Richard over at A Quiet Watercourse has moved his blog over to wordpress, so you can now find his most interesting thoughts here.

He had this to say when describing his link to my blog here:

“An incredible blog, a massive influence on my own writings.”

To say I was deeply moved by this was an understatement. I consider Richard’s style to be quite different from mine in that quite often he simply puts a question out there rather than making any firm attempts to answer it. He likes to consider what really happened instead of focusing on why it happened, and in this way manages to live his questions rather than wasting life and energy in searching for answers to questions which only begets more questions - the type of thinking that gets lost in linear logic and is never peaceful because life is at its core a Big Mystery.

I’d like to think I learn from him at least as much as he learns from me, so allow me to suggest you go over and take a look at his blog if you haven’t already. Richard, we look forward to seeing how the new wordpress version of the site progresses.

Well, the fog rolled in for the days leading up to the new moon and the Winter Solstice this year - I enjoyed having some thoroughly wintery weather to accompany my celebration of Yule, such as it was.

I went walking, and out there in the fog where I couldn’t see for more than a few metres I reflected on how different life is when there’s only so far to look at. I went up into my favourite fields, knowing that the hill would appear the closer I got, and it did, and with it all the horses. How interesting that from the road you simply couldn’t see them, would not have known they were there. And then a thought which thrilled me a lot - why, now I’m standing on this hill, no one from the road can see ME!

It was nice to have a rest from being seen, to withdraw from the worldly ways of presenting a certain Lewis to people and things, and to simply enjoy the cover. Once you get over the fear of what’s out there, you can concentrate on the things are that in here, the things that you are naturally drawn to in times of fog.

It’s in keeping with the time of year to look inside, when the nights are long and the days are cold, when activity is at a low and reflection comes easily. It was a strange comfort to withdraw into myself - but where am I, and what am I, and where do I withdraw to? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was somewhere I hadn’t been for a long time.

The place I use as the focal point of the fields when I speak to the land there, the gorse bush alive with yellow flowers at the top of hill, told me just what I needed to know: “It is time to withdraw into your heart”.

And so I learned: if we are to be happy and at peace with ourselves, and by extension the rest of the world, we must learn how to do this - to withdraw into our heart from time to time, to listen to what goes on in there, until we no longer need to withdraw from the world to listen at all.

Some poetry for y’all. I feel like a man changed beyond recognition over the past few months, I think we’ll see a complete change to the site to reflect that soon enough. Anyway, here goes the poetry of mine:

The mystic meeting between lovers and friends,
The sky, the sun, the stars.
I kiss the heavens gently,
And worship from afar.

For all those workaholics out there (and I don’t just mean the money earners, I mean the people who feel compelled to do task after task after task, or chore after chore, and that’s a lot of us), some lyrics from the talented and good humoured man Brad Paisley, a song called Time Well Wasted, from the album of the same name:

“It was time well wasted,
And there’s no way I’d trade a few more things that I could’ve crossed off my list,
For a day I’ll never forget.
No, I didn’t get a thing done,
But I sure soaked up every minute of the memory we were makin’,
And I count it all as time well wasted.”