Learning to write in the tropics

Generally I avoid mentioning anything political on here, some years ago amid the appalling electoral situation in Spain I became increasingly angry at the sheer selfishness and ignorance on display during the power grab. The current prime minister in Spain, as so many of his equivalents in Latin America, is clearly not going to leave power easily, whether or not he is voted in or not, not even when most of the country was calling for his resignation during recent financial and sexual scandals amongst his closest allies. How is Spain ever to get rid of him when the separatist parties and brain-washed separatist citizens look only at their regional preferences rather than at the national good? Spain is not Germany where the regional cultures and dialects are maintained and celebrated but where not a single region is so stupid as to insist on the type of damaging regionalism that is currently sapping Spain of its vitality. They really should just be allowed to leave and let them languish ...

 My summer unofficially began with a summer school in the German city of Regensburg, it was one of the study weeks organized by the Dominican brothers, in this case one I know from Notre Dame but who is now living in Rome and working at the Angelicum. For last minute reasons, instead of staying in Pamplona for two more weeks after returning from Regensburg I returned only to pack up my summer things and close up my flat until September, leaving for San Sebastian and a week of being aunt to an adorable five year old nephew, whose parents had to go abroad for several days. I was in theory meant to be preparing a paper I was going to give at a conference in Vienna three weeks later but living and caring for a five year old is good for living the virtues but not really for writing about Aquinas' take on the virtues. The paper had to wait, and it was in the end, partially because of a lost suitcase partially my own poor time management, in the days directly leading up to the conference....

Back in September, during a somewhat inauspicious visit to the Edith Stein Archive in Cologne, I recorded a podcast with my good friend br. Thomas Mannion, Dominican Friar and University Chaplain in Edinburgh. It was the second we had done and since then we have recorded a third. As with so many of our encounters, these occasions are filled with joy and some pretty deep conversations intermingled with laughter. During the second recording, I briefly mentioned a theory I had about how unity in the Dominican Family was palpable in some concrete things, like the fact that we all follow the same rite of profession, well sort of- for starters as a Lay Dominican you promise to live a life according to the charism of St Dominic rather than take vows. For this reason, this was one of the topics we both agreed needed further thinking and investigating, some things such as obedience and poverty were promises that Lay Dominicans, many of whom are married, would not live in the same way nor was it...

After lunch today I meandered, after another frustrated attempt a solving a bureaucratic conundrum, into what I thought was the fifth floor of the library I am currently working in only to find all of my things missing. Being towards the end of the lunch hour, this level of the library was almost completely empty except for the most dogged of researchers, most likely PhD students. I began to panic, checked another aisle, then went back to the one I was sure I had sat in and check the drawers, as if all of the things could possibly fit into such a small space. Then I went to the storage room in the back. Nothing, I began to wonder what librarian to ask for help and if they were going to chastise me for leaving my things like that for over an hour. Since it’s a fairly closed off area mainly accesible by researchers only, I had done it, like everyone else, multiple times in the past, but you never know the temperament of the rotating librarians and their penchant for enforcing the rules w...

 Yesterday I landed in Bilbao airport, it has been a year since I moved back to Spain, and I couldn’t help wonder what was in store for this my second year in the north of Spain. Unlike last year, the autumn has already begun and the cooler air and sight of falling leaves made the return all that more poignant, the sense of a new beginning even stronger. I suspect this coming year will bring many good things but I hesitate to say much more, one never really knows what will happen. The past year was very different from how I thought it would be and while it brought mainly blessings and unexpected joys, it was also a complicated and difficult year. I have been learning for some time now, as all of us have to, that life, even our everyday lives is a mixture of joys, failures, disappointments and achievements, and it is so important to focus more on the joys and blessings sometimes also found behind those disappointments.  I was in Honduras for two very frustrating weeks in which ...

 This may not be the easiest post to read for some people I know and may seem infinitely naive for those few I know that are actually knowledgeable and much more practiced on the subject. Edith Stein once gave a talk titled in German Muttererziehungskunst- roughly translatable as motherhood kraft. At the start of it she humourously commented on the irony of a single female academic, who had spent the better part of a decade living in a Dominican convent and college, and a year or two later would become a Carmelite, being asked for a talk about motherhood. She of course had ample knowledge about spiritual motherhood, something she also commented on in this talk. There is much that one can learn from observation and talking to others about a certain topic, it isn’t only experience, though obviously experience gives a knowledge about some things that renders a depth that is missing without that experience. In the case of marriage, it is a curious thing, but the church has a clear idea...