Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. And the animal part of us doesn’t like it. It tenses and tightens and makes us uncomfortable. One reaction is to try harder to be spiritual and wise about it. In my experience that just makes things worse. Today, I try to just be with the frustration, feel it, breathe it. I try to accept it as part of this journey.
Westacre Day minus 43
Hilde left the house in Harrow all neat and tidy before setting off for Westacre. She is feeling very tired from missing out on sleep – life is a bit too interesting at the moment. Alex was having a rest from three hard days tightening up radiator connectors. Roger went shopping and fed us and his friends a delicious meal and pudding.
Roger and Alex have chosen a laminate floor for the bungalow living room. Alex has been fighting with the radiator valves, but he’s hopeful they’re finally on and not leaking.
Meanwhile, in London, Hilde interviewed prospective Dutch and German tutors and answered questions from her new colleague.
Just a link today, to a very wise woman’s blog. It’s about being a peacemaker – and isn’t that what being a Druid is all about? Enjoy.
Westacre Day minus 46
Alex is finishing off the plumbing in the bungalow, installing the radiators ready for the gas boiler to go in next week. He’s using compression joints and is not getting on with them very well. Hilde has been at her day job, giving advice to a beginning language teacher. Roger has been drawing a sparrow with pastels in his art class.
In our arrogance, we think we have control over our lives and over what happens to us. But such control is superficial at best. Everything is always changing. Nothing is permanent. All things flow and shapeshift and slip between our fingers. Spirit longs for people who have noticed that control is an illusion. She longs for people who are willing to acknowledge that things don’t seem to work they way they think and who are ready to follow Her lead. Listen deeply. Let Her show you. Do you dare to take the leap?
Westacre Day minus 46
Hilde and Gerjan brought the ladder back to the hire shop first thing. Then Hilde went into London to work, and Gerjan set to taking the garden waste to the dump and cleaning up the very slippery decking. He’s done wonders these last few days. We’d love to see him again.
Alex is back at Westacre. He tested Matt’s plumbing and none of it leaked. He and Roger also took trips to the dump, but mostly with rubble and plaster board. Hopefully, that will be the last major dump trip for the bungalow.
“… the obvious can be very difficult for people to see. That is because people are self-corrective systems. They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal disturbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, ro shutting off various parts of the process of perception.” – Gregory Bateson, 1968
Alex has done heroic deeds in our Harrow toilet. This may sound like an exaggeration, but believe me, seldom has such valiant battle been done in so small a space.
For a long time, the flush hasn’t been working right. Over the last few weeks, Alex has been fiddling with the mechanism in the cistern, fixing it, only to find that, after a couple more days, the problem would return, or another problem would appear. We are now keeping our fingers crossed for the latest repair.
Again in that small room, the walls needed tidying up. So Alex has been working hard with filler and lining paper. But in order to get the lining paper on the wall, he stood on the toilet seat and… broke it. He spent ages in a traffic jam to get to B&Q to get a replacement.
Flush and seat being repaired, and lining paper attached, the toilet needed a lick of magnolia emulsion. Our friend Gerjan applied that in the afternoon. Hilde has written her next blog post and has been general support system for the battles in the toilet.