The Restory Retreat Centre

“Francis called all creatures, no matter how small by the name of brother and sister; because he knew they had the same source as himself.”                                                     Saint Bonaventure's Life of St Francis "If humankind could have known God without the world, God would never have created the world."                                                     Meister Eckhart "In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!"                                                   Colossians 3:11 ...

Mily, as photographed by Frans Marais I have a cat. No, wrong assumption: The cat is not mine. We cohabit, Mily and I. She loves me like cats do: by choosing my lap for a nap or perching on my hip until I wake to walk her to her bowl. She shows her contentment with our arrangement by sleeping in utter abandonment, stretched out, totally vulnerable totally trusting. I am afraid that I love her too much. That someday she will not be here anymore and I will so miss her weight on my hip as I awake to her purring. She is irreplaceable not being owned by me. She will have shared all of her life with me. That is all. Matilda

George worries about the strangest things. He asked me this morning: Do you think the dogs have settled in allright after the move here to Barrowfield? This is what came to my mind. "Oh, I think so," I said. Matilda

We aren't immortal. We don't last long. Like our dogs, we age and weaken. And die. Ps 49:12, 20 (The Message) She came to me as a stray more than a decade ago. On a rainy December night she somehow managed to get through the electric fence. She was terrified, thin and in a general bad state. When you approached her she growled and snapped in all directions. We left her alone to find her the next morning deep underneath the stack of sprinkler pipes. She wouldn’t budge. For two weeks I left food and water close to her place of safety. When I was at a safe distance she came out, ate and drank, sat staring at me for a while, then returned to the hide-out. Gradually, there was movement in the tip of her tail to be seen when I brought the food and looked at her under the pipes. And then, one morning, as I was walking with the other dogs in her vicinity, she came out and tentatively started to walk along. She had decided to stay. She was a mongrel in the ...