The Restory Retreat Centre

  Deidré  We don't have a recording this week. Our words are few. Our daughter-in-law Deidré passed away unexpectedly last Friday. She leaves behind her husband Leon and 7-year-old daughter Ariana. Yesterday was the funeral service. Our efforts to adjust to her death have also begun. Emily Dickinson wrote about this process as follows: It doesn't happen every day, but in this case we don't completely agree with Emily.  We're not going to pack up our love.  Or is Emily saying more? That we and she are right?  After Deidré's death, we experience that our love for her is still an active force in our lives.  However, Emily describes another truth that we have also experienced. After such a sudden death, you tread water. You move in a haze and do things semi-automatically. You tidy up the house. Put things away. The instinctive work of those who mourn.  This is the difference between the long, lasting landscape of love and the sharp, devastating earthquake ...

  Death, And My Life "Man, who is born of a woman, is few of days...." Job 14:1 (ESV)                                       The Conversation Elements From The Conversation With our love. George & Matilda

  The Week After a Death Sebastien at his happiest - close to water, catching fish The Conversation Elements From The Conversation Music Sebastien used to say, "I like old music.' He did. For a long time, Billy Joel's Piano Man  was the ringtone on his phone. That we can be that lucky, thank you Sebas. George & Matilda

  Easter As Message  Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground,  dead to the world,  it is never any more than a grain of wheat.  But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.  In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life.  But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.                                                             ‭‭John‬ ‭12:24-25‬ ‭(The Message)   Our Conversation Elements From Our Conversation There is death, destruction, grief, sighs and tears.... Scars of a war, Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb 2022 An old, hauntingly beautiful folk song from Ukraine  (Click on the link to listen) Plyve Kacha  The lyrics, translated into English:  A duck swims upon the Tysyna ...

Photograph by Matilda Angus taken 6 years ago The Bustle in a House The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,-- The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity.                                                                 - Emily Dickinson (See the previous post Leaving ) It is the morning after my father’s death. I am alone in his room in the retirement home packing all his clothes and other belongings.  I cannot look at his slippers, or his shirts, his glasses, without seeing and smelling him in them. A deep, deep sorrow washes over...

Photograph by George Angus “I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love.”                                                                                    Rainer Maria Rilke I pray that you may have your roots and foundation in love, so that you, together with all God's people, may have the power to understand how broad and long, how high and deep, is Christ's love.  Yes, may you come to know his love - although it can never be fully known - and so be completely filled with the very nature of God.                                   ...

Morrie Schwartz dancing Your life is not about you.                                                             Zen saying I’m usually 10 to 20 years late. If a book is on The New York Times bestsellers list in 1998, I’ll probably read it in 2015. Well, sometimes I get to it a little earlier, but Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom is a very good example. Published in 1997 I only read it last week. Retired sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease and his former student Mitch Albom had these conversations on Tuesdays in the months before his death. They covered a variety of subjects relating to the fundamentals of life. It was as if his imminent death made the wise Morrie see things even clearer than before. From one such a conversation Albom shares...

On our recent visit to Knysna we took a short trail through one of the magnificent indigenous rain forests. Aptly called The Garden of Eden, one cannot help but gape at the immensity of it all. Something happens to me when I enter into this type of cathedral: I become quite unaware of myself but feel myself totally immersed, totally one with Nature in her green skin. I am a cell, a branch, a leaf, a stream. I come home to this place of moistness. What strikes me as I flow through the arteries of this great Being, is how the main themes of life play out here quietly and beautifully. The birth of a fern leaf, bathed in a sliver of filtered sunlight beneath an ancient yellow wood tree brings me close to tears. From the decay of a fallen giant and the life forms engaged in this process, to the air thick with moisture and the sounds of the rain forest musicians: birds and frogs endemic to this place, I am reminded that everything is as it should be. Everything belongs. I belong. ...

What will you do, God, when I die? I am your pitcher (when I shatter?) I am your drink (when I go bitter?) I, your garment; I, your craft. Without me what reason have you? Without me what house where intimate words await you? I, velvet sandal that falls from your foot. I, cloak dropping from your shoulder. What will you do, God? It troubles me.                                                               - Rainer Maria Rilke

In South Africa we call a small pickup a “bakkie”. It is an Afrikaans word that actually means a small bowl. You’ll give milk to a kitten or a puppy in a “bakkie”. How exactly it came to be used for this type of vehicle I don’t know. In our country with its 11 official languages, we borrow and mingle. Some words we don’t translate. We just use them “voetstoots”. As is. So, whether you’re English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, you’ll call any small pickup more or less up to a one tunner a bakkie. Thereafter it is a truck or a lorry. Were you to emigrate to another country you might find fairly similar vehicles, but you would miss using the word. There’s just nothing like a bakkie. And among bakkies there are Bakkies. Legends. You can get them only second hand. Or steal them. They’ve earned their reputation through years of use and reliability.  Driving one of them you get used to people walking around them, admiring them, kicking one of the tyres saying: “They don’t make them like...