One year later….

 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 I achieved very little of what I meant to achieve, it mainly serve to convince me that the sooner we can removed everything of ours from that country the better. Because of delays in Honduras, I flew straight into Germany for a week at the Edith Stein Archive in Cologne and what would also be an unexpected and not all to joyful week. The archival work was fine, a new idea is emerging that would bring a significant change in my research plans but one which would make it even more interesting…..let’s wait and see. On the personal level, much happened, and I am more convinced than ever that this essential lesson, which our forebears seemed to have learnt at much earlier ages than we do know, is almost missing from the newer generations, or at least they get to it later. How to deal with disappointments and plans not going as you hoped, and to have the flexibility to change plans when needed because continuing in spite of everything telling you to stop is a dangerous type of pigheadedness. 

I happen to be there for the March for life and partially took part in it. It


was a bizarrely warm day for Germany in late September and none of us were prepared for it. The person I was with got a headache, the start of heat stroke, and we slipped out early. I was staying at the guesthouse of the Carmelite convent, where the archive is housed, and it served a refuge from tiredness and heat. Later in the day there was an afterparty where I managed to injure myself, walking 18000 and dancing did a number on my knees and returned to Spain with both knees bandaged….there has been unexplained swelling lately in all my joints and it was just too much for them. Anyways, upwards and onwards. Slightly ill-fated weekend to say the least. I wanted to visit a friend in Aachen and unfortunately couldn’t go because of my knee but I did get to see another friend who came to Cologne that I hadn’t seen in years. As time goes by the more I come to appreciate my friendships and the clearer it has become that the most important thing in life are those who are with you while you live it.

One of the highlights of the week was squeezing in time to record a new podcast episode with good friend, and fellow Dominican, Br Thomas Mannion, we had some good old fun amid the discussion and preparation, so stay tuned for when it appear on the Light from Light podcast.


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