I’ve just come back to normal life after a two day sort of staycation-while-doing-something-different holiday. Friends arrived from London for some fresh air and sea views so I’ve been driving them around, to Mwnt and Poppit and the Preseli Hills, and there was an evening with more friends, catching up on the last four years, oh, and lunch out. A real staycation.
It’s been interesting to see the world through the eyes of newcomers. What has become normal and often unremarkable to me was breathtaking to them. Shrieks of delight as we rounded a corner, a gasp as we crested a hill. On a road that to me is just ‘the quickest way to the supermarket’ they were spellbound by the sky, the sweeping hills, the distant sea, the autumn gorse in all its vibrant fiery colour, the sheep, the air, the everything. I know that if I was to visit them at their home in London, I would be just as struck by the noise and bustle, the architecture, the availability of just about anything, the nearness of galleries and museums and restaurants and shows and …. all the things they probably don’t even notice any more.
We have so much and so much and so much, wherever we live, so that our senses can become dulled, so that the wonderful colour and life all around us is just wallpaper. It was good to see the place with their fresh wonder. There’s no denying, I didn’t read a lot of Bible over the last three days, so inspiration and any insight may be lagging right now – I barely squeezed in a Psalm on waking and another on going to bed. But, you know how it is – I meant to read a whole lot more. Oh, hang on – I read a couple of chapters of Genesis when my pals were walking up the cliff slope at Mwnt (but my attention wandered so that I ended up taking photos instead). Here they are setting off
And this is them at the top
And these are some of the words I read while they were up there, dazzled by the world……
And God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.’ So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault ‘sky’. And there was evening, and there was morning – the second day.
And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land’, and the gathered waters he called ‘seas’. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis. Doesn’t that book put a spring in your step, a gasp in your throat? What a wonderful world we have, and – speaking entirely for myself now – how rarely I appreciate it in all its amazing glory.
This was the beach this morning:
Luce thinking 