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For The Sunday Muse Prompt #188 and the 49 from Northcote to White City: ** On the 49 from Northcote, a young woman sits. She folds her hands, hangs her feet, and lets the world without slip by - grey granite yielding to gleaming glass, verdant green disappearing behind the whorls of potted plants. Somewhere outside, the river wends its way across the plain. Above, in a fleeting moment a giant clanging bird roars. Somewhere on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush and King’s an old man, wraps his hands around himself as his breath draws wisps in the winter wind. As it was in the beginning and now is the river remains. We all like small lights flicker, and then are gone.

Image Source: Christianity Today ** Over the past four or so months, I have listened with rapt attention, waiting for the next episode drop of the Christianity Today podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. For the uninitiated, it chronicles the story of Seattle megachurch, Mars Hill and its founder Mark Driscoll. It first came to my attention, if memory serves me right, when its host, Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper, popped in to the Holy Post podcast for a conversation with Skye Jethani. That interview, and the end of the first episode, go some way to lay out the team’s reasons for exploring this story and what lessons they hope to tease out as they go along. As expected, Mark Driscoll looms large over the series - which has one final episode to go. Alongside him, making appearances and/or being named checked are a slew of other heavyweights in the evangelical space, thanks to his involvement in two organisations like The Gospel Coalition and the Acts 29 network. ...

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #186: ** Before you call me by this name and shrink the sum of all my days down to this facade, this still-life of sepia pixels flickering like daylight disappearing before the force of dusk; Before you place the burdens of history around my neck, till it begins to break beneath the weight of expectation, you must know that this name is one of a myriad, each bequeathed by the ones who came before, a prayer that we might see, the small lights in our being.

Photo by Kenza Benaouda on Unsplash ** Of the things that still irk me, more than a year into my Arabian Odyssey, the sheer inefficiencies which seem baked into the system stand out for particular ire. Case in point: this past week to spend ten minutes picking up a letter from my employer and then delivering it at a government office fifteen kilometres away, I had to drive 250+kilometres. To my mind, it is something that can and should dare I say, be managed via an online portal but I found to my pain that this was not the case. It is no wonder then that in the short space of over a month I have driven just shy of three thousand kilometres, mainly between my outpost in the middle of nowhere, work (twice), the big city next door (multiple times) and the occasional trip to the provincial capital for some government thing or the other twice too. ...

Image Source: The Guardian ** Every waking minute of the past few weeks it seems has been filled with some nursery rhyme or the other, so much so that deep in my less wakeful moments, I have caught myself humming along to some tune or another. Chief of them has to be the ten in a bed one where a particularly bossy kid shoos off the others who end up in a pile beside the bed nursing various bumps and scrapes. Sometimes it has felt like there are an infinite number of ways this can happen, although the mathematics suggest that there is only one way to do that, if that particular order is maintained. All of this is long way to say that L is very much at the centre of things with sleep, if I can go out for a run in the morning and other such mundane things very much dependent on what state she wakes up in. ...

Rodin’s Le Penseur. Image from the US National Gallery of Art ** When I set about thinking about the year of being forty, it seemed a no-brainer that it would be centred around delving deeper. The premise was that as the worst kind of failure is one of depth, actively looking to ensure I had depth in all critical aspects of my life was key as I came into my decade of being forty something. As to why I think failures of depth are the most critical, I think that both the one who fails and the one who is failed are left with the lingering after taste of what might have been. For one, the chance of a lifetime disappears before it even begins. For the other the time and energy expended/ invested ends up being for nothing. Both face the opportunity costs, lost irretrievably. For the year of being forty-one, rebuild better was the key, given COVID and how it had intervened specifically in my life with regards to a new job. ...

For The Sunday Muse prompt #180: ** We come to water to be washed and be reborn, this hand cupping the curvature of the face, the other dipped, drenched in the very fluid from which we come, the space between the fingers of that hand filled with the water, straining against the strictures of the hand. We come to water to lose ourselves in the beauty of the simple things, to see the dirt of our days and the detritus of the night loosen, dissolving until we see ourselves pristine whole again, the way we have imagined in our dreams a lip, an eye, lingering still in the mirror of still water.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #179: ** The scent of life and of living hangs heavy on this place, Here, where the weight of memory and first things lose themselves in the labyrinth of the mind. First step, first walk, first smile. First words - garbled beyond recognition but finding the connection between the proffered body and sustenance. First leaving, first returning then leaving - the first steps of a lonesome journey to a far country, of seeking the wily welcome of the open world calling - siren-like - from beyond the walls that time has built. ...

In the news this week on the BBC: Abattoirs have about a week’s supply of gas. It’s a chain: We have constantly got pigs coming out of the breeding herd that need to go in homes. Those homes need to be emptied. Stumbled on this on the news recently which got me thinking of a couple of my interests of late - systems, resilience and [system of system approaches](https://www.incose.org/products-and-publications/sos-primer#:~:text=A%20System%20of%20Systems%20(SoS,a%20topic%20of%20increasing%20interest.) to identifying deep dependencies and potential unintended cascade failures of supply chains. What is a world in which rising gas prices potentially affect the availability of meat via several fertiliser farms having to shut down if not incredibly fragile.

For The Sunday Muse #178: ** In the wisps of the smoke blown in a moment of recalcitrance the man he might yet be lurks. The man he now is and the one he once was yielding in the moment to the future better one. Becoming.