The Wrecked Metaphor at the Sand Martin Hide

Captain Butterfly took me to the Sand Martin Hide today.  Not a lot going on but a lovely late summer afternoon with a real feeling of Autumn in the air.  The wildflowers were everywhere.  As he set up his cameras, I watched a swan sail gracefully across the lake and disappear, and then watched its wake disappear in turn.

Mute Swan, Cygnus olor

Its all metaphor nowadays, and it set me thinking of the sparrow who flew across the Mead Hall - in this quote from Bede:

“The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.

― Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Well, we do know, because Jehovah, the Creator of life has told us.  From the moment we are conceived in the womb, he knows us. We are a living soul. He knows every detail of our damaged genetics.  And when we die, his inspired word assures us we are conscious of nothing at all. But it also assures us that God will not forget us, and will reclaim us from the sleep of death when the earth is Paradise again.

But, watching the swan and its wake disappear, made me think of the shortness of our lives now and how quickly all traces of it go.

Though the swan then wrecked my metaphor by swimming back and carrying out a long grooming session in the middle of the lake.

 I did wonder whether that could in some way picture the resurrection and... but at that point my overloaded metaphor sank without trace.

There is quite a lot to say about the last few days, but I can't say it yet.  I only managed to get to one session of the Twickenham Assembly, but I do have some notes from the talk about Babylon the Great, which I hope I can read well enough type up and blog.

(No swans were harmed in the making of this blog.)

Dorothy Whipple

Or I could have called this blog:  "No Caravans", as the gypsies seem to have left. They stayed a couple of weeks last time. Its a shame, as I was hoping to get to their doors next week.   Went to Rustington - shopped, and tackled a steep flight of stairs.

I have just been re-reading Dorothy Whipple and can't recommend her books enough.  "They Were Sisters" and "Someone at a Distance" especially.  Good short stories too.  Bea, the ones you read here were "After Tea and Other Stories".   Apparently she wrote 3 volumes of short stories, and I hope one day to find the other two.

This is an excellent review of Sisters:
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/they-were-sisters.html

She also wrote a memoir: "The Other Day".  It ends with Dorothy still a child and I don't know that she wrote any more. But, maybe, one day, I will come across Part 2 in a second hand bookshop somewhere.

The book ends like this:

"It is winter.  There are no cows to get into the wood. There is almost no wood.  It has thinned away almost to nothing.  The grey levels of the lake are but sparsely barred by naked trees.
  In the field there is a ring of bitten turnips and the sheep limp forlornly in the frozen grass.
  But in the garden one snowdrop is out, praying under the veronica bush.
  Spring will come back.  Not - to speak in metaphor - to me.  But spring itself will come, and that is enough."

She loved the beauty of the creation - she wonderfully evokes the seasons - and it will all come back to her when Jehovah wakes her from the sleep of death.

Will she write more novels then?      Who knows?    At the moment, we really have only one plot. Things go wrong and they get put right again.  It might be that misunderstandings part the lovers until the last few pages - or that someone is murdered and, in the last chapter, the murderer is unmasked and brought to justice - and so on.  And in these post modern times, when we have lost hope, things just go wrong, and they don't get sorted.

But its basically the same plot.   Can we imagine any other story?  That is the story we, the children of Adam, are living.  Things went terribly wrong in Eden - we are waiting for the Kingdom of God to put them right again.  Which is why we say the Lord's prayer.

When Paradise is restored there will be new things. Things we can't even dream of now.  And so perhaps new stories.

Caravans

The Gypsies are back.  There is a small encampment of unmarked caravans on the Green outside. I will have to talk to the elders and see if we can get some Witnesses down to the caravan doors next week - hopefully including myself this time.

While I was wondering how to approach the subject of Babylon the Great in my blog,  I noticed that this Friday afternoon, at the Assembly at the Rugby Stadium at Twickenham, there will be a talk, at 1.40, entitled:

 How Babylon the Great Has “Shut Up the Kingdom”
(Matthew 23:2, 4-10,13, 23, 24, 34)

If anybody is in Twickenham you would be most welcome to come and listen.   And I will - I hope, knees, arthitis, general debility permitting - be there and will take notes and type them into my blog - for anyone who is interested to read.

It is vital that we know, because Revelation warns, in the strongest terms:
 “She has fallen! Babylon the Great has fallen, and she has become a dwelling place of demons and a place where every unclean spirit and every unclean and hated bird lurks!  For because of the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality, all the nations have fallen victim, and the kings of the earth committed sexual immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth became rich owing to the power of her shameless luxury.”    And I heard another voice out of heaven say: “Get out of her, my people, if you do not want to share with her in her sins, and if you do not want to receive part of her plagues. "

You will see from that she is not the political system, though she has made herself part of it, when she should have been no part of it.  Nor is she the powerful commercial system though she has made "the merchants of the earth" rich.


I did the rest of my magazine route yesterday, except for Emma.  She said she wanted to ask me in for a coffee, so I must try and get there at a time she will be in, so it will have to be the weekend after the Convention.

If only I could find the words to do justice to the sky yesterday morning. It was a Paradise sky - an intense and tender blue, filled with fluffy white clouds.  The Captain was out doing his butterfly count, and found plenty to count.  It was true butterfly weather.

The Captain suggested that I link this block to the Barbara Dickson song of the same name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-GLqF-0Dg0

We saw her at The Chichester Festival Theatre. A great evening.

The Feeling of Autumn

Grey Heron, Ardea cinerea

A beautiful day, but with a real feeling of Autumn  in the air.  Its my favourite season - although I love them all.  The Captain marched me off to the Park yesterday evening. There was a lovely light, and we saw a heron posing, spotlit.   Col got lots of photos.

It was much easier to walk to the pond this time, so that was encouraging. I sat and enjoyed the beauty of the late summer evening, and thanked Jehovah for it.  There weren't many people about - some dog walkers - some happy dogs - and an Asian family feeding the ducks. Their little girl, in a pink tracksuit top and pink trainers, found a handful of seagull feathers on the grass.   She took one in each hand and flew along with them, her arms outstretched.

I sometimes feel my own childhood curving back to meet me  - remembering how much fun we got from the flowers, and the seeds, and the feathers.    We used to play soldiers with plantains.  And I still feel excited when I see a chestnut glistening among the fallen leaves.  We used to play Noah's ark with shoeboxes and herd our china and plastic animal collections on board, just in time. And we had hours of fun on rainy days drawing villages on large sheets of cartridge paper.

Or is this my second childhood talking?

A Mighty Engine

It is good to feel I am getting back to being a cog - albeit a zimmery sort of cog - in the mighty engine of the Christian preaching work.   As we left Sue's -  it was the team of Sue and Sue today -  I saw loads of my siblings in the street, already starting to work.  They would be from one of the other groups. We meet in various private homes on Saturday mornings, each group with its own map.

We - Sue times 2 - went to a lovely and I assume expensive estate, trying to give everyone the details of our website:  http://www.jw.org/en/ 

This is being distributed worldwide, so I hope you will all get one.

"Don't stay out too long" said Captain Butterfly, plaintively and uncharacteristically. "How are you going to wait on me hand and foot if you go and cripple yourself again."

Hmmm...  anyway, I promised I wouldn't do more than an hour. He is right too - I was in a lot of pain after the last time when I did too much.   But, when I got back, to start my hand and footery, I found he had gone out to do his butterfly transect!  For the first time in a week.  He must be feeling much much better.

Hurray.  And  I didn't mind the waiting hand and foot.  He has been looking after me for months.  So it was his turn for a bit of TLC.   Lovely to have him back though, soaring on his butterfly wings.  I've packed him up a lunch for tomorrow.

As we watch the News...

For those who are wondering what the answer is, our "Examining the Scriptures Daily" addresses the question directly, so I thought I would simply blog it, and those who wish can read it.

Thursday, August 14

Man has dominated man to his injury.—Eccl. 8:9.

"During 6,000 years of human history, self-determination and self-rule have brought a tragic abundance of pain and suffering to mankind. What do we see today? Aside from wars and uprisings, there are the devastating problems of poverty, disease, destruction of the environment, climate change, and more. Government officials have warned that if we do not change our business-as-usual attitude, the outcome will be disastrous. Under the Messianic King Jesus Christ and his 144,000 corulers, God’s Kingdom will take progressive steps to undo all the damage done to humans and their home, the planet Earth. The Thousand Year Reign will bring about the fulfillment of the heartwarming promise by Jehovah God: “I am creating new heavens and a new earth; and the former things will not be called to mind, neither will they come up into the heart.”—Isa. 65:17. "


This is what we are praying for when we say The Lord's Prayer - for God's Kingdom to come, and for His will to be done upon the earth.

And its odd how the Day of Judgement, the thousand year reign of Jesus and the Saints, is so often pictured as something terrible.  Yet it is something to be longed for.  It is when the earth is restored to Paradise, and obedient humankind to perfection.

All who come into the Day of Judgement, be they "the great crowd" that is protected through Armageddon, or the resurrected dead - both "the righteous and the unrighteous" - will have a completely fresh start. They will not be judged for anything they have done before.

As the Christian Greek Scriptures famously tell us "The wages sin pays is death."  (Romans 6:23)   And therefore, "the one who has died has been acquitted from his sin".  He has paid the wages of his sin, his imperfection. (Romans 6:7)

Hence the urgency of the Christian preaching work, as all of us on the earth now are facing Armageddon with the wages of our sin unpaid.


Today, we have had beautiful light brought to us via Big Bertha, I assume.  Intense sunlight with ominous dark clouds all around - a brief shower while I was shopping this morning.  I took the Butterfly Memberships, plus a Report someone had requested to the Post Office, and posted the card and present to the bride and groom.  Oh and also a copy of "Old Playgrounds" to Krysia.

I hope she will enjoy it.

The new Dentist and the first Guardian reader.

Saw the New Dentist yesterday afternoon.  My teeth are OK. And they had the first proper clean since we left Rita, our American hygienist, behind on Planet Expat quite a few years ago.   Ouch ouch ouch. But they do feel lovely and clean now.  Very nice guy, lovely surgery.

I delivered one set of magazines on the way back. I meant to do more, but realised I had come out without my Bible!    I am feeling a bit distrait at the moment.

Had a lovely chat with Krysia, old school friend, the other day.  Well, not that we knew each other in school exactly, but we had  long talk about our Convent school experiences.  Neither of us is starry eyed about nuns, but I have recommended that she reads Karen Armstrong's "Through the Narrow Gate", which explains a lot.

Lovely comment in The Guardian today - under an article about Bleak House:

Bleak House is worth it just for Mrs Jellyby, the original Guardian reader.