewer"

"The light in an icon does not come from any physical sun, but is divine"

"An icon is itself a prayer - a hymn in colour"

Spending time immersed in divine light, surrounded by colours singing hallelujah for all their worth, I remembered alot of important things that might just have got lost in the shuffle.
And for a while, I stopped doing, and simply was.