A green thought in a green shade ...

This is the view up the drive to our church, taken towards the end of this hot afternoon. It sums up the heat of the day in this part of the world, or perhaps is half the story - we look either on the dancing blues of the coastal environment, or we turn inland to where everything grows in such abundance. The title of my blip is a line from a poem by Andrew Marvell called The Garden: I didn't know this until a minute ago, so goodness knows where I picked up the quotation. The stanza, however, suits my current mood:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, 

Withdraws into its happiness; 

The mind, that ocean where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find, 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas; 

Annihilating all that’s made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 


Good, eh?

Today we celebrated the feast of Pentecost - the birthday of the church, if you like, the day when the crowd listening to the disciples each heard them speaking in his or her own familiar language. To mark this in our online service, The Rev (to borrow his Sunday name) asked for volunteers to read a sentence or two of the story from Acts in a foreign language. This proved easier in the online format than it would have been in real life; I volunteered to do Italian, on the rather shoogly basis of my current study of the language on Duolingo and the accent learned from my mother when I was a child and she took up learning the language.

In the event it was most effective - we had Afrikaans, Norwegian, Broad Scots, German, Spanish, French, Gaelic, Italian and Latin, each reader taking up when the previous left off. I think I'll finish by recording my lines for posterity:

E anche sui miei servi e sulle mie serve in quei giorni effonderò il mio Spirito ed essi profeteranno. Farò prodigi in alto nel cielo e segni in basso sulla terra, sangue, fuoco e nuvole di fumo...