Sabbatical Picture No 7 Still Standing

Storm Ophelia blew through yesterday amid the inevitable 21st century meteorological hysterics - unprecedented, catastrophic (this is a really pop twitter-ism just now), life-threatening (true - but so is the M25 and so why isn't that in the traffic news?).

On the edge of the North Atlantic people live, and lived, for whom Ophelia was just a noticeably windy few hours.  These standing stones show that like Stonehenge the exposed moors of the Isle of Lewis have more history of settlement than London, though faring less well in the last 2000 years or so.

There aren't many warm, still summer days on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis.  But that didn't mean that people couldn't be warm and still.  The secret is having a fire (conveniently achieved by walking outside and cutting some peat) and by having very thick stone walls (conveniently achieved by utilising vast numbers of boulders broken off the land by the weather).  Unlike the sad stories currently circulating from the balmy climes of California and Iberia (where wildfires are destroying people, their lives and their homes) the crofters of Lewis lived with storms in houses that in part still stand.

The secret of a peaceful life is not found not in the climate, but in the refuge we have found.  

My life is hid with Christ in God, wrote the apostle.

Home

It would never work in an estate agent's (realtor's) window or website.  Yet until the 1930s this was home to a Hebridean family and, as necessary, their livestock.  

What no picture can convey is how nice it is.  The smell of burning peat, the warm shelter from the wind howling off the ocean outside, the self sufficiency of a setting in tune with its natural surrounds. 

Having a very good internet connection has become important (and ironically my mobile phone signal was way better there than it is in Muswell Hill).  Yet this connectedness has come at a price of disconnectedness; from each other in family and community, from the rhythms of night and day, wild and gentle weather, from connectedness to animals and to the land around us and probably most profoundly a disconnectedness from our own souls and from our God.

Are we at home in contemporary London?  Is that even possible?