the adlards

We had had enough of the 98% humidity when we left our tents on Saturday. I mean like completely enough. I mean enough ’til, like, January or something.

We came to East London in October for a two week break and have stayed. For the past six weeks we have camped north of East London on the southernmost segment of the Wild Coast. It’s been good. We’ve been visited by peacocks, giraffe, fallow deer, new friends and old friends and angels and have woken each morning to the sound of the weaver birds in the trees around our camp. In six weeks the girls, though by no means unrecognisable, have changed dramatically. As have we. But I get ahead of myself …

This is a Christmas letter. I dislike Christmas letters. Quite a lot. So I thought it good to pause at this point and give you a chance to brace yourself. Please don’t stop reading. Perhaps it will be of some encouragement to know that I only seem to write such things at truly tumultuous times. By which, of course, I mean entirely subjectively tumultuous times, but perhaps you’ll find it interesting nonetheless. As my wife and eldest daughter keep telling me: “You never know.” I think they mean “One never knows”, but I’m not really sure.

The analyst in me recognises that Michelle and I thrive on the discontinuities in life. Linear progression doesn’t get us up in the morning. As I imagine a surfer must feel, we find joy in the fine balance between tumult and order; between mastery and having our butts kicked. The joy of living for us comes by adversity; in changing, in finding strength, in overcoming. By definition then, as you will see, it’s been a joyful year.

The quietness between adversity is also good. Very good. But it’s not when we feel most alive.

Today, thanks to the love of friends, I am warm and dry and not sitting in a dripping-wet tent. My intention is to share with you some of those things that have fundamentally shaped us over the past year or so. It has been a difficult year for writing, evidenced both by the slew of unfinished article stubs, that you can’t see, and by the more-or-less complete absence of content on the blog this year, which you can see. I hope you begin to understand our silence as you read and that in weaving the story the joy of expression begins to flow for me again.

I’ll be writing in installments.
This was the introduction.
I hope you’ll stay with us.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 9:56 pm by james and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.