Learning to write in the tropics

For some months now I have known that I am probably one of the youngest great-aunts in history. Jokingly I decided to check the Guinness book of world records but the position of youngest aunt doesn't seem to appear; I didn't spend too much time on it so maybe it does exist. And given that the nature of my family, with its overlapping generations, is found in many parts of the Catholic Church I am unlikely to be the only youngest aunt. It is even possible that being an aunt for the first time at the age of 11 is not that young an age. Today hopefully my family and I will meet (or at least e-meet since I am in another country) my new niece. As we all wait expectantly next to our phones both here and in Central America it is interesting for me too in a way to watch myself watching this beautiful part of life unfold.  As Catholics, we know that pregnancy and childbirth are a miracle and amazing, but I sometimes feel this remains an abstraction for most people until you realise wha...

 In the time since my last post, back at some point in the summer when the days felt so wonderfully long and I was possibly still on the other side of the canal, a lot has happened.  I've known since May that I would be starting a new job alongside my ongoing research work. This was meant to be fairly remote with only occasional travel to Oxford.  During the summer,  however, things changed and I found I was moving yet again. Soooo now my commute involves a rather steep hike and cycle up Hinksey Hill on the outskirts of Oxford. This is considerably steeper and longer than the rather modest Castle Hill in the more flat Cambridge. Once up there the views are amazing,  wonderful for a weekend hike. Up the hill, quite properly, is the Carmelite Centre for Applied Spirituality where I have started working. This is starting out as an interesting year as I try to balance a new job with my ongoing research projects, and somewhere in between trying to maintain a balanced...

I have a stomach bug....and so was scrolling in one of those moments in which I was awake. Right before getting sick, I submitted a paper on Edith Stein's concept of woman. My own question: "How can we create a world in which woman can be woman, however they choose to be woman, and also participate actively in the world as woman?" had led me to this paper. Stein had been credited with writing about complementarity but reading her original lecture on the topic revealed that there was more to her writing than that.  This is largely to do with the difficulty of translating from German into English in a way that picks up the nuances of the German language in an English that has fewer words to express the same thing. For Stein, women and men had the same capacities, could study the same subjects and do the same jobs. At the same time, individuality came through, that too was part of human nature. For her the notions of Act and Potency, which she read in Aquinas were central to...

Today is the feast day of Edith Stein: St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Today I am meant to be finishing up an article about her. Today is the day the heat is undoing me. So I napped and woke up to this nagging that I need to finish writing this here post about something that has been bothering me over this past summer. Partly it was reading this here  post about Edith Stein, which is a biography about her. In her pursuit of Truth (of God himself who is Truth itself) she was led by the hand through different writings: Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Avila. She was not prejudiced rather she let herself be led by the saints on her own path to sainthood.  We would do well to emulate her. __________________post on what has been nagging me: a bit of a churchy rant_____________ Over the past year life has brought me back in touch with people I had not spoken to in many years, many of them from or living in Spain. While I have visited Spain in these years I had m...

 Another summer and I am back in the North of Spain, near the border with France about an hour away from the place where I spent many years of my life.   I may or may not have mentioned before the phrase "soul friends", in case I have not, it is something similar to what Anne of Green Gables called "bosom friends". If you haven't read Anne of Green Gables I highly recommend it. It was a childhood favorite that has sort of grown up with me. Like Pride and Prejudice, it is a book in which each read brings out new nuances and side jokes that were not at first apparent. Plus adult me pick's up on things that would not have been readily apparent to 10 yr old (Anne) or teenage me (P and P). You have to wonder what Austen or Alcott thought behind their feisty protagonists.  As I sit on the terrace I have the blessing to be in temporary possession of, watching the neighbors of this particular part of the town go by, I look back on these past few days. It was a weeke...

At this point, I have been to a few weddings (not counting family weddings at which I was a flower girl). Some have been big affairs in really beautiful churches, almost location weddings, others have been smaller affairs, in also beautiful churches but with a more local feel. Some couples I have known since before they started dating, others I have met as they were preparing their wedding, and in one case, I was instrumental in starting the whole thing by insisting they come to a dinner party I organized. Then came covid and two friends of mine married with just their families present. In this unexpected way, covid reminded us that what matters most in a wedding is the sacrament the couple is celebrating and we, the family and friends, are witnessing. Of late the wedding industry has bloomed, exploded really, with wedding planners offering evermore lavish weddings. Often the stress of it all gets to the couple and people lose sight of what really matters and forget to enjoy each other...

 We are used to winter colds, they seem almost inevitable because of the cold, rain, and sometimes snow that surrounds us, and yet, summer colds can happen. I am often surprised by people's baffled looks when I mention having a cold in summer as I do now. On Monday I was at a party and I walked home with my housemates at about 3am and now I have a mild summer cold, I don't deal well with drastic temperature changes and the day had been warm so the early morning cold did not sit well. As I nurse my sore throat I randomly listen to radio 4, a bit absent-mindedly going through emails I have forgotten to check or respond to, clicking on links for events, etc. As with so many websites, ads pop up and one of them reads fertility treatment for single women. A sad fact comes up in the ad: a quarter of families in the UK are single parents and 90% of these are composed of single mothers. 90% really?! That is shockingly high. When did being an absentee father become a trend? The ad is us...