Loch Striven

Today has gone on too long, beginning as it did with scraping ice off the car at 8.10am, continuing through the haphazard restoration of order to the  clothes that might be wanted on holiday and the oh-I'd-forgotten-all-about-that-useful-garment moments to a fairly hurried lunch so that we could have some benefit from what looked like a totally gorgeous winter day. 

Because it was afternoon we headed south again, this time all the way round to the Loch Striven road, where it was indeed so beautiful that we walked further than Himself has done for ages. I took so many photos that I couldn't choose one for the blip, which is why you have this self-indulgent collage today, and more views of the sunset. (What I haven't included are rather fuzzy ones of a bullfinch keeping pace just ahead of us along the road, and a heron flying overhead in that wonderful fighter-plane mode.)

And because I'm on sunsets again, and because I was really cross that I forgot to include it in last night's blip, I'm now going to repeat the wonderful lines from a poem I don't know properly in its entirety, by Robert Browning. I came across it in a book by John V. Taylor, one-time Bishop of Winchester, whom I had the privilege of meeting a long time ago at a conference about Peacemaking in a Nuclear Age. In "The Go-Between God", he quoted this as an example of how one can be ambushed by the sense of God in the face of beauty - the kind of beauty I was enthralled by this afternoon.

Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,—
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self
To rap and knock and enter in our soul ...
 
‘Bishop Blougram's Apology’ (1855)