It’s a very simple idea – taking photographs from the same spot through the seasons (and not an original one either). But I have found it more profound than I had anticipated.

It reminds me that life is always changing. To live well is therefore to allow life to flow through you like a river, rather than try to hold onto the good times as though they can last. It teaches me that death and loss are as much a part of life as buds and blossom. It shows me that winter is as beautiful as summer and autumn as lovely as spring. So when I go through my times of grief – as I most surely have and most surely will again – I can welcome them.

Sometimes, I think this is all we need to know, just this – just what the trees through the seasons can tell us. If we understood this deeply, we would be most fully alive.

The conference centre, familiar to me through schmoozy celebrations with Birmingham’s film and TV industry, was now being run with military precision.

There were St John Ambulance volunteers in green tee-shirts wiping down chairs and showing the way. I was shown to three desks, two waiting areas and one clinical space. At each point, people smiled. There was welcome, clarity and a quiet seriousness about it all.

I felt humbled and grateful. I was humbled by the scale of the horror that had brought us all to this place; by the skill of the scientists; by the dedication of healthcare staff; by the urgency of the roll-out programme. I was in my home city, but I felt connected to the globe.

This little jab was one small step towards saving lives, giving children their education and healing the world. Some people had their jabs in cathedrals. Millennium Point was cathedral for me.

Cue Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. What? No, I didn’t expect that either.

Tony Iommi and Birmingham Cathedral

A stunning collaboration between the heavy metal legend and Birmingham Cathedral has helped me figure what to do with my helplessness at our Ununited Kingdom – make art.

The lead guitarist who created the music rooted in metal-bashing Birmingham worked with his friend, the Very Reverend Catherine Ogle, to devise How Good It Is.  The composition blends his electric guitar with the strains of Birmingham Cathedral Choir.

It’s beautiful.

How good it is

The sound alone would be enough but on top of that, there are the words, which are derived from Psalm 133: “How good it is when strangers meet and find a home.”

In a world where so many pick up their children and flee from their homes, in a world where others are lining the streets in sleeping bags, in a world where referendums and elections are won on the promise of borders and walls that will keep the strangers out, those words seem exquisitely and ethereally subversive.

I want to listen to them over and over again.  And I have done. And you can too.  (YouTube: How Good It Is)

Make art

And this in itself points me to a way forward in my despondency. I know what to do now.  I want to make art. Find your truth – the thing that you believe in – and sing it, write it, paint it, make theatre out of it.  Knit it. Spray the town with it. Keep doing it. Keep saying what you believe as beautifully and as lovingly as you can.

And the world will change.  It will.

Thank you Tony Iommi.  Thank you Catherine Ogle. Thank you Birmingham Cathedral Choir. Thank you Paul Leddington Wright for the choral arrangement.  Thank you Marcus Huxley for directing the choir. Thank you Sam Bagnall for the photographs.  Thank you Edwin Ellis Creative Media for letting me use them.

Why is it that “fun” gets colonised by extroverts and people who are entertained by hairy chest contests? I would like to offer an alternative introduction to those who have just boarded a cruise ship. With respect to the charismatic and remarkably engaging Felipe, may I present “Cruising for Introverts”?

Introverts’ cruise director

Hello. My name is Jo Ind and I’m the introverts’ cruise director. I’d like to welcome you on board this vessel for a vacation we hope will be awesome, in the true sense of the word.

The first thing an introvert needs to understand when boarding a ship with more than 3,000 other people, is that there’s always a place where you can be alone. Even while hundreds of passengers are at the Mega Deck Party doing the Cha Cha Slide, you can still find a quiet spot where all you can hear is the hum of the engine and the sounds of the ocean. Wander around the ship and find yours.

Arrivals and sailaways

Secondly, take note of the information that can be found in small print on the front of the daily news sheet – the times of the ship’s expected arrival in port and its sailaway. If the ship is due to arrive at 7am, set your alarm for 6am and head for the bow. There you will find a handful of your fellow introverts sharing a moment of exquisite beauty – the ship sliding slowly into harbour just as the sun is rising.

These arrivals are what cruising is for. They are gentle, majestic, silent and different with each new morning and each new port. Please don’t miss them.

Kids’ Club

If you have children with you, let them try out the onboard kids’ club. If you do, there’s a good chance they’ll make friends with children their own age from all over the world.  Once that happens you won’t see them between breakfast and one o’clock the following morning. This leaves adults free to do adult things – such as reading.

When you’re visiting a different Caribbean island each day, there’s plenty to read about. Obviously, you can’t get to know another country well in the space of eight hours, but if you read about its history before you visit, you can use the snippet of time well enough to get a good taste.

Onshore

Each island has a different topography and a different response to a colonial past. When you get onshore, walk round, take a taxi, ask questions, chat to people who live there and notice the subtle changes in prosperity, etiquette, language and outlook. Gather literature from museums, cathedrals and fortresses.  Go to your quiet spot when back on board. Sip a pina colada, gaze at the sea and digest what you have learnt about the peoples with whom you have spent your day.

Fun Day at Sea

Travelling in this way is so intense and sensuous, you’ll be glad to have a Fun Day at Sea.  This is a day when the shop doesn’t dock, you are surrounded by water and the extroverts play things like Hit the Jackpot and a Larger than Life Game Show. Go back to your quiet spot and notice the blueness – the ocean, the sky and the nothing in between.  Here the horizon curves, the water rolls and the starless heavens are a bright, bright dome.  Spend time here. Know the circling roundness of it all.  Live this moment. Take it home. Go back at night and be enveloped in darkness.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you

If you cruise like this, you are likely to become deeply happy.  The depth of the ocean, the slow movement in the sea, the vastness of the sky, the volcanoes, the waterfalls, the sand, the faces, the stories, the welcomes…. They might well put you in the mood for dancing. Go on. Go to where the DJ’s playing:  “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you”.  Dance the night away with the best of them. 

Birmingham Rep will be the venue for Fertility Fest – the first event of its kind in the UK.  Produced by Jessica Hepburn and Gabby Vautier, it will bring together 20 writers, visual artists, theatre-makers, film-directors and composers alongside some of the country’s foremost fertility experts.

We will be talking about, and sharing art around, the diagnosis of infertility, IVF, donation, surrogacy, the male experience, egg freezing, involuntary childlessness and alternative routes to parenthood.

I will be crying

I will be there (speaking at 11.30am).  I think it’s highly unlikely I will manage to be there without crying. (I say that to prepare myself as much as anybody else.)

Other people might want to talk about the effects of fertility science on future generations and how far as a society are we prepared to go in our pursuit of parenthood. I want to be there because I want to stand in the same space as people whose deep longing to have children remains unfulfilled.   Grieving is inevitable.  There is no escaping that. But whatever else we feel, we do not need to feel alone.

• Book tickets for Birmingham’s Fertility Fest, which includes a performance of The Quiet House by Gareth Farr.
• Book tickets for London’s Fertility Fest on Saturday, 11 June 2016.

Day 26

One day I shall look back at this time

At the waiting

And the counting

And the bleeding

And the longing

The trying

And the not-trying

The loving

And forgiving

And I will say that it made sense.

I know the time will come again

When my womb will be holding

The secret hope,

The possibility of miracle;

Origins so awesome

That only God can know.

But today my vulva

Is tender-lipped

Heralding blood.

And today is the day

I have to live

Right now

Learning to embrace

My own body and grieving dreams

With the fierce

Unconditional

Over-whelming

Mother’s love

That is present

That is ready

That is now.

Jo Ind

Jake has been working with the image of a boat as a way of reflecting on his father’s journey through cancer to his eventual death. The picture, featuring a lone figure in a boat pausing for a moment on a gilded lake, is an invitation to any who have been touched by terminal illness. It will be toured in hospices.

For me, it has become a picture of the journey through menopause, so much so that I now find it hard to imagine the process in any other way. It could be about any kind of change, where the future is unknown, where turbulence and peace sit side by side and there is an acute awareness of the passing and stillness of time.

The piece is the size of a house

I have called this post “Panel by panel”  because I am amazed by the size of the piece, which is approximately the width of a terraced house.

I would have thought that to make something of that size you would have to work on it full time and have an enormous studio at your disposal in which to lay it all out as a whole.

But Jake did it in whatever hours he could squeeze between a full-time job and a family and he made it up panel by panel in a small room in the family home.  He could only piece it all together by taking the panels into the garden.

Process is a metaphor

That in itself is a metaphor of what work is like – what it has to be like – at a time in life where there are so many commitments it isn’t possible to give yourself to anything in as whole-hearted and focussed way as us intense peeps might like.

And yet Jake shows that somehow it is possible to keep your eye on the bigger picture.  Hour by hour, panel by panel, we get there….

It was never part of my plan to play the organ for funerals, but it just so happened that I became a church organist because I could play the piano and there was a vacancy on the organ stool.

And so it was that playing for funerals became part of the rhythm and texture of my life and has been for the past 20 or so years.

Each funeral is different

Some funerals are huge standing-room-only affairs – 400 people squashed into the space with not enough orders-of-service to go round and with trouble being heard at the back.  Others are pitifully small and lonely.

Sometimes the person who died is someone who has approached death without fear and who leaves an inspiring legacy to her mourners.
Other times the coffin is shockingly small, carried by a mother and father in unbearably poignant steps.

Some families know exactly how they want the service to be conducted. They are well organised.  I have time to practice and my brief is clear.

Other times – and I enjoy these more, if I’m honest – I’m waiting for the hearses to arrive before I can find out what tune they want to what hymn and what I should do with this rock band that has turned up unannounced and set up in the corner.

I am humbled to be taking part

But whatever kind of funeral it is – black or white, peaceful or tragic, smooth or veering on the chaotic – I always feel profoundly humbled to be taking part.

What can you say to people who are bereaved?  Not a lot.  Words lose their currency in the rawness of grief.

But music….quietly playing as families hold cold hands and kiss their beloved’s face before the coffin lid is  closed…offering suggestions of amazing grace, hints of heaven’s morning breaking….

I am so honoured. It is one of the best things that I do.

Image on blog menu page: @szbrozek

Don’t get me wrong, I love summer evenings – sitting with friends as the barbeque cools and the scents of the impending darkness fill the air, calling the children in from the far ends of the camp site as it approaches ten o’clock, coming home all nice ‘n’ lazy because it’s light and it will stay that way for – oooh – hours and hours. I luxuriate in the ease of summer.

But there’s another side (should I say a shadow side?) to the gloriously long evenings of June.

Why I feel relief at the summer solstice

What about the times when I’m tired or sad and all I want is to get home, have a bath and get into my pyjamas?  It’s just not the same doing that in daylight.

What about the moments when I long to create a womb-like space in which to curl up, light a candle and pray?  I need to do that all the year round but in summer there is often a dissonance between the callings of my inner world and the long, glaring hours of light.

I’m not complaining. One of the many things I enjoy about living in England is its climate and the contrast between its winter nights and summer days.

But as the year is poised on this, the summer solstice, I salute and welcome the start of the hemisphere’s descent into darkness,  just as, in six months’ time, I will welcome its ascent into light.

A 5km run is said to be for families and beginners. But despite years of working out at the gym, I would feel defeated after running little more than half that distance. “How do other people do it?” I wondered. “I can’t carry on any more…”

It all changed last Saturday

That was until last Saturday, when it was such a glorious spring morning I decided that instead of working out in the gym, I’d go for a jog around Kings Heath Park.

I had already found out that a figure of eight in Kings Heath Park is 2km, so I decided to do one and a half circuits and call that my workout for the day.

I started off. The frost on the grass was glistening like pearls in the low-morning sunshine. The bare trees stood in sculptural silouettes against the clear blue sky.   Tiny varieties of daffodils and snowdrops were peeping shyly from the earth.  The birds were calling to each other, reminding me of other dawns I had witnessed, other times when I am overwhelmed by the sheer sensuality of being alive. I completed one lap.

Praying on the second circuit

On the second circuit, replete with voluptousness, I decided to pray. I remembered a baby I knew who was in hospital, for one loop of the eight.  I thought about the people of Japan, for the second.  Every time I glanced at the roofs of the Kings Heath terraced houses, I would think of the people who lived in them, whose names I didn’t know but whose neighbourhood I shared.

“I’ve just run 4km,” I realised as I finished the lap.  “How come I couldn’t run 4km on a treadmill? Isn’t that a great example of the connection between body and spirit? Doesn’t that just show the fallacy of thinking of the body as a fixed, physical entity?”

And with that, I thought I may as well do another 2km circuit – and I did.

I came across that quote while I was taking a look at the new website of  St Saviour’s, Bridge of Allan where my brother is rector.

It just happened to catch my eye because I was about to write a post on why I was finding it hard to post at the moment.

Why it’s sometimes hard to write a blog post

There are many times in life when I find my inner world more vivid and enticing than the outer world: I can’t read on the bus because I want to stare out of the window, I’m late for an appointment because I have been day-dreaming in the bath, I don’t switch the telly on because lying on my back looking at the ceiling is far more entertaining than anything being offered to me on a screen.

I’m going through a time like this at the moment – a time when I am being beckoned by my soul rather than wooed through the web. The outer world is small and thin. My inner world is rich and deep.

I don’t know if this is “spirituality.”  I don’t know if this is the way of being to which Richard Rohr was alluding. But it is good to name this place and it a good place to be.