“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”  T.S. Eliot

When you’re only six months old and you can’t roll over or crawl away anywhere, and your grandmother takes you outside to lie on a blanket on the green grass at a nearby park, you lie flat on your back and looking up, this is what you see.

After babyhood, toddlerhood and childhood it then becomes a very long time before you see this same sort of view again.  Certainly not staring up at it for such a long time.  And really looking at it. With no awareness of the passing of time. Without the urgency of agendas and the hustle of necessary impending tasks crowding out your mind.  Exalting in what you see so much that you wave your arms and legs and squeal with the excitement of it all.

But as a grandmother, I get another chance to experience some aspects of life again.  To glimpse at it once again through the eyes of my grandchildren.  To see “ordinary” things as though for the first, or even the second or third time.  To see the wonder of colour and shapes and patterns that are green tree branches waving in a gentle breeze against a blue sky.  To see thin threads of white cloud slowly moving across the blue sky.  To hear magpies carolling as they hop about on the grass.  Fussy, busy willy wagtails pirouetting and chattering away.

To be unhurried and see that this really is a wonderful world we’re in.  A world that’s been designed, handmade.  But also a broken and fallen world that needs repair work. But behind all that, it’s still a wonderful world – as Louis Armstrong has sung.

To see this world again – with meaning and purpose behind it.  To “know the place for the first time”.  Back where we started. To be children again, filled with child-like wonder.  To recognise that all of it hums with the beat of a Creator.