The Real Dulsie Bridge

“O Lord, what great works you do! And how deep are your thoughts.” Psalm 92:5

I often get accused of using words that no one understands. There may be a simpler way to express an opinion, using the words my listeners are familiar with, but there is such a rich vocabulary out there that I refuse.  The dictionary every year drops out words to allow new ones in. Sometimes the words that hang on in there lose their original meanings and become something else. Language evolves and I understand that. I just like words and lots of them.

This morning as I was reading Psalm 92. I had a notebook and pen, a couple of commentaries and devotionals and I make notes. As I came to this verse the words “Dulsie Bridge” came to mind. Some things don’t get dropped out of the memory. I wrote this in a Faithwriter’s Weekly Challenge.

One Saturday, Joe and I went for a drive. We began at Nairn with a late breakfast and then as the weather wasn’t particularly nice for walking, we went for a car drive. We picked up a tourist information leaflet at the local office. It contained directions for a car drive in the area. By following the instructions we would see things that we would never just bump into.

Several miles along the route was the sign post for the Dulsie Bridge. There was no picture in the leaflet, so we were not sure what we were looking for. We have seen some nice bridges in our time.

The “bridge” was beside the road. It was very humped back with a turf top to it. There was no water going under it, the river having been diverted by engineers at a later date perhaps. We took the required amount of photos - me on the bridge, Joe on the bridge, me standing next to the bridge and so on. It was a nice bridge!

Imagine our surprise when a mile down the road we came upon the real Dulsie Bridge! It was even labelled! The road dropped down towards the bridge that spanned a huge chasm, and then climbed up steeply on the other side. It was a real feat of engineering. The two bridges were incomparable - the other must have been an old drover's bridge!

We looked at each other and laughed thinking of the photos we had taken!

If we had not continued with the drive after seeing the old drover's bridge, we would have never realised that we had missed the real Dulsie Bridge. Seeing the real thing, we knew that the first bridge wasn't it.

When we know what the real thing looks like, we realise that what we thought was "it" really wasn't at "it" all. The real thing is much more impressive.

There are a lot of people who think they know what the Christian life is like. When they are confronted with the real thing, it is so much more impressive! Some people may think they know what God is like. When they are confronted with a real encounter with God, there is no mistaking Him!

This morning I wasn’t thinking about what the Christian life is like or not but what God is like. I have a feeling that what we label as God’s great works don’t really come close to what they are about. Rather than allow scripture to define them, we define them according to our own experience. Perhaps because we live less vibrant lives than we ought, our concept of those great works fall short of what they really are. We limit our perceptions. God is not allowed to demonstrate His great works because they make us feel uncomfortable.

The depth of God’s thoughts? I’m not sure that we are willing to dive that deeply. We imagine, all too often, that God thinks like we think. Scripture tells us otherwise – but we don’t live scripture very well. We soften and dilute to make life easier and forget to be radical. We seem to have lost the ability to turn the world upside down by taking God at His word.

I felt a little bereft this morning.  A little bewildered. I find myself, perhaps, in a comfortable place and wonder what happened to the risk.

I was talking to a group of young people this week about the changes that we had been through over the last twelve months. Some were taller. Some were more confident. Some had new family members or had moved house.

I shared how I had lost courage. I noticed it particularly in driving places. Last year Joe and I went to Yorkshire for a second time. The first time the hills, the unfamiliar roads, getting in and out of cities, driving in the dark – none of these things alarmed me. Last year – it was a different story. I wasn’t as courageous then as I had been. I admit I have dodgy eye-sight and a need to update my glasses – so, yes, I had reason to be wary. Deep down I lamented my lack of courage.

It is not my surroundings that should make me comfortable but the knowledge that I am secure in God. Whatever the adventure, whatever the risk – I am safe in His hand.

Someone Whispered

It was after late night shop window blinds were winched down

After lively conversations on balconies were muted

After echoes of boots on wet pavements dissipated

After curtains shifted in the cool breeze of an open window

Someone whispered

Four courtyard walls, a dozen flats and a chimney of space

A dark square of sky, a scattering of stars, a light drift of cloud

The scent of a dozen meals cooked and the fragrance of wine

The last bars of a song, water from a shower, the low rumble of a washing machine

Someone whispered

We met in daylight, the tenants, glancing and guessing, awkward dances in hallways

We watched each other, reluctant to speak or ask, or look the other in the eye

The names we never knew, because we never asked, never tipped on our tongues

Strangers sharing bricks, cement, a wrought iron gateway and a dozen post-boxes

Someone whispered

Night after night after night

Someone whispered

English, not Spanish

A woman, not a man

At night time, never in the day

Someone whispered

“She’s praying,” said the woman from the top floor as she folded her washing

“It’s her brother’s flat,” announced the man who lived opposite, cigarette between fingers

“He’s in hospital with cancer,” added the young man wheeling his bike into the porch

“Dying,” disclosed the old woman from the ground floor, crossing herself swiftly

Someone prayed

We listened, chairs pulled up to windows, eavesdropping on a conversation

She prayed a storm of words, rebuking tumours the size of an egg, declaring healing

Asking for anointed conversations over cups of coffee on the hospital veranda

Seeking peace, finding anger, raging at God who kept His distance, then saying “sorry”

She prayed

We thought if we were God we would answer her prayer, perhaps

We thought the brother would get the all clear, perhaps

We thought we should say something if we saw her, perhaps

We wished someone would pray for us the way she prayed for him

So we prayed

Tales by the Real Fireside

I think I was willing to be talked out of going last night. Storm Brian had been in the news and the clouds were gathering. It was Strictly night on TV and I was all for being cosy on the sofa. However, having been involved in some of the workshops I felt I needed to see the whole thing out - the final result of four weeks of a creative workshop. I grabbed a brolly, a torch and a camera set to night-time pictures and headed off.

The meeting point was the carpark at Great Glen House, the dropping off point for my husband on a morning. The Crofting Commission shared the building with a number of other organisations. Last minute details – I inserted my hearing aids, stuffed spare batteries into my pocket – quite how I planned to change the batteries sitting on a log, in a forest, under torchlight I hadn’t worked out but like the good girl guide I used to be, I was prepared. The dozen or so people at the carpark wore rucksacks and walking boots and had that fit and healthy look about them. They probably didn’t even know they were missing Striclty.

A fifteen minute walk was promised. I had fretted about this. People in general tend to walk a lot quicker than me. Although I began the walk quite near the front, I was trailing behind towards the end. There were fairy lights decorating the path every so often, and although we were not encouraged to use our torches, I kept mine on, pointing to my feet. I have a feeling that in daylight I might have quailed at the path. It was steep, but only being able to see a foot-span spotlight ahead of me I couldn’t see how steep, or how long we would be climbing.

Tea, coffee or hot chocolate were on offer at the fireside. There were logs to sit on, with a mat to cushion the rear end against the rough bark. A canopy had been fixed, spanning from tree to tree. Had Brian brought his rain, we would have been dry. The fire was burning bright surrounded by a ring of stones. Through the trees, way down below us, the lights of Inverness sparkled in white, yellow and orange.

The stories began.

It didn’t take a lot of imagination to feel transported to a different era. It was as if a family or clan had gathered by the fire. We were perhaps missing the oldest generation. The youngsters sat beside mums and dads, bedtime postponed for a little adventure.

I’d heard most of the stories before as part of the storytelling workshops. It was different hearing them in the middle of a forest, late at night, in the firelight. I could almost see the fairy folk drawing near, enticed by a good tale, enthralled and listening just out of view. I imagined there was a sigh among them; that people had returned to the forest not to walk dogs or chop down trees, but to gather and tell tales, like they used to once upon a time. I thought about this present generation of people not here, playing death-dealing games on the computer or a dancing somewhere under strobe lights. This story telling event was something of a unique experience.  It was a soul feeding opportunity.

I had prepared my own story to tell. Indeed I had been telling it to myself in the car as I drove to the carpark. Having missed two of the workshops, I had missed my chance at making it on to the storytellers list. I didn’t mind. There will be another time to tell that tale.

The final story was new to me, a Welsh legend that involved a farmer, his son and a dark stranger. It was a tale of magic and dangerous deals. The boy and the dark stranger, a magician, turn into a variety of animals and fish as the one pursues the other. It was only when Merlin was identified as the son that I remembered the sequence from “The Sword in the Stone” cartoon. Someone once said that there are only six stories out there in the world. The thousands that are told change names and settings and quests – but they are essentially the same story.

I was thinking about last night, the climb up to the forest, the fire, the tales, the hot chocolate, the descent back down to the carpark – and how I had almost talked myself out of it. The threat of Storm Brian, the lure of Strictly and longing for comfort. Had I listened to that voice telling me not to go, I would have missed out on the event.

What other things do I talk myself out of doing?

There is so much to deter, distract and divert my attention and my energies. I don’t want there to be a pile of treasure in heaven I can never claim because I never climbed the hill, sat on the log in front of a fire and listened.

Imagine if no one had gone with Jesus to the tops of mountains, heard and seen the things He wanted to share the record in the gospels would be that much shorter, much less vibrant and challenging, paler somehow.

 We don’t climb enough mountains. We are too obsessed with picking them up and hurling them out of our way.

“Being Ourselves”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment” Ralph Waldo Emerson

A couple of years ago I challenged myself to write a poem a day during the advent season. For some of the poems it was simply about writing something as opposed to writing nothing. I could tick the box and say I did it. When I look back over the few lines I am amazed that sometimes they are not just lines at all, to fill a space, but they contain a truth.

Heaven’s King

Heaven’s king comes down

Jesus at ease in His skin

touches a leper

I love that phrase “at ease in His skin”. There are too many surveys and polls around that reveal how much we are not really at ease in our skin. There is too much out there in the world presenting us with images that we rarely match up to. We are not allowed to be at ease in our skin unless it is size zero and blemish free.

Today I met with the “Poetry in Motion” crew to explore what it means to be ourselves. They were running a series of workshops around the Highlands as a part of the 2017 Mental Health Arts Festival. The venue was the Glenurquhart Library in Drumnadrochit, just off to the right of Loch Ness before you hit Urquhart Castle on the left. Amazing building.

There were a couple of warming up exercises and a fistful of prompts to play with. We are the sum of all the places we have ever visited, the memories that we hold inside, our hopes and dreams, the people whose lives we have touched and what floats our boat or sinks it. Who we are isn’t always what people see us to be.

There is a spiral staircase in the library that leads to desks littered with computers and a panoramic window that looks out onto the distant hills. A couple of banners hang from the ceiling. Two words decorate them “stones” and “people”. I didn’t consciously think about either word but they must have registered somewhere in the creative part of my brain.

I did Geography “O” Level at school. In my day it was not human Geography as in towns and cities and pollution and poverty. It was the structure of the landscape – mountains and valleys, rivers and rainfall. I fell in love with the word “isthmus” and I knew that Fort William had the highest level of rainfall never thinking I would ever visit the place.

As I looked through the window of the library I wished I could remember all I had been taught about how the mountains came to be like that. It was something to do with glaciers and the ice age and plate tectonics – the movement of earth’s crust, sometimes pulling away, somethings pushing together and piling up.  There’s a limit to how much we can play around with the landscape to make it do what we need to when it comes to roads and railways. We seek out the natural passes rather than blast our way through. We tend to build according to the contours.

That’s the landscape – the “stones” but what about the "people"?

It didn’t seem to be a difficult jump to start thinking about people and how they got there. Not how they got there according to evolution or the birds and the bees of sex education. (Remind me to tell you about the trains and the tunnels and dropping off presents). How people got there as in how they ended up living the lives they live and the internal firing of thoughts and feelings. Is there a human equivalent of plate tectonics and glaciers that shape and form us?

Over a cup of tea we talked about how much of being ourselves is written in our DNA and how much we are shaped by our environment. Philosophy on a Saturday morning! It really was an interesting discussion with no right or wrong answers.

We settled down to write something inspired by our notes and observations.

Shaped

landscape shaped and formed

by wind and weather

the earth’s crust shifts

sometimes pulling away

sometimes piling up and over

mountains and valleys fashioned

rock, soil and lochs

ice age evidence

too much to dismantle

we build beside or near

curbed by contours

people shaped and formed

by family, friend and foe

the heart’s crust shifts

sometimes love bestowed

sometimes love withheld

our joys and sorrows fashioned by

words spoken, or swallowed

too much to dismantle?

we fight or surrender to our DNA and

build who we want to be

The Land of Forgetfulness

“Can anyone in the land of forgetfulness talk about your righteousness?”

I was reading Psalm 88 last night and these words in v12 caught my attention. I know too many people who have fathers or mothers who have been diagnosed with dementia or something like it. A horrible disease that strips away all that really matters in life – the connections we make with one another. I wrote this poem years ago. It came to mind as I thought about the land of forgetfulness.

Dementia

She was mugged

Not in broad daylight

Not watched

By the unblinking eye

Of a CTV camera

No grainy pictures

Of unidentifiable yobs

Snatching a handbag

And pushing her to knees

Leaving her trembling

She was mugged

Not on a crowded street

Where people pretend

It's not their business

And hide behind

Carrier bags and trolleys

And only after it's safe

Do they reach out

To help her back to her feet

Leaving her shaken

She was mugged

In the safety of her own home

No balled up fists

Or snarling threats

Just the silent destruction

Of neurons and pathways

In the brain

The relentless dismantling

Of memories and thoughts

Leaving her confused

Now she sits in a nursing home

Folded in a red chair

Frantically picking

At a blanket that covers

Her knees

Blue clouded eyes

Searching for familiar landmarks

The lines erased

Between then and now

Leaving her adrift

More Tales by the Fireside

We have a rule in this house that runs along this line – if you’re too sick to go to work, you are too sick to go to anything else that might be happening that day. I broke that rule yesterday. It was not an accidental breaking or a realising after the event kind of thing. It was deliberate. If I was not as old as I am I might be grounded. Actually, I have grounded myself anyway. Had I felt yesterday as poorly as I feel today I’m not sure I’d have been up to any rule breaking at all.

The second session of the “Tales by the Fireside” storytelling workshop was yesterday evening. I will miss the third session and maybe the grand finale of actually telling any story around a campfire in Dunain Forest.

Last week we played with kennings. This week we explored the art of storytelling itself and drew storyboards.

It would appear that in many parts of the world the art of storytelling is becoming extinct. Today when people meet together around a story it’s all played out on a cinema screen. It’s just you and the action sequences and no connection with the hundred or more other people in the same room.  A story may be told but they have done all the work and you are an observer of it rather than a participator in it. Disney provides all the bottled-milk happy endings we need and really doesn’t encourage us to chew real food.

Even bed time stories are read rather than told.

A story was compared to boat, with the storytellers being the crew and the listeners being the passengers. Perhaps it was an apt comparison seeing as we were on the Loch Ness Barge and the session was hosted by the Scottish Waterways Trust.

To be a storyteller, rather than a story reader, there are certain elements that must be included in the narrative:-

·         Choosing the right story to tell

·         Finding the bones of the story and fleshing it out

·         Knowing your beginning, middle and end

·         Finding your own way of telling the story and working out what you are comfortable doing

·         Tapping into that dream state people enter into when they hear a story and giving the listeners all they need to involve their imagination

·         Crafting the story with pace and drama, song and silence and rhyme and repetition

·         Paying attention to body language

·         Making effective use of props

Knowing that we were going to be looking at stories I printed off a children’s story I had written a while ago – “The Laughter Thief”. I’d revised an earlier version of it to make it child friendly. I’d written the story but yesterday was the first time I had read it out loud to anyone. It was nice to give it a life it had never had before!

Not only was the story read out, but I got the chance to “tell it” too. We were encouraged to draw out a storyboard - picking out the bare bones of the story in pictures and phrases. With this in front of us, with these clues about what happens next, we were given the opportunity to tell our story.

There were a couple of other people for the workshop. One of them told a story about a stonecutter who was unhappy with his life and envied others. Magic transforms him into all the things he thinks he would rather be until he comes full circle and realises his own stonecutting life is the best.

The other man told a story about birds in a competition to find out which of them could fly the highest. After reading the story and creating his storyboard he was able to tell the story.  A first telling did not allow for enough of the crafting that comes with really knowing the story well but it was a start. We discussed what could be added.

I was working with my own story that I knew well enough. It wasn’t about learning it off by heart but using the clues on my storyboard to move from one scene to the next. I tried to act it out as I went along. It was a lot of fun. It is also a confidence thing too. From reading to telling allowed me to be more creative as I went along. It also allowed the listeners to pick out what they saw as what was important in the story.

Of course, being related to the best storyteller that ever lived, my big brother Jesus, helps. Time will tell whether I have inherited from Him the trick of telling a good tale.