Reading: Psalm 119:1-8
Nan Merrell Version from Praying the Psalms.
Blessed are those whose ways are blameless
Who live with spiritual integrity
Blessed are those who honour the Inner Being
Who follow you with their whole heart
Who enfold the world with love
and walk on the peaceful path
You have shown the way of Truth
the way that leads to freedom
O that I might ever reflect the Light
Then I shall know inner peace
as I surrender myself into your Hands
I will praise You with a grateful heart
as I lean on your great kindness
As I forsake the path of Darkness
O have mercy on me.
Sermon
Back in 1994 when Caitlin and I moved to the west coast, we drove across the country, taking three months to do so. We followed our hearts or the intriguing names of places on the map, driving no more than three hours a day, camping every night, exploring the country between the Ottawa River and the Pacific Ocean as we drove into our new life together.
One day we stopped at Grasslands National Park. It was late September, and the prairie grass was dry and brown. We had the whole park to ourselves. We camped in a tipi ring on top of a coulee overlooking the Frenchman River and looked across the valley. From horizon to horizon, we counted seven trees, so we decided to visit them all. It took us two days.
Our first hour of walking was boring. We traveled down the side of the coulee into the valley and saw nothing of the wildlife that we were promised by the breathless copy in the Parks Canada brochure. With every step we took, the tree we were heading toward seemed to retreat into the distance.
Finally, we rested by the side of the river, where we encountered a coyote trail. Instead of mindlessly chasing the tree, we decided to follow the trail and see where it would take us. Almost immediately we spotted a badger den, and then a prairie dog colony full of gophers nervously nosing the air and keeping one eye on us. The trail took us past burrowing owl nests, rattlesnake hibernacula, and within sight of a herd of antelope who could see us coming for miles. At one point we were joined by coyotes, one leading us and one following behind, both a couple of hundred meters away, like respectful guides or watchful parents. I had the stunning realization that the continent at one point was covered with this uninterrupted meshwork of trails and that they carried a walker past all of the living features of a landscape.
When you walk the path, life is revealed.
This reading comes in the midst of Epiphany, the liturgical season in which we reflect on what has been brought into the world through the teachings and example of Jesus. In ten days we will begin Lent, which is an intense time of practice for us. For many of us, Lent centers around a commitment. That might be giving up a habit that no longer serves us or perhaps, more positively, focusing on a habit that we can build over 40 days of practice. If we grew up with a dose of Christian guilt we might be conditioned to think that the way to be holy and righteous is to look at all the ways we are bad in the world and punish ourselves for it. Lent might carry with it more than a little trepidation. Years ago however, I read that 40 days is enough time to secure a new habit and that a more affirming way to approach Lent was to do something different rather than stop doing something. Our minds can’t hold a negative – don’t think about a pink elephant – so as we focus on things that make us feel guilty or shame, we simply allow more of that to take over our hearts.
Instead, choose something different to focus on, something we know brings us closer to the sacred and beautiful source of life and love. Do that one thing diligently for 40 days and see what begins to take hold in you.
The last time I was reflecting here I talked about how the Greek word for “repent” is “metanoia” which means, turn around, do something differently, notice the things that aren’t serving you, and do a different thing. It is a positive word, a choice that takes us closer to the sacred, to the Divine, to the source of unconditional love that reminds us that we are Beloved. Like Caitlin and I on the short-grass prairie, it means taking a turn onto a path that will deliver us towards living.
So just in time for Lent, this Psalm shows up in our Lectionary. If we are looking for a few things to practice during Lent, this psalm may offer a nice sourcebook for that.
The Psalm is 176 verses long and structured as an acrostic poem, with each section beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In all, there are 22 sections with 8 verses each. The Psalm is an at-time ecstatic plea that the writer may live in accordance with God’s law, which is best thought of as a path towards wisdom, truth, and spiritual freedom. The law, the way, the precepts, and the path that is spoken of is about the actions of aligning ourselves with a higher purpose and growing closer to the Sacred. The Law here is about living a more loving and meaningful life, mindful of how we encounter the world and cultivating a spiritual awareness that awakens us to beauty, mystery and the goodness of the world so we might live with reverence and joy in every moment. The Psalm is a dance between things the writer longs to practice in accordance with these basic principles of spiritual development, and a plea for the discipline to actually to do it. Sounds like all of us, right?
Nan Merrill’s translation of the first 8 verses of the psalm gives us a few things we might want to focus on. And I will be the first to stand here and tell you that these things are simple to say and hard to do, and if you want stories about how to fall well short of one’s intentions, I’ve got a long list! None of us are perfect. But we are all good-hearted, and these practices are for polishing that goodness, not becoming perfect.
We might want to live in a way that stops us from feeling ashamed, by practicing what we preach, and doing what we say. In that case, spiritual integrity is the path. Being aware of what arises in our minds and hearts and what comes out of our mouths or what actions we take. Awareness and mindfulness help us to notice our patterns and habits. Noticing is the first step to change. So what do you want to pay attention to?
Or how about honouring the Inner Being? The Inner Being refers to our true, authentic self that lies beneath the surface of our daily thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It is often described as a spiritual essence or soul that is innate within each of us and that seeks connection with a higher power. It is seen as the source of our deepest wisdom, intuition, and guidance. It is the part of us that is connected to the divine and that experiences a sense of peace, joy, and purpose in life. When we honour the Inner Being, we are tapping into this inner wisdom and allowing it to guide us in our actions, thoughts, and relationships with others. That sounds like a good practice for Lent.
We could choose in every moment to enfold the world with love and practice a commitment to truth. These two precepts go hand in hand. Speaking the truth is made more powerful by embracing love and compassion. Jesus’s teaching to “love one’s enemy and one loves oneself” is the lesson here. So who could you love a bit more? What part of the world could you enfold in love?
Or we might choose to reflect the Light we speak of when we refer to the Christ amongst us, that conscious pattern of love and connection and belonging. In a world of separation and alienation, we can remember how we are connected together and choose to walk a path of peace, gratitude, and surrender to the beauty and awe that surrounds us. We can sing with others, creating sweet moments of harmony. We can engage in deep conversations about what matters to our hearts, and what we love and long for. What we miss and cherish. These days, it is easy to lay hate on the state of the world, for the changes that are happening to us, and for the conflict that consumes us. Can we find moments to rest in the peace of the world, to watch a seal in the sea, or listen for the changing songs of the birds in the dawn chorus, as spring creeps upon us? Can we daily surrender to the gratitude of a world that hosts us on its surface? Forty days of that is good for the soul.
This is not an intellectual exercise. Like my experience on the short grass prairie, this is about noticing what arises when we walk in spiritual integrity when we walk a path of wholeness and alignment to our true selves. It requires us to be in the world, carried and buffeted by the struggles and celebrations of our life. It is through human experiences that we come to know who we are as spiritual beings. We come to recognize the Inner Being of the Divine within us, to see ourselves as living, loving pieces of stardust. And in knowing this, we come to the ecstatic praise of the intricate nature of love and the gift of our life here at this time and in this form.
As we walk this path, we are invited to enfold the world with love and be enfolded by it. We are invited to become the Beloved, brought into a deeper connection with all that is, a love that opens our hearts to the beauty and wonder of this world, and a love that brings us into the embrace of the divine. It is a love that touches and transforms us and those with whom we interact.
The spiritual life is one that is enhanced by discipline and practice, regular prayer, reflection, learning, and self-examination. Christ’s teachings in their simplest form point us to practices that lead us to a life that is for our benefit, that brings us happiness and peace, and that makes the world a kinder, more just, more equitable, more loving place. The promise of these teachings is that unconditional love awaits you at every step on the path. It is right here. The Kindom is at hand.
I encourage you to read the whole Psalm at some point this week. When you do, listen for the longing the writer has for the ability to stay true to a path of loving practice. This is all of us, diligently tuning our hearts to The Way, opening ourselves to the life that unfolds as we walk through this world, feeling the struggle of suffering and the liberation of blessing. Every day become a little more attuned to the fact that we are always, and ever becoming Beloved.
Richard Rohr has been an important and influential presence in my own spiritual journey over these past 10 or 15 years and although I have never met the man, I have visited the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, and every day I reflect on his teachings and practice through daily blog posts from the Center and through the vast library of Rohr’s works.
After several years of transition, Richard Rohr now seems to be fully released from his duties at the Center as he nears the end of his life, and this little video series is a lovely testament to how a leader-founder can let go into community with grace and trust.
Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakw’kwa’kwa’kw Elders and youth teaching together in the Kwagiulth big house at Fort Rupert in 2005.
Once a month, in our little United Church here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) I fill in for our not-quite-full-time minister by leading the service and offering a sermon. I’ve never published those sermons here, but why not? Here is today’s.
Reading: Matthew 4:12-25
We are well into the season of Epiphany and so this is the time of year that we contemplate Jesus’ ministry in the world and his early life. We get to witness a Jesus who is called from his work as a carpenter and who becomes an important and radical spiritual leader in his time. For the first 28 or 30 years of his life, things are somewhat uneventful, and although he shows some talent for interpreting scripture as a precocious child , he isn’t doing much else of note.
To set the stage, Matthew, whose terse words we will be studying this year, offers this text from chapter 4, which is the first time he writes about Jesus as a spiritual leader. The first few chapters of his book concern Jesus’ birth, the visit of the magi and the story of John the Baptist. With chapter 4 we get two important stories. The first, which we will hear in the first week of Lent, is the story of Jesus retiring to the wilderness of a 40 day retreat in which he meets the devil and wrestles with temptation. It is a story of a spiritual coming of age that echoes that of other great spiritual leaders, including Buddha, who sits under the bodhi tree struggling with his mind in the form of the temptress Mara as he approaches the great insights and liberation of Nirvana. Somewhere in this story of baptism, retreat and now calling, Jesus has gone through a similar transformation. He is not longer a carpenter.
Now these events are often told in a breezy narrative of what Jesus is up to, but as I read and meditated on the readings this week I was struck by how the simple structure of the story that Mark just read mirrors four deeper callings that I think are part of our work as Christians.
A calling is just something that one cannot ignore. It is a movement of Spirit that reaches deep inside and changes a person. It hits you like, well, like an Epiphany, which is to say that a calling is a manifestation of Spirit inside of oneself that changes behaviour. It can draw us towards a life mission, and an identity. It has the power to surprise, to give insight, to change one’s ways, and to ultimately align one’ purpose in life with the needs of the world.
What I also love about the way that this little story is told is that it also provides some simple guidance for ourselves, to act in tune with Spirit.
The first calling is to withdrawal and contemplation and alignment with the light of God that shines through the soul of a person and turns their heart and mind and hands to acts of justice and compassion, the words of the prophet Isaiah. This comes on the heels of news that John the Baptist has been arrested, and will soon be killed. John is very much the pre-cursor of Jesus and this news provides the gravitas for Jesus’s choice. He knows that choosing to reveal himself will result in his death. His choice to act has a consequence from which he cannot escape and so he withdraws to rest and wait before responding to the call. Like the morning sky waiting for the sun to rise, Jesus withdraws to cultivate his light. It does not good to burn too brightly right out of the gate.
Discernment is a critical part of responding to a calling. A calling changes lives. Even on the micro-scale if we realize that we are about to confront a major decision in our lives, even burdened by urgency and overwhelming need, the first act should be to withdraw and consider the consequences. It’s not second thoughts so much as it is deeper thoughts.
The second calling is revealed in the simple statement ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ With these modest words, Jesus’ entire message of spiritual liberation is embodied and in saying it he has become a spiritual teacher. As we’ve learned before the word “repent” is the English translation for the Greek word “metanoia” and it is a terrible translation. “Repent” means to feel guilt, remorse and shame for something and it’s as far as you can get fro Jesus’ message of compassion and forgiveness. “Metanoia” means to change one’s life, literally to turn around. Jesus offers this as an instruction: if you have done something wrong, go back to that point and take a different tack, apologize, heal yourself, and you will find forgiveness because the “kindom” of heaven wants you to belong, wants you to be in relationship and wants you to be connected and whole. Like the Buddha, Jesus knows that life is hard and that we all walk around with shame and guilt and regret. He is not interested in doubling down on that, pressing on teh bruise and making you feel like shit. He is about liberation, and he is about giving you a simple pathway to addressing the burdens you are carrying. Simple in concept, tricky to execute. But to be left riddled with shame and guilt is literally NOT what Jesus said. So, “Change your life: stopping harming yourself and others and the forgiveness and love you seek – which is always there – will fill you with joy and healing.” That’s a better translation of the phrase.
The third calling is to community and movement-building, gathering the disciples around him in a core team to activate the mission of love and justice. The phrase “become fishers of people” is a reference to the sayings of multiple prophets who point to the rich and unjust people in the world who rule with cruelty. Jesus’ mission is to rally a group of people together to transform the society they are all living in. To practice radical love and forgiveness, to gather people together, to heal and feed, to support and care for one another. Once he is committed to this call, Jesus’s mission becomes gathering many people into a movement to make change.
Justice is not the work of a single person. We have just passed the annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and when I think about him, and Indigenous rights leaders here in Canada like Delbert Guerin and Simon Baker and Marge White and Khelsilem and George Manuel and Gisda’wa and Wedlidi Speck, I can see that the project of becoming a prophet, literally a social justice warrior, is not work to do alone, nor is it work that one can do part time. Jesus asks his disciples to leave their professions and engage in the work of world transformation alongside him.
A life’s calling has that effect on a person. Suddenly you know what you are made for and whatever you were doing before falls by the wayside as you fully commit yourself to the work of Spirit.
And finally we come to the fourth calling: the work of healing people and the world. It is not just enough to advocate for a more just world. The world cries out for healing and reparations and repair and reconciliation. We have damaged social relations, our connection to the planet and to our selves. In order to make change in the world, we need to heal and restore. You can see that no matter how you have healed – cooled your anger, broken your addictions, restored an ecosystem formerly devoid of whales, life floods back in. Joy and Spirit and wellness fills you. The “Kindom of God” surrounds you. Being healed is the name we give the way from guilt and disconnection to wholeness and life.
And so the readings give us a map of our calling, a checklist of things to do if we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as his followers. May we have ears to hear how our callings can contribute to a just and kind world.
For years Peter Levine, a moral/political philosopher who teaches at Tufts University, has been a must-read for me for his musings on civic engagement, democracy, policy, history and philosophy. Today he celebrates 20 years of blogging with the release of “Cuttings: a book about happiness” that is a collection of his collected blog posts on “Happiness” which is so much more than that title implies. The book is a set of reflections on philosophical texts, religious scriptures, and poetry, Buried in the text is a little observation that I suspect says something about who he is:
So we have a model of the humane and sensitive educated person as one who has been
— Peter Levine, Cuttings: A book about happiness v1.0, p. 20
habituated by the reading of moving stories to be empathetic and thus to show mercy or
otherwise depart from harsh decisions.
I have never met this person in real life, but his character shines through his deep and considered blog posts, and this collection is a lovely gift to savour.
Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.
Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.
The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.
It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.
Work
My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.
In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”
This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.
We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.
Partners
Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.
- Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
- Tatiana Glad
- Meribeth Deen
- Bhav Patel
- Kris Archie
- Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
- Tiaré Jung
- Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
- Phill Cass
- Ciaran Camman
- Amanda Fenton
- Quin Buck
- Corrina Keeling
- Jodi Sanford
- Kinwa Bluesky
- Chad Foulks
- Geoff Brown
- Teresa Posakony.
Teaching
This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.
- Hosting Powerful Conversations: Introduction to World Cafe and Open Space Technology through teh Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, a course I have offered annually since 2009.
- Complexity from the Inside Out. A course that Caitlin and I have put together and that combines our joint bodies of work assembled over the past 20 years of working with complex systems and challenges. We ran two cohorts in 2021.
- The Art of Hosting. Every year since 2004 we have offered this program on Bowen Island, and in 2020 we offered it online. After missing 2021, this past year we offered it in person in Vancouver with Kris Archie and Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier (who sadly couldn’t be with us for the actually program days). We’ll repeat that again in 2023.
- Kelly and I did do a course together though, which was really magic. Transforming Power, offered alongside our friends at Beehive Productions, used Nuu-Chah-Nulth lenses to look at the power we have and how we wield it. I loved this course.
- Also through Beehive I offer courses on Chaordic Design, Harvesting and Sense-making and Hosting in Complexity all of which are available to take on demand.
Learning
In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.
- Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
- Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
- This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.
Living on the web
My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.
I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!
Avocations
This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.
Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.
Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.
Life on an island
I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.
In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.
So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.