The Restory Retreat Centre

What The Mystics Know 7) Changed(-ing) people change people Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.  Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’  will enter the kingdom of heaven,  but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ‭‭ Matthew‬ ‭7‬:‭20‬-‭21‬ ‭NIV                         The Conversation Elements From The Conversation Music Time is certainly one of the main ingredients in the process of change. May it be so. May we be brave. May we be changed. With all our love. George & Matilda

The Southern vista from Barrowfield Photo by Hanna Jacobs  I have lived in many places throughout my life. The earliest home I can remember was when I was about four years old and we lived in a tiny hamlet called Mica, where my father took a job as electrician in a vermiculite mine. It was very remote and truly unspoilt. It was glorious for my sister and me but nerve wrecking for my mother. It being very much Africa, there were huge spiders and scorpions and green grasshoppers, not to mention deadly creatures like green mambas and malaria mosquitoes. On weekends my father would take us to the banks of the huge Olifants river and we would watch the hippos lazing in the muddy water. We moved to a bigger mining town when we had to start school and from then on every few years my father would find a different job with better prospects and we would move again. For some of the most memorable places we lived I don't have fond memories of. At one stage, when I was about ten ye...

Notes from a different drummer Learning the unforced rhythms of grace "There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves."                                                                          Thomas Merton So, to the practical How. To begin with: Become aware that you are waking up. I imagine you thinking: “The very last thing I need at the beginning of a new year, is yet another program to follow which promises to make me thinner, healthier, richer, more ...

On a stroll down to the river I was amazed at the change since our last walk. Autumn is blazing all around us. Matilda

Eylene at four years old (left) and at thirty (right). Not much that's changed. And yet. Eylene turned thirty yesterday. To celebrate the occasion, we went on an adventure, not unlike Winnie the Pooh and his friends when they went in search of the North Pole. We, a party of ten, however, went searching for the Neighbourgoods Market  in downtown Johannesburg.        We took the Gautrain, which is South Africa's only super modern express train. It runs between Pretoria and Johannesburg and we are very proud of it as the stations are kept neat and clean and one can pretend you are travelling abroad somewhere in a first world country.        Stepping off the train and following a myriad of cell phone gps's and hard copy maps, we set of to walk the 750 m to the market through an area we would normally not venture into. I felt excited by this, and sensed it in Eylene also, as we walked into the stomach of this vast African city, the sun ho...