This Friday was the loveliest of Fridays. I have Friday afternoons off, and this week Jamie and I had an unspoken agreement that the rainy weather obliged us to spend it in the kitchen where the Rayburn would keep us warm and we could generally do very little. Jamie duly snoozed for hours and I was the…
Category: Reflections
What they don’t teach you in school about family planning
I don’t know about anyone else, but the message I got from my rather limited school sex education classes was pretty much like this… You can get pregnant quicker than you can say ‘contraception’ so make sure you practise ‘safe sex’ at all costs. No one wants to get pregnant these days before they get…
Spiritual Whitespace
Since reading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Where you Are, I have discovered a whole range of American writers who are exploring different ways of thinking, living and believing. All have come to points in their lives where they realised they were desperate for change. They wanted to break away…
Bitter Sweet
Later this week, I’ll be posting a few reflections on a great book I just finished, Finding Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening your Soul to Rest, by Bonnie Gray. I enjoyed Bonnie’s book so much that I looked up her blog, Faith Barista, and found it a beautiful way to slow down for a moment with a coffee…
Small Things: Nature’s Pace
Rather inevitably, since moving to the countryside, I find myself slowing down. As I write I’m sat on the sofa. The sun through the window feels very natural. The dog sat in the patch of light on the floor does, too, and the quietness broken by Andrew’s voice chatting to our neighbour outside, and the…
Walking at the Weekend
There is something rejuvenating about a weekend walk, particularly at this time of year when the air is fresh and cool and your return can be heralded by a cup of tea or hot chocolate 🙂 We’ve been walking through woods and fields and beaches lately. There’s something momentous about finding a new walk with…
Harvest Time
September has soared along, October is almost upon us, and it is most definitely the season for blogs to fill with pictures of turning leaves, rich hot chocolates, crisp mornings and hearty food. I love these seasonal offerings, and the next month or two would not feel complete without putting together one or two of…
In the throws of September…
After the luxurious month of July when Devon welcomed us to our new home with a spell of extravagantly hot weather, a holiday on Lundy, and a couple of weeks relaxing with a friend, August saw our new lives gather momentum and September has hit us at full-pelt. It has been hard to find the…
Small Things
This week I have been struggling with something that really gets me down. It leaves me in a dark place at times, and yet, even there, there are always the small things. Always a cup of tea made by a friend, always the sunlight on the floor, always the jokes of children and the fulfillment…
Home: The Dining Table
Reading Under the Tuscan Sun the other day, I came upon a paragraph I could really relate to. In it, Frances Mayes describes the acquisition of a long yellow dining table for their summer home in Italy… The long stretch of summer calls for a long tavola. Now that the kitchen is finished, we need…
3 Posts that have made a difference to my week
Flowers in the desert + a Recipe for a Better day + How to be Empathetic = 3 posts that have made a difference to my week 🙂 These pictures of the desert covered in flowers, which I found via Ann Voskamp’s website, feel like a metaphor for how I see my life right now. I’ve…
There for the taking
The other night I had a very clear dream, in which I held a new baby. It made waking up a very painful experience – and living another day without the child I dream of rather sad. It was one of those days when songs on the radio seemed to echo my thoughts and my…
Life Lived 