Snow, Sun and Rain at February's supervision

Bench Sheffield this morning

Bench Birmingham this evening

 Today was supervision for February, the weather was to say the least variable. The benches illustrate just how different the experience was in the two places. There was some snow fall in Birmingham but the snow was about two inches deep when I set out from Sheffield and so to get to the station snow boots had to be worn. The result is that I have been ridiculously over dressed in Birmingham.

The other snag today is my voice has decided it is time to take things easily. It was fine as far as I know first thing this morning but when I got on the train I realised that all thaht was coming out was a whisper.  Given that my supervisor does not write anything down and that therefore the supervision is very verbal and you have some idea of the difficulties this brings about. It did appear to have decided that a partial return was a good idea by the supervision so I was audible. I still would not like to project it.

I had the worship chapter under review. Actually the changes suggested were quite limited when we worked through but included adapting it so it is coherent with the tradition chapter.

Problem the tradition chapter is only getting there. It is going to be interesting to write. The problem is that what I have is a series of images that work analytically for parts of the tradition but none of them work for all of it. He wants me to extend further the range of the images, I am tending to use mechanical ones and he is preferring organic ones. The only common thread seems to be that they are all chaotic systems. His challenge to me is to write something that is more poetic. I wonder if he realises exactly how difficult it is to write poetically. I say that as someone who has written poems. It can take me several hours to put together a poem that is not twenty words long. My poetry has an almost opposite style to a thesis in that it is very spare. That and the fact the Reformed tradition is highly rational but you can not rationally describe it without simplifying the complex interactions that make it an active system.

Any way this month I will spend this coming weekend (three days working on the tradition chapter) and hopefully getting it into another draft. Then back to the worship chapter before I move onto the chapter on belonging. After that I think I will need to go back to community and location, then onto flows and so it goes. I need to keep going and get this done now. Once it is done I can step back and start thinking where next creatively.