The Restory Retreat Centre

  I often use the image of stringing beads when I start to write about things that announce themselves over time. I’ll hear a song or read a line or passage, see a movie, and an unexpected element of a theme that I didn’t choose in the first place will gently arrive and take its place among the other elements already waiting.   Lately it is the relationship, or romantic love, between two people. How we search for it, what we expect to find, how it plays out, the mystery in it all.   In Alexander McCall Smith’s book, The Full Cupboard of Life, the main character, private detective Mma  Precious Ramotswe comes to the conclusion:  “If you were  in the mood for falling in love, or marrying, then perhaps it did not matter very much whom you would see when you turned the corner. You were looking for somebody, and there was somebody, and you would convince yourself that this random person was what you were really looking for in the first place.”   A full...