Thursday 2nd March

Reading through the blogs today, I noticed that Sharon on Mornings Minion, had been at work in her garden, but seemed to be experiencing the same type of weather in America as we are having....

So I pottered round outside to look what was happening in our small part of the world, firstly I went to the church, as daffodils, though in the 19th century they would have been referred to as narcissus, were coming through.

A Robinson illustration

There are still plenty of snowdrops scattered around.

So what is happening in the garden, crocuses of course, dwarf irises, primulas, a cultivated primrose, who's name eludes me, a triffid like hellebore that has appeared in the front bed....

Another Robinson illustration of crocuses

primulas

dwarf iris

The hellebore, will it be white?

Murrmurrs  Lifted the day with her take on baptism, one of my abiding interests is, as everyone knows churches, which always have a baptismal font in the corner, how many squalling babies have emerged from the cold waters over the century, somewhere I have a quote as to why we were all submerged of course, here it is Bede in the 8th Century.  The fact is that sadly young babies who died without being baptised, got 'buried by the wall' with no stone to mark their little grave.

'Only the piety of the faithful knows that a sinner descends into the font, and a purified person comes up; that a child of death descends, and a child of the resurrection comes up; that a child of original sin descends and a child of god comes up'.

You were in fact 'unshriven', this fact for LS who asked what it meant to be shriven the other day, well according to the dictionary, impose penance on a sinner, grant absolution to a penitent, to hear a confession of a person.

LS thinks I am an expert on christianity, basically because I went to a convent, this is not true, like the blogger on Murrmurrs, religion passed me by when I was a child, could not see the reason for it.  So my enforced stay at a convent, due to a divorce in the family, whilst not unhappy, except for the food, was one of curiosity and then illness as I succumbed to a dreadful bout of flu.  But I did learn my catechism,  got confirmed and witnessed, the picture of which stays clearly in my mind, nuns prostrate on the floor of the chapel.  I have nothing but admiration for people who can devote themselves exclusively to a religion, my cynical mind though says it is all there to trap people by those who want power.

And a quote from a previous blog of mine, a lovely myth of nothingness about dragons, where are those dragons today I wonder ;)


First of all we come to dragons and the Tree of Life, the snaking foliage that we find in the font at Avebury; a quote from the “Book of Bestiaries”

“The perindens is a tree found in India; the fruit of this tree is very sweet pleasant, and doves delight in feeding on it. The dragon which is the enemy of doves, fears the tree, because of the shade in which the doves rests, and it can approach neither the tree or its shadow. If the shadow of the tree falls to the west, the dragon flies to the east, and if the shadow is in the east, the dragon flies to the west. If it finds a dove outside the shadow of the tree it kills it. The tree is God, the shadow Jesus Christ”...