Musings

I have been writing - but not my blog! My evenings have been soaked up writing my research paper on handedness and accidents. Although I haven't completed the survey part of the work, I can write up the literature review and set the scene for my own work.

It's been a bit quiet on the family front: my husband has been sick, so I worked from home on Tuesday to keep an eye on our small daughter. I did actually manage to get quite a lot of work done, but not as much as I would have done in the office! Somehow the presence of a three-year-old isn't that conducive to serious work...

On the personal front, I've had some extremely interesting conversations with various people, including an ex-nun, about vocation and calling and so on. She was very encouraging as she told me her own story: she didn't leave her Order because she wasn't called; it was that it was a different vocation and she needed to give herself time to hear what it was about. I still haven't heard from the Order I wrote to in June-July, but I have decided that I'm just going to wait patiently and see what eventuates.

In the meantime, I am deepening my own practice particularly of the Office, and have been visiting the church next door to work (the glorious St Mary of the Angels) quite regularly for private prayer and meditation in my lunch hour. They have some amazing stained glass and church art (statues etc) that really helps me focus. I particularly love the pieta - although it is rather significantly lacking in realism in one way (the corpus is almost completely blood-free), Mary's face is twisted with a wholly convincing parental agony, and some incredible work by the artist makes her eyes shine with unshed tears. It is a really poignant statue that makes me think, both about the love of God who holds us like a loving parent, and my own responsibility as a parent of a small child.

Pachyderm