The Monthly Salon: March
Come along and set the agenda
Hello everyone. Spring is in the air, and I am busy. Busy getting ready for my book Against the Machine to arrive in the world in September, and also busy writing the stories of which will appear in my next book after that, The Book of Wild Saints. I am also busy on another top-secret project which is a lot of fun, and which I will be telling you all about here in due course.
Meanwhile, I’m also preparing a couple of talks I’ll be giving at the British Saints Weekend which is coming up in Walsingham in May. This will be a really interesting event, I think. I’ll be reading some wild saint stories, and also musing on how England can rediscover some of the ancient saints which made it a nation. Tickets are still available.
I was busy, too, last weekend, when I was over in England teaching with my friend Martin Shaw. Some of you will have read the story of the Devon church which Martin took me to while I was down there. If you missed the conversation I had with him in the pub afterwards, and you’d like to hear us rambling merrily over ale about nature, English churches, green men, Orthodoxy in the West, mythology, scampi and what 1980s beats are playing in the background, you can listen in our our chinwag here.
Oh, and I am also busy watching the grass, the hedges and the brambles grow outside my window, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Time is of the essence when nature gets back into her stride, and as ever I don’t have enough of it.
But life is good when you can be busy on things you mostly like doing, and I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who continues to read me here, and to support me financially in doing all this. I appreciate that I have not offered many hefty essays for a while, due to the above-mentioned head-filling workload. I will try to remedy this when and where I can.
What I am writing at present I am trying to give away for free, because I feel increasingly less and less comfortable charging for any work with a Christian theme. I do have to eat though, and so do my children, so if you are helping me to do that with a paid subscription - thank you again. Please remember that you are also helping those of my readers who are unable to pay, which makes you a doubly nice person. Blessings to you.
Anyway: our monthly salons are your opportunity to set the agenda, so it’s over to you. Talk about anything you like. I’ll join in where I can. Take it away.
Greetings from our wild Bronte Pennine land. House move after 25 years of bringing up four precious children- now all adults. Three skips later, while watching snowdrops replaced by crocus- living now alongside daffodils. Needing to clear out the gutter and eves, in order to sell the house, but not daring to. The birds have returned to very old nests and soon the chicks will be heard- we leave them all be. All faithful, yearly signs of Easter promise. Thirteen weeks post cancer treatment, helps clear out the possessions I have hung onto. I read once.. if the minutes are hard, look for the moments. I am very grateful for so many of these 'moments'.
As a mini-homesteader over here in the States, I can definitely relate to the seasonal "so much to do, so little time." So we all do what we can as best we can re: generating substack content. Do what you can, we're not going anywhere. :) Plus we take comfort knowing that the Machine book is looming on the horizon.