Category: Rites of Passage
-
Halfway to happiness
Moves and transitions are rarely easy, and when you don’t understand what’s going on, and why you’ve been displaced, it must be even more disorientating. We’re now about halfway through the adjustment phase, when Kali cat is allowed to ponder the great outdoors, but not to explore beyond what her eyes can see. It’s fair […]
-
Making the best . . .
It’s taken us some time to re-equilibrate to our new circumstances. Like a death in the family, I guess, a big move away from a lifestyle of decades standing is quite an emotional shock. You can prepare for it all you like, and in our case it’s been a year of thoughtful planning, but when […]
-
Roads from confusion?
The last ‘joy’ I could develop was in the middle of fraught tensions before Christmas, and life has been a frenzy of strenuous physical effort since to pack up all our stuff and vacate our home. Now that we can sit still, in our tiny bolthole within a pleasant village, and sigh in some relief, […]
-
Resilience: the gift that keeps giving . . .
I don’t know how a parent teaches resilience to their children, except by some sort of example. We’re pretty sure that ours have seen enough situations where we’re down, struggling, and have somehow managed to get back up on our feet and try again. Let’s say rather that we’ve certainly felt we’ve had our share […]
-
Those cusps . . .
Sometimes it feels like our lives have been struck by a bolt of lightning: everything changes, and you can clearly identify the before and the after. The birth of a child can be one such cusp, for example. Or a much hoped-for job offer. Lightning bolts can feel desperately negative too. Cancer diagnosis is one […]
-
The joy of clearing
Today I shall extract the remaining bits and pieces from the loft room that you enter as you climb the steps. Our hedgerow wine bottles will be slowly consumed, or divested, thereafter. Although I don’t really have any idea where the last of this first stuff will go, when it all comes down, I can […]
-
Marshland colour
For a Canadian expatriate, the more brilliant the red leaf is, the more homesickness intrudes. But yesterday afternoon you didn’t have to be a reminiscing Canadian to experience the delight of the blackberry leaves turning crimson, branch by branch. I remember when the new Canadian flag was first mooted. Schoolchildren were urged to create their […]
-
This too shall pass . . . the joy of foreknowledge
Feeling just that extra bit stiff and sore this morning — my joints and muscles don’t really want to move around very much. We had our fourth Covid jab yesterday afternoon, the Moderna bi-valent one. I reckon our immune response to the immunological challenge is mobilising, from the lymph nodes draining the injection site, where […]
-
Family togetherness . . .
We had a full house over the weekend: blow-up mattress, camping cushions in the living room, and three sets of familiars to accommodate in separate quarters. Kali cat lived in the conservatory from whence she could escape to the great outdoors; growing-up kittens Maui and Leo roamed from lounge to bedroom, enjoying their sequestered eating […]
-
The big picture . . .
Funerals are one particular point at which we stop, look back, and consider a life. The obituary is a condensed recitation of the deceased’s odyssey, and in my experience these small and intimate biographies, declaimed from the lectern above the casket, can convey surprising breadth and understanding of where the beloved has come from, how […]
Roads to Joy 