More than Writers

Every evening in summer, when the sun tips over the pear tree, this bird starts singing. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is as it sits high up in the leylandii way above the house and I can't quite see it. But its song is astonishing - strong and high, the notes sailing up and down with such speed and clarity that it takes my breath away. How can such a tiny creature produce such a breath taking sound? He starts early, around 4, and is usually singing alone for the first couple of hours. It doesn't seem to deter him. Eventually, around supper time, another starts to answer him. You can easily hear his echoing call followed by a silence then a distant reply. This encourages him to sing louder and stronger, which then seems to encourage other birds to join in. And then, the song is unstoppable. I love that bird. "Mum!" groans my daughter, "Are you still going on about the bird? It's just a bird!" But I can't help it. I love the way he keep...

Gentle readers, may I beg your indulgence with this post; I set out to write a psalm, without first making much of a study on how the psalms were written, and I know that there are scholars among you who know and understand things like structure, metre, the little couplety thing that many of the psalms have and so on.  This will clearly fall far short. My offering below is probably neither a psalm nor a poem, but a kind of outpouring from the heart in the rough style of the psalmists at their most raw and un-poetic. I don't think God is offended by the awkward and unskilled, and this felt important to me. It just wanted to be said. As a writer who has - and is - struggling to understand what I am called to do, to find a niche, so stop speak, this seems the very bottom line in why I keep opening my laptop and stringing words together even when frequently I feel like giving up for good. I have tried so many different things, nothing seems to fit, and I come back time and again to...