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This week’s assignment offered a choice of character depictions. I opted to go with reviewing Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay, The Duchess of Newcastle , from The Common Reader First Series . Its subject is Margaret Cavendish the Duchess of Newcastle. I very much enjoyed getting to learn about her. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons \\\* It is difficult to come away from Virginia Woolf’s essay on the life of Margaret Cavendish with anything but a sense of admiration for the person the Duchess of Newcastle was: a libertarian who lived life on her own terms, a prodigious thinker, prolific writer and designer, all-round force of nature and perhaps proto-feminist. What is even more remarkable about her life is the context within which it was lived, times which seen from the lofty, enlightened heights of our 21st-century sofas seem like the dark ages. Given the latitude to explore and later express a non traditional interpretation of the roles of daughter and wife by both her mother and husband, we get the sense that virtually every thought she had was encouraged and articulated in some shape or form with no attempt to self-censure. It helped perhaps that there were no children to encumber her free spirit. Given Virginia Woolf’s own life and character – and reputation for being a free spirit of sorts too - the largely positive portrayal here does beg the question of objectivity given the tendency in all of us to eulogise those who inspire us and worship them as heroes. ...

What if disease is the earth groaning, these bodies daily breaking its cry for relief from our feet pressed hard against its throat? What if…

For Week 3, Weekend of the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional: \\\* The curse on the slithering snake is to toil ceaselessly, to eke each day’s living from the benighted earth. The promise we hold to is the blessing of the seventh, that after six summers of toil, the seventh brings rest and healing.

For Week 3, Thursday: \\\* The rush of locusts leaves the trees - once lush and green - bare, each fading away in the impermanence, of fields destroyed; the ground mourning the demise of a raw and an exquisite beauty. This is how the earth groans, curled up in pain at the wilfulness of wanton waste, a silent witness to the marks we’ve missed. We bring our clay, our bodies and and our burdens to this place to this aftermath of loss, and hope for redemption, that this place broken in the moment can be whole and holy once again.

For Week 3, Wednesday: \\\* Drop by drop flake by flake the seeds of life are coming and going a stairway between heaven and earth, words watering it with life, calling a harvest from dry things. Each seed is becoming a harvest; of redemption and salvation - joy returning where sadness once reigned.

For the Week 3, Tuesday reflection in the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional: \\\* Trees planted by the river are blessed with the fortitude to resist the howling of the wind the pounding of the waves and the dying the heat and drying bring. Their roots hold together the soil, their leaves stay green even in the season of forgetting. So hold me, tell my heart to trust, to not waver in this season of distress.

A response to the Week 3, Monday reflection in the CoE’s #LiveLent series \\\* Land and plants the Lord God made each one, called forth by the thundering of His voice. First dry land carved from the gathering of the waters then seeds, each taught to yield it’s kind. And everything- the red earth, white beach lush plain and rugged hill sings as one. My God, how great Thou art.

19-tree For the start of Week 3 of the CoE’s #LiveLent Reflections. The wet grass catches the faint light of the rising sun, each blade resplendent in its very present beauty. Here today but gone tomorrow each clump is a promise of provision, a gift of remembering that tomorrow, and the rising sun will come.

This week’s assignment was to interview someone, summarizing what we learned about them in 300 to 500 words. Here goes.. Image by Clint McKoy on Unsplash \\\* R was hunched over his phone typing furiously when I pushed the door open and walked into the restaurant, one of the many that dot the roadside on this corner of the seaside boulevard. I was three minutes late but he, ever the most punctual of people, had arrived early and was in the middle of typing an acerbic note to me. ...

For the Week 2, Weekend reflection in the CoE’s #LiveLent series for 2020. \\\* I come at noon the burden of shame around my neck like a shawl hiding me. I come to find water, to sate my thirst to soak my face in its cooling and wash the dust away. But here I find you offering living water. I drink for cleansing for my scarlet to be white and to never thirst again.