Radegond retires to the monastry

I did a little digging and discovered that Radegund was a Frankish princess from the 6th century. Though she married and became a queen she devoted herself to the church and escaped to a monastic life.  A very early example of a learned and powerful woman in the church some of her writings remain. I quite liked this poem which she wrote to her cousin:

If the monastery’s sacred cloister did not keep me back,
I’d come unheralded to the region where you bide.
Swift would I pass by ship through tempest-tossed waves
Racing gladly through the gales of wintry water.

For love of you would I press more strongly through shifting tides;
What sailors dread would never make my quake.
If the wave broke the keel in the perilous waters,
I would still seek you rowing on the surface of the sea.

If by unlucky chance, the planks refused to bear me,
I would come to you exhausted from swimming.
At sight of you, I would deny the journey’s perils
For that would sweetly take the sorrow from the wreck.
[McNamara & Halborg, p.68]

You can read much more about her on this site

I don’t really know what her association with Canterbury is but an abbey in Dover was named after her in 1191.

Trivial and informal as this learning is I’m glad to know who she was. It satisfies an itch, like finding a missing jigsaw piece. And then there came the faintest feeling that I’d heard this name before. An album from my dim and distant past?

Oh yes – here it is!

St Radigunds Spirogyra

Spirogryra -  originally from Bolton their first album was named after the street they lived in whilst at the University of Kent. It’s sort of acid folk and I remember it well now I’ve found it again! It’s available on Last fm and Spotify of course!

washing

Originally uploaded by bobsee

Here’s the washing at North Berwick waving to the famous harbour washing line in Cellardyke the other side of the Isle of May.

Washing.

There’s something about a line of clean washing blowing in the sun in a good sea breeze that gladdens my heart. The washing absorbs the sun and the sea and you get a hint of that when it’s gathered in. Great armfulls of cold, slightly damp fabric that smells of the clean salt sea wind.
When you come to iron it the washing will take the heat from the iron and start to give you back that gorgeous scent. The kitchen will fill with that heady, evocative smell of sun and salt air and it will be softer and nicer than any chemical could ever make it.
Eventually you, or someone you love, will wear that shirt, maybe weeks later and that faint clean, salt, smell will linger, taking you right back to that cold sunny day.
Via a great post on Heroes Not Zombies

Hmm, that’s familiar – when I used to sew my work basket was always overflowing with UFOs (Un Finished Objects!) and gorgeous bits of fabric that I couldn’t resist. Hours would be spent planning things I never had time to start let alone finish. So I made it a rule that I couldn’t start a new project or buy fabric, no matter how tempting, till I’d either finished or abandoned and thrown away (eek!) one from the stack.  I think I need to re-introduce this rule but apply it to my web projects.

My main focus this month is working on a number of key phrases for our main properties, adding posts, tagging, back linking etc. It’s going quite well I think and I’m enjoying having identified goals to work to for once. Usually I’m much more free flow in what I do so this is an interesting challenge.

There are still the usual round of blog posts for other sites to get through but I’m shelving a couple of little tempting project that have been tickling at the back of my mind and draining creative energy for the last few weeks. Enough is going on already. No more new fabric till these projects are finished!

Oh and I’ve almost finished restoring my vintage curtains .

A nice cup of tea

]]> http://lindamhartley.co.uk/muse-where-are-you.html/feed 0 http://lindamhartley.co.uk/wish-casting-wednesday.html http://lindamhartley.co.uk/wish-casting-wednesday.html#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:31:28 +0000 Linda http://lindamhartley.co.uk/?p=122 Jamie’s prompt today for Wish Casting Wednesday is:

What is your spirit wishing for?

Sounds easy enough but I’m not used to asking my spirit questions so I’m finding it hard. (Skipping swiftly over intellectual worries about whether we have a spirit at all and if we do what it might be “Hello rational brain, nice to see you’re looking out for me but just relax, this might be fun “ )

My spirit seems to wish for  Energy this coming week, it wants to fizz and pop, maybe even spark (ah, there’s that Sami fire again!).It’s a specific kind of energy, graceful and not forced. The kind of energy that burns bright and clear, that gets things done with ease and is purposeful not restless.

photo credit: ashfay
See other people’s wishes for the week at Jamie’s Wishcasting post

cold full moon dreamboard

In my board I see the clean, dry cold of a crispy morning, frozen rowan berries hiding their promise of life, the flash of a homecoming salmon. And 6 glorious weeks of not teaching! My relief and longing for the quiet calm of a frozen lake, my love of winter. I think it’s a time for taking stock and contemplation of what changes I’ll make in the coming year. A time to let my creativity recover and play.

I have a special love for that rowan berry felt bowl. I once had a coat made from fabric very like that. It was brought from Norway for me as a child and I loved it dearly. Seeing the bowl I could feel the rub of it against my fingers and just for a moment reconnect with that 8 year old who was fascinated by stories of the Sami. So I hope this month my creativity is going to spark and dance like the fires of the Sami on those long dark northern nights.

By the way, I’m not into the whole cosmic ordering stuff. I just see dream boards as a great tool for connecting with my much neglected, often ignored (both by me!) creative side.
You can see other people’s dream boards for this month via Jamie’s Blog

Wheezes – in the old fashioned sense.

However, I am not really downhearted. A good wheeze used to mean a good method of doing something, a good trick or a good idea and there have been lots of those this week. These are just a few:

• I have tickets to see the final dress rehearsal of a West End play tomorrow and I’m really excited about that!
• The birch tree outside our dining room window still has golden leaves that are shining in the tiny bit of London sunshine.
• One of my niche blogs proved itself yesterday and this means the start of another hopefully profitable venture.
• I discovered a really useful tool for getting articles written more efficiently (write or die)
• My class is nearly at the end of their course and things have gone well with them.
• Ezine Articles have finally decided they quite like me and have approved a whole raft of articles of mine. So lots of nice juicy back links and maybe some human traffic too!
• I discovered Likaholix which is a bit like a fun version of delicious.
  photo credit: L`Yoshka

I’ve been writing mostly today, article for link backs to one of my main sites. Re-working old blog posts into fresh. Makes me think of spinning straw into gold LOL.
All this writing got me thinking about my own short stories. I have a stack of them and I’ve always meant to do ‘something’ with them.
Today I sat down and re-read them. Amazingly I still like them and think that other people might too. So what to do with them?
Posting them on the blog isn’t quite right. They wouldn’t happily fit into the blog format and yet I find I would like to publish them somewhere online. If for no other reason than to preserve them. At the moment they exist only as printed copies.
Andy suggested making them into pdfs that people could download and read. I’m not sure anyone would ever bother but it’s a semi- attractive notion.
Anyone got any good ideas?