Category: Musings
-
A quiet retreat . . .
When we were fortunate to acquire the little bolt-hole across the border, we didn’t realise quite what a solace it would be. The weight of responsibility somehow seems more pressing when we’re home, but here across the open-plan living, dining and kitchen space it’s a temporary break from all that. Writing duties carry through, however, […]
-
The accumulated joy of small steps . . .
We were just chatting this morning, waking up with our daily word games, about the joys of a daily activity, whether that little step is poetic, journal, memoir, or something more physical like a small knitted square or another sorting exercise. One of us has been a fan of Brian Bilston‘s daily poems for some […]
-
Too busy to muse . . .
We must have planted the Viburnum in the corner of our front garden some years ago and then left it to its own devices. My iPlant app tells us that this lovely plant decides to bloom in late autumn and then continues on into early spring. But we’d never been aware of its blossom until […]
-
Where we belong . . .
I’ve been flummoxed for a week, trying to figure out a fictional response to a WriteOn Galloway task. Finally I ventured into our own lives to create a kind of story-memoir piece about our travels. The challenge of the task was to create the story without revealing the author’s/narrator’s own take on the personal passion. […]
-
Clearances . . .
I’ve spent the past afternoon and again this morning clearing up my laptop’s desktop. Not only does the struggling machine, uncluttered, work much faster now that all the accumulated images are whisked away, but the space is neat, tidy, and restful for my busy mind. The extended display is open for new material, while a […]
-
Measurement, a never-ending joy
I made a little investment, a year or so ago, in a small measuring wheel. Its first use was, finally, to measure within a meter or so how long our track is from the road. Turns out to be 495 meters, half a kilometer in other words, which makes us quite happily isolated from any […]
-
A slight discombobulation . . . perhaps a good stimulus
So I began the day on a different schedule: quick coffee, then a dash to the dump (aka Household Waste Recycling Centre) in Allendale so as to get back for my beloved to have time to return to the village for choir practice and the knitter-knatter group. But the rain was pouring down, and it […]
-
But umm, now what?
Ah yes, there’s a reason why all that stuff was up in the loft, out of sight and out of mind. Apparently, there’s nowhere else to put it! But up there, it was more than just out of mind; it was also inaccessible. With a little perseverance, and diligence, we can sort things out and […]
-
Thinking: ?Cognitive reflex?
I’ve been thinking this morning about the way a cognitive stimulus travels, the journey it provokes. We’re sending off a little package to our grandson today, a print-out of my historical fiction short story and an accompanying letter. Maybe he’d like to do some illustrations for the piece? The stimulus way back over a month […]
-
The pleasure of a contemplative review
For beloved friends who do not have internet access, I’ve taken to printing out the previous week of musings from these Roads To Joy. Though it feels odd, looking at the week in a spread like this, it seems that it’s instructive too. Sometimes I’ve been really stretching, grasping and flailing around trying to find […]
Roads to Joy 