queens, music and a general lack of snow

sorry for the absence but i was away for the weekend. i really have no other excuse than that considering that my days are basically filled with waking up late, thinking about doing some work, procrastinating and then meeting someone for coffee or something similar. take today: got up @ 10:30, checked e-mail, wandered around the internet reading the morning paper in canada, winnipeg, etc., showered, sent some e-mails, listened to some christmas music and now i'm getting ready to meet a friend for coffee @ 1:30...

anyway, i was in windsor and windsor great park this weekend at an "international Christmas" celebration for students of the commonwealth. the conference was held at cumberland lodge, a former royal residence which is now a retreat centre. while we were there, princess margaret's son was also staying at the lodge as this is their traditional "hunting weekend". we saw windsor castle- which was splendid, and the queen was in but she decided to brush us off... we saw evensong at st. george's- the choir's not as good as i had hoped but it was nice to just listen to an evensong... we had a treasure hunt- it was fun but was consistenly over-run by a domineering Austrian who was a bit too rules/winning obsessed...

we also had a lovely christmas dinner, a reading of commonwealth poetry, a rambunctious talent show (which featured one american singing "the thunder rolls" with his laptop copy of the garth song as accompaniment as well as his tone-deaf girlfriend) and a talk about international development who was basically a mumbling economist who acted as apologist for structural adjustment and suggested that there were "no legacies" to colonialization in terms of economic development... we got along splendidly :)

now i'm back and even though i keep playing christmas music incessently it hasn't really hit me yet that christmas is in 9 days! craziness i know but i'm still getting excited- even though it doesn't feel the same as other years... so, we'll just trudge this week out with coffee and work and see whether we can force snow to fly...

. . .

if only emotions and layers of self-protection were translucent and we could then have a much better look at our core without all the pain of stripping all the layers away. perhaps that's why it hurts so much- to dig too deep into oneself is to painfully remove all the scar tissue and rigid barriers which have surrounded that which we call ourselves.
i would love to make it easier for every one of us. i would love to help him understand and not make the same mistakes as i. if only... yet, we are limited and opaque and hardened. and hurt must come- but, once the pain has healed, we can hope to see... self.

. . .