Some Glad Morning.....I'll Fly Away

Hello all! So, back from Scotland, with so much done and so much to write about.
There were so many aspects of this particular trip that merit description, in the midst of jet lag, etc I am still trying to work through all of it.
We spent our days working out in a myriad of different gardens & weather systems (everything from gardens in the center of town, a wet and wild marsh garden, and a vast meadow ringed with a community orchard, in the wet, misty, sunny, windy, rainy, dry, clear, buggy weather. Horseflies, midgies and stinging nettle, oh my!) We practiced the fine art of clumping through a small Scottish village, dirty and bedraggled, tools slung over our shoulders. (Harder than it sounds!) On top of that we were leading the team of 10 people. Not only was there all of this, there was the overlay of community life, that we were coming back into a community of people with whom we'd lived and worked, loved and prayed. That meant that after we'd put the children to bed, finished our team's evening devotions, B and I were out most nights walking through the village to visit friends. We loved watching the beautiful and slightly surreal sunsets at 10:45PM, catching up with people and introducing them to G & Hecho.  Anyway, all this made for a deliciously rich and full time for us, with little time left over for blogging. But now that we are back, and I've decided that writing needs to play a bigger part in my life again, I hope to be able to process different aspects of our time back in Scotland. I am a typical external processor (a condition common to bloggers), and I have a feeling that there are still some things out there that I have not thought through or even experienced fully since I have not been able to write.
Which brings me to this: little Rosa Bird is spreading her little wings and flying away, alighting on a flower named rosa-sinensis. Wow, that was inane! I am going back to my original blog, rosa-sinensis, and will continue this narrative over there.....ta for listening, and come meet me under the rose, at rosa-sinensis! 

"A Longing Fulfilled is Sweet to the Soul"-Proverbs 13:19

We've returned,but the good grace of God for 2 weeks to Scotland. Back to the Seamill Centre where B & I lived and worked for a year about 6 years ago. I was the groundskeeper on 4 acres at an international Christian missionary training center. B was the housekeeper, which people here thought made for a funny switcheroo, me with the gas powered tools and the steel-toed boots and B with the dust rags and the toilet brushes. But it somehow suited our personalities, and I know he cherished as I did the teams of students we got to organize and lead for 2 hours each day. People from all over the world live, work and study here, staff and students together from many different cultures. We are leading a team of gardeners from our church in SC, to work in the grounds of the base and in the village with the local Environmental Group. It will be brilliant! (Cue drum solo from Ground Force).
Cookies, Lost
Of all the ways I dreamed of returning to the Seamill Centre, holding handfuls of sick was not one of them. Poor little G! Right as we were turning into the Seamill parking lot she started retching. The 15 hour plane ride and then the windy Dalry road made her delicately puke up the dried apricots I gave her for breakfast. She soon recovered, and I quickly washed up.

My last few days have been harrowing to say the least; prolonged airplane travel with young children is not for the faint of heart. Little Hecho managed to sleep 1 hour out of 15 (guess who joined him in that feat of non-somnolence?)
Another highlight had to be right at the end of our first leg of the journey, San Francisco to Philadelphia. Just as we were landing, it became very clear that Hecho needed a new nappy, very soon. B nipped into the lavatory across the aisle as soon as we were allowed to get up from our seats. The door slid open. "Got a change of clothes?" he asked, looking slightly nauseous. "It should be in the diaper bag!" I shot back, a trifle strained. There then ensued frantic searching and then the sickening realization that while the spare clothes had truly been in the bag at one time, they had been moved. By someone who will remain deeply contrite, but nameless. So there we were in the Philadelphia airport with a baby wearing naught but a diaper. We got many fun looks as I pushed him around, looking for clothes. It turns out all his original pants needed was some judicious scrubbing, so we were okay.
Dreams 
I will say it is simply amazing to return to a place I have long loved. Over the years it has made its way into my dreamworld, morphed in fantastic ways night after night, until the real thing seemed hardly tangible. But here I sit, in a stone tower, overlooking a darkening Scottish sky that at 10:45PM still bares the faint tinges of a coral sunset.This morning the tide was out and the beach was littered with the translucent corpses of jellyfish amidst the long tendrils of seaweed, like a diadem set in a head of woman's hair.
A Day in the Life
Today was a meeting with the Kay from the Environmental Group, and Tim from the Seamill grounds, as well as dropping in on some friends and being lovingly spit up upon by a tiny baby. An anointing or sorts, to match all the other strange children's fluids that have come into contact with me in the past 72 hours. We had coffee ('decaf white') at a cafe in the village called the Cherry Orchard and stopped in at the local co-op for a few things. I managed to stay out of the bookstore, which was hard, and G, Hecho & Mum walked to the beach and then crashed in the afternoon. Oh! And few things can beat half a fresh crusty baguette filled with brie & tomatoes, eaten on a walk through a beech grove during an early Scottish afternoon when the rain has abated, the foliage sparkles with a thousand raindrops and two weeks of gardening lie before you.
Fecundity & Color
Purple loosestrife, Queen Anne's Lace, foxglove & buttercups. Ivy-leaved toadwort's sweet little faces and the pinky-red color of the sand along the Firth of Clyde. Huge specimens of wild fuchsia growing right along the burn, and the old wild roses & honeysuckle that have threaded their prickly way through enumerable shrubs & old fences. I spent some time with a huge bull thistle that was growing out of a crack on Glenbryde Road, with its glowing purple and silvery green  nodding down to the ground. The air is redolent with the odor of wet green and salt, lots of wood doves, crows and gulls.
This is God's trip, His fingerprints are all over this thing we're doing- the rest of the team arrive tomorrow, and we're diving in! Pray for us, leading this team, wrangling the children, getting our hands dirty in the sweet Scottish soil.....

5 Minute Write

So we're leaving for Scotland in a few short days, and it's all I can do to keep from turning into butter ala Little Black Sambo's tiger.Maybe a more beautiful tiger reference would be William Blake's
Tyger tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
 Yes, definitely more lyrical than Little Black Sambo, although that's not too hard. But the real question is, how did all these tigers get into the blog post? Oh yes, the racing round and round, and the bright burning.
Somehow these seem apt words to describe my days of late. (Unfortunately, Rosa as Roaring Tiger also has applied from time to time, especially with the Littles.)
I know I will have more time to write once we are returned; the problem ,of course, is that all the interesting stuff is so much better told in situ; not made rosy or dull by recollection.

It's interesting going back to a place where we once lived. I know you can't go home again, and all that. People change, we've changed, definitely. I say there's nothing like children to help mold and shape you, for better or for worse. I think for better in our case, with the added bonus of lots of anecdotes and a strange proliferation of single baby socks in my purse.
So things will be different, and we're trying to plan for that. Leading this team, bringing our two children, doing the work that God has set before us, these are all different sorts of things that will require skill, acumen and a certain level of thinkums that I am afraid will be in absentia; especially for the first few days.
But all the pieces are falling into place. Everyone has their funding, the British government is expecting us and our shiny new visas, the YWAM base is expecting us, the Environmental Group is expecting us, the biggest challenge on our list these days is the time to pack, deal with team accounting matters (eek!), figure out what to read on the plane, and oh yes-gotta clean and sharpen the Felco's. It's BYOC ( bring your own clippers), and mine are in desperate need of attention!

We're Going To Scotland

I don't know how I've got this far without mentioning it, but we are going back to Scotland. B & I lived in Seamill in 2003-2004, working with Youth With A Mission at the fabulous Seamill Centre, a training centre for Christian missionaries. It was a watershed time in our lives, and we use it as a reference point for so many things. Like G, we came home 3 months pregnant with her, and gave her the middle name of a nearby island. Not the Isle of Man, in case you were wondering.
Vintage Gardeners Go To Scotland

We're heading back in roughly 6 weeks, leading a group from our church. We're going to garden with the Environmental Group in West Kilbride, just a short little walk from Seamill.  It's definitely exciting, but right now all I can think about is how the preparations are consuming me-I've  just spent 10 unsuccessful minutes on hold with the visa support people. The call costs $3.00 a minute, and the 10 minute wait was just in order to put my credit card number down. I finally hung up, so it cost nothing, but it doesn't bode well for future tries.
The really irritating thing is that this isn't the way I meant to write about our trip. There is so much that is lovely and hopeful and exciting about going back to a place we love: bringing our kids, hiking once again on Fairlie Moor and up Goatfell's misty sides. I can't wait to sit on Tarbert Hill with the group amidst the gorse and close-cropped grass, listening to sheep's baas, looking up the Firth of Clyde into the beginnings of the Highlands.
I can't wait to stand once again on Great Cumbrae and introduce G to great Scottish cuisine-like the tomato and cheese toasty and the Knickerbocker Glory Sundae at the Ritz. Above all that is the hope that God will be working through us as we tend the soil of a village that struggles with teenage alcoholism, drugs, vandalism and unemployment.
I am hopeful about all these things, and trying to remind myself as I wade through the morass of paperwork and websites for these visas. (Properly known as a Tier 5 Charity Worker Visa, for those who are thinking of doing the same.) Please pray for us!
And thanks to Neal B for introducing me to The Social Services, a band from Glasgow. I was just listening to 'Electric Brae' and it made me happy......

From the Darkness: A Morning Prayer

O gentle Christ, ever thanks to thee,
That thou from the dark hast raised me free
And from the coldness of last night's space
To the gentle light of this day's grace.

O God of all creathures, praise to thee,
As to each life thou hast poured on me,
My wish, my word, my sense, my praise,
My thought, my deed, my fame, and my ways.

from Poems of the Western Highlanders, translated from the Gaelic and taken from Alexander Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica.

Our darling bud of May......is one year old today

Well happy birthday to our youngest, little Mr. Hecho. He is one year old today and is a sweet little guy, with red hair and blue eyes, six teeth and inordinate fascination with my cell phone and the shower drain.
I will also brag that he is really the most easy-going little guy out there. Today he sat happily doing whatever came his way, cooing and gibbering to the adoring throngs & horking birthday cake with great alacrity.
We had his birthday party down in our driveway, which worked really well, and a sweet time was had by all. It was really just a small family party, but since it was in the driveway, with B's latest hair-brained scheme (100 balloons forming an floating barrier from the road-it actually works!), we got a lot of drive-bys, horn honks and shout-outs. The whole day was scented by the wafting sweetness of the climbing 'Cecile Brunner' rose as well as the massive vase of David Austen roses  that were dropped off as an anonymous May Day donation. But I think I figured it out! In the morning I snuck off to the UCSC Farm & Garden Plant Sale, to which I trek bi-annually as a rule (spring and fall). I missed  it last year, on account of a little thing called childbirth. I took Eleven, who started a veggie garden this year and has been texting me all sorts of random questions ("Do I want a bucket of ashes for my plants?" "Can I plant now? How about now?") I got a lot of stuff for the Abbey Garden: Camp Joy tomatoes, 'Ancho' chiles and many many little flowers. The highlight was getting to talk for a few minutes to Orin Martin, one of my favorite gardeners, and a former teacher.I always feel a little gawky and star-struck around him, which is silly really, when he is so mellow and laid-back, Santa Cruz personified.
Lots of love and thanks to family and all the adoring Hecho fans! In closing, this song. I had it in my head all day. Take it away, Innocence Mission!

Living La Vida Loca & Rosa's Poetry Archives: Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

Well, I just want to say that I survived. The day peaked at about 4. Out of 10. Nothing spectacularly terrible or calamitous, the very everyday-slogness of it was one of the things that was so hard. The youngest, Hecho, was getting over a cold and apparently had decided, privately, that the quickest road to recovery was a strict diet of fussing, nursing and as little sleep as he could manage. The elder, or Bunny, as I now deem her, was at loose ends all day, wild and flapping around. The rain, it came down. No car. We were good and stuck.
 It was the sort of day where you are tripping over everything, when you go to put something away, only to find the cupboard/closet full to bursting with clothes that need to be gone through. So you sit down to do that, so that you can eventually do the first thing. My house is infested with this sort of thing. I think we need to get it fumigated. Wouldn't that be a quick and easy solution?
It felt like whichever way I moved, I had a child desperate for my undivided attention. I tried to keep my expectations for the day low, but it didn't really work. As soon as they were distracted with a project, game, whatever, I would tiptoe out of the room and head towards cleaning something, or putting something away. Almost as soon as my hand touched the item needing to be cleaned/organized/sorted/folded I would hear twin cries of "Mooooommmmmmmmyyyy! I need you to....." followed by Hecho's hacking bellow.

I felt like one of those African dung beetles, rolling a big ball of dung uphill with my front legs. I guess in this analogy the housework is the dung and my children are the hill? Or are my children the ball of dung, and I am rolling them up the hill of my sucky attitude? And where am I going with this dung, anyway?
As I said, it was a long day.
But I also want to say that there were moments of respite and beauty, and these I record here.
Two Part Invention

The first, the perfect accompaniment to a rainy day at home, was Jacques Loussier's excellent Play Bach No. 2. Eleven recommended this, like so many other things that have become favorites. Loussier's jazz combo performs elegantly spare arrangements of some of Bach's greatest pieces. I've always liked Bach in theory, and then I listen to some of his more baroque pieces, and suddenly it's like that scene in Amadeus when Mozart's patron sends back a symphony because it has "too many notes". But who knew that a piano, stand-up bass and drum kit could be the perfect purveyors of Bach's amazingness? His rendering of 'Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring' gives me chicken skin, as the Hawaiians say. In the midst of the piano's rolling notes are the sublimely controlled yet joyful cymbals, lightly crashing, and the stand-up bass picking up the melody here and there. And over all of it, Bunny out there dancing, a smile lighting up her face, red hair flying. So check out Jacques Loussier! I recommend him to anyone feeling sorry for themselves. It's hard to whinge and listen to him at the same time.
".....une fleche ardente sur un mur de soleil."

The second splash of sanity in the midst of a dung beetle day came from another citoyen de la France, Carmen Bernos de Gasztold. De Gasztold was a French poet whose 'Prayers From the Ark' and 'The Creatures' Choir'  came my way from the church library. These simple, sweet and lyrical little poems are spoken from the perspective of the different animals on the Ark, published during Carmen's long stint at Abbeye Saint Louis du Temple. There is just a hint of the unusual grammar and word placement that denotes foreign writing. How I love translated poetry! And how I wish I spoke French. I think there are some beautiful subtleties that didn't quite make it into the English translation. But they have been very capably translated by the great Rumer Godden. 
Carmen Bernos manages to convey something wonderfully essential to the character of each 'friendly beast', usually with wit and wordplay. Here is The Prayer of the Bee, but it just as easily could have been The Mole, The Starfish or The Prayer of the Glow-Worm, all gems.

Prayer of the Bee
Lord,
I am not one to despise Your gifts.
May You be blessed
Who spread the riches of Your sweetness
for my zeal.......
Let my small span of ardent life
melt into our great communal task;
to lift up to Your glory
this temple of sweetness,
a citadel of incense,
a holy candle, myriad-celled,
moulded of Your graces
and of my hidden work.

-Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

Rumer Godden's account of the translating of these prayerful poems is engaging and beautiful. She writes that Carmen Bernos' poems were not influenced by her life at the Abbaye. They were written long before, during a hard life working at a silk factory near Paris-during enemy occupation. She writes:
"The Abbaye has only endorsed what she knew a prayer must be-if it is to have any meaning; not something dreamy or wishful, not a cry to be used in emergency, not even a plea, and not necessarily comforting. A prayer is a giving out, an offering, compounded of honest work and acceptance of the shape in which one has been created-even if it is to be regretted as much as the monkey's-of these humble things added to the great three, faith, hope, and love."
I can relate to these little prayers of the animals, each in their own circumstances and situations, faithful eyes on their Creator, trusting, hopeful. May I be as such!
So merci, Jacques, Rumer et Carmen! I really needed that.

The Tentative First Post

I have blogged under the title of rosa-sinensis for over three years now, and it feels a little odd to begin again under a different banner. I feel a little naked, maybe it's all the white. I must do something about that. But the idea is to continue to write, write, write. I still can't tell if it's incredibly unnatural to tease apart the three strands of 'faith, poetry and horticultural derring do' that have (for the most part) described rosa-sinensis. I expect all those elements to still be present here at rosa bird; more like I wanted to give rosa-sinensis the chance to explore the garden writing genre purposefully, without having to stifle any desires to write about whatever else wants to pour out of my head. So!
Anyone?
I also don't know how many readers will even want to make the trek from rosa over to this new site, I know, I know, that extra clicking on the link was hard. I'll probably lose a few people in the transition. If you have jumped over from rosa, why not give me a shout out? I'm curious to see who leaves a comment......
Let's let Clive Staples christen the new blog with an old favorite. (Following the age-old rule, beloved by writers and preachers everywhere: 'When in doubt, quote C.S. Lewis.')


What the Bird Said Early in the Year

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

-C.S. Lewis