Windows into our worlds

I love Blipfoto more and more these days. I value the insights into other lives, into other minds, into other societies. I especially love the posts that support their interesting or beautiful or striking photos with a narrative that takes the reader with them on their different journeys. For me, it's possibly the most civilised social media platform of any I use - more reflective, more vulnerable, in a way, than the wild forum that is Facebook or the primarily political threads I follow on Twitter. Right now, I have to pull myself back from being the fierce, partisan, political me, the person that emerges elsewhere online; I have to remind myself that I can live a parallel life, not looking to the side where the virus looms, nor to the other, where the political fury pelts along beside me.

So, through the first window? Me, still in bed this morning, drinking my morning tea - and on FaceTime in the local supermarket, choosing fruit and  vegetables through the good offices of my shopping angel, who thought it would be fun for her to have me tag along. What a laugh we had (I've known this mother of teenagers since she was 12) - and when she'd queued to pay and I'd managed to get dressed and had breakfast, we sat three metres apart on a mossy bank in my garden and chatted while the messages melted on the doorstep ...

Through the middle window: a lovely interlude actually inside my church, recording hymns for Sunday's service because we've realised how much better it sounds in the lovely acoustic with organ accompaniment instead of the keyboard in the study. Come Holy Ghost is one of the hymns for Sunday (Pentecost) and one of my all-time favourites. Outside, the trees were in full leaf under a hot sun and the birds were quieter than they would be later and it was absolutely lovely and I was content.

And through the third window? I'm still framed in that third window. It's been online all the way - the Provincial mid-week service for which we provided the hymn; a zoom vestry meeting of the church whose windows I've blipped; and finally a live YouTube international gathering of, at this moment, 126 educators from all over the world to which my #2 son has just finished a presentation on designing for the future - the future that still looks so uncertain.

And now, square-eyed and very tired, I'm going to slip away from that third window and have a cup of tea and a biscuit. Having written this, I may even make it to bed before midnight.

On the other hand ...