Update: Christchurch 2015

January 2015

I awoke this morning, looked through the bedroom window into the leafy tree canopy, and saw above, painted across the sky, a Canterbury summers’ day, like last year, Wedgwood blue with Bill Sutton’s clouds on the horizon — angel wings feathering at the edges — and decided I would go again to the central city to view and record the changes since last time.

I would go with an open heart, absorbing the title of my book Giving Yourself to Life and be receptive to what I might find there. I thought too I would take the poet Riemke Ensing, who gave me the phrase ‘…it’s called giving yourself to life…’ from her poem ‘Love Affair’ about author Katherine Mansfield. I would go with both of them beside me, remembering the lines on human suffering from KM’s journal ‘One must submit. Do not resist. Take it. Be overwhelmed. Accept it fully. Make it part of life.’ 

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