Beauty for my blindness

A sort of new year begins and I am going to read more poetry and be much less involved in church organisation.

The first and largest beam for the new building is standing aside as Rural Dean and as Chair of the Deanery’s Mission Area Planning Group. I don’t imagine that much of a gap will open up around the vacancies as (no doubt the result of my own character faults shown up in the ways I’ve put up backs when I’ve tried to insist on alternative approaches) the norm is now that my e-mails or letters to diocesan staff do not get acknowledged, and realistic input isn’t requested from there or elsewhere before strategies for the area are developed. I expect some sort of desire to be at the centre of things has stopped me making this obvious move when I should have done so sooner.

The other building material has been piling up around me since the real New Year. I happen to have tried to write one or two things again myself (and immodestly blogged the texts) and have found this more sustaining than pretending to myself that I am at the centre of things. Also, since blogging about some texts of his, I’ve been doing things like having both a biography and the collected works of Walter de la Mare by my bed through which I am working very very slowly; the poem of his to which I am returning most at the moment has an appropriate sense of confession and hope.

For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the friendless go.

For the things unsaid that the heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling - calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.

O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving kindness
In the dark of the end.

The picture is another of Lake Siljan taken from Leksand Rectory.