· stillpoint ·

  When I go to the hills, along with my rucksack full of the usual, I often take with me something I'm mulling over...the hills are a good place to mull. It could be a decision,  a project, a passage from the bible, a new idea I'd just come across, or as in the case today something I'd been reading recently that had rocked me back on my heels.  A FB pal Graham (we are yet to actually meet!) had kindly sent me a wonderful book for Christmas:  Backpacking with the Saints  . I had just been challenged yesterday to   give myself to Joy in the full awareness of all the unrealised joys in my life.  To embrace felicity (bliss) despite a world of endlessly unmet needs.   The author is referencing Thomas Traherne an Anglican priest, mystic and poet from the 1600's who had a very intense spirituality and an amazing way with words.  He believed that God himself recklessly participated in unfulfilled desires and that in the Cross He assumes the pain of all our thwarted hopes and

 Liminal is a word that resonates well at this time.   It has a cluster of meanings including transitional stage, start of a process, threshold, being at a boundary.   A liminal season implies a period of time when things are changing from what they were and are still  in flux and a new normal has not emerged yet.  A lot of uncertainty and even insecurity can go with this experience.  Old patterns, ways of doing things and even ways of thinking and believing no longer work so well anymore but we are not sure yet what they are being replaced with. There's no doubt that these last two years have been an extended liminal time to some extent in that a lot of our old ways of being in the world and in public spaces have changed.  We don't know yet what the long term future of for example shopping, travelling, worshipping etc, will look like.   As I write this my niece is checking in at Heathrow airport en-route to Sri Lanka for a few months, a Heathrow which is much quieter than norm