(3) The tiny blooms were growing from a rock in Stirling, Scotland. I love when something so tiny, fierce, and beautiful grows right out of something so dense, cold, and immovable. Like resistance to empire. Recovery from trauma. Growth when death seems to be winning.
(4) Speaking of death, this photo is in the Old Towne Cemetery is just down the hill from Stirling Castle where many monarchs and Scottish warriors are memorialized. The history of intrigue, war, opulence, and poverty are mixed up together in the town and castle, as most every place on the earth.
The Celtic crosses, pull me in. These works of art replicate are not more than 200 years old, replicating older Scottish and Irish traditions. The celtic crosses have been argued by Martin Werner to have come from the influence of Mediterranean Coptic Christian art when it was introduced to the British Isles in the mid-eighth century. The beautiful carvings on the Celtic crosses towering in this cemetery remind me of circle of life superimposed with the instrument of torture and death, making me uneasy. Yet, I’m also grateful for the connections symbolized
between endings and death and also life and birth. “In our end is our beginning,” as beautifully captured by Natalie Sleeth in the Hymn of Promise.
From the past will come the future
What it holds, a mystery
Unrevealed until its season
Something God alone can see
(5) And speaking of something only God sees... here
I found a tiny bird nesting in a turret of Stirling Castle, up against a pane of glass, nestled in grass, twigs, and feathers. In the wall of a castle built as a fortress to wage war, a symbol of power and wealth, this tiny bird was living, breathing, nestled. Within a monument humanity’s lust for power and dominance was a living sign of life, resistance, hope. Wings of freedom. Just waiting to fly.
Wherever your travels take you this week, my prayers are flying your way. May your adventures bring you to hope. May you see life among the ruins.
