Morning bells
Prime
I find it weird as I’m not remotely religious but I seem to be increasingly following the Liturgy of the Hours.

I seem to always wake around 2am in time for Matins and then again around dawn or before for Lauds. I’ll sluggishly shuffle into action around Prime and this morning I enjoyed watching the early light on these pure paper white columbines, looking remarkably like early Benedictine, or Cistercian, monks, as the call to work started to sound.

I take to my home office, the spare room, that feels quite cell-like and work at the old wooden bureau that both I, and my sister, worked at when we were children.

Today, like so many others, I listened to the cavernous losses and broken lives that seem to echo and ring and merge to join all the vibrations of sorrow that blend and yet remain crystal clear in their individual solitary and utterly lonely ringing of a single bell sounding in a small cell of a vast church.

I took to the cold water just before vespers and cried into the lake, a visceral cleansing of the vicarious traumas.
At compline I drank wine and watched Doc Martin for the millionth time.