“Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself”
- Søren Kierkegaard
“Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the
driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll
show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self.”
- Matt 16:25, The Message
Dearest readers and friends,
Welcome to the August Beagle, yes, August, phew! I hope this basket of goodness finds you well today, finds you surviving and hopefully, thriving. I’m sorry I haven’t gotten to read this in my own voice this month, maybe I will get time after publishing and can add it later. I’m on my final paper deadline the next couple of weeks, plus a host of other things, so time needs serious respect right now.
I have heartfelt things to share with you this month (see Signing off section), but first, the most beautiful hamlet I’ve seen in recent years and a little July photographic update.
“Want me to come round? Dinner? Beer? Fun?” was the text I received from my lovely daughter a couple of weeks ago. She was feeling the itch for a spontaneous adventure and wanted to kidnap me. What a treat when your grown kids want to be with you. I was not going to object! Welcome to the sleepy village of Turville, Buckinghamshire. With its historic stone and timber dwellings, it has often been used for film and television projects. The windmill is a famous icon featured in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Not only did we enjoy a scrumptious pub meal outside in the beer garden, but we got to explore the delightful 12th century, St Mary The Virgin Church, as seen in the Vicar of Dibley series.
Now, a time for photography.
We celebrated my mum’s 84th birthday last month, spending the day at my Aunt’s where mum was having a sisterly sleep-over. At the last minute we were invited to a BBQ next to the Farnborough Airshow, which was very exciting. It was a great tonic to bundle into the car and get everyone out for some fun. The UAE display team were fantastic, the F-35 thunderous!
Finally, British Strawberries, the fragrance, the flavour, the taste of Wimbledon.
An absolutely huge bag of green tomatoes from my lovely neighbour. “Would I like them?” Is the Pope Catholic?! I will make a feast of antipasto for months from this!
I have begun my final, ever paper, huzzah! The next time I write you, I will have completed my two-year Oxford theological study journey. It really is a miracle. My paid subscribers will know I have shared some of my study papers in my Oxford Library section, but I am a bit behind on doing this. I hope to do this update in the coming weeks and months. I just received my latest marks and cried with joy (and relief) as I was awarded a First on each paper!
Thank the Lord for friends who bring homemade antipasto and authentic challah (pronounced HAH-Lah) from her baker friend.
I baked my own spelt bread using the stupidly easy recipe I posted in another Beagle (July or June edition).
I made my friend a beautiful birthday card using cuttings from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (an old copy specifically for crafting). These show up regularly in charity shops here and usually cost no more than a couple of pounds.
Hampshire loveliness and afternoon tea with mum at Chesapeake Mill.
What does it profit them if they gain the whole world,
but lose or forfeit themselves?
- Luke 9:25
I’ve thought, studied and written about phone addiction extensively through my Anchored Offline course. It’s currently behind the paywall, but I’m going to make it available for free as soon as I can work out how to do that. At the footer of each unit is my Full Disclosure section where I honestly share my own practice in the areas I just preached on, so to speak. Hence, the title.
📱Is It Possible? Anchored Offline in an Online World
So, fess up time — I’m quite exhausted by the world being in my pocket; I am oversaturated, overstimulated, overwhelmed with it, and I need off. It is taking my soul (dramatic but feels true), my mental space, my irl connection space, and I need to reclaim myself. This latest slide into digital comfort-seeking has been brought on by ongoing stress factors. The irony is that the comfort I seek to relieve stress actually creates more stress.
In my attempt to seek relief, I’ve fallen prey to the ol’ doom scrolling, not even doom scrolling, just what-business-do-I-have-watching-this-scrolling. I’ve caught myself wondering why the heck I’m enthralled in a three-minute video of a rescued horse having its feet trimmed, or whether Taylor Swift is genuinely married or simply pulling an epic PR stunt, or how to make a doll’s house using only a tissue box and a few twigs!
I’m not beating myself up about it though. The tech is designed to train our behaviour, by stealth, to create addiction. I also understand my ADHD brain craves dopamine, and this little slot machine promises hit, after hit after hit. I feel positively wretched at times. But there is hope. I know the cause, I know the “cure”, I only need to start taking the steps to implement once again the things I know to do, to behave my way forward. If you think my course can give you the kick-start you need, then please do take advantage. If, however, you’d prefer to point and laugh and cry “hypocrite”, both are valid responses.
Alternatively, you can contribute £2 to The Oxford Studies Kitty Jar via this LINK.
Did you know I link every book, film, recipe etc in the Beagle? Where you see words in BOLD and UNDERLINED, simply click the link.
“Lord God, whatever I have written which is of Thine, let Thy people recognise. If I have written aught which is of mine, forgive Thou, and let Thy people forgive.”- St.Augustine
It’s a strange thing, writing here on Substack and, before that, my blog, creating for a publication no one has asked for, yet feeling compelled to deliver it by a deadline no one has set. Somewhere unseen, each month, I’m gathering scattered thought and inspiration, feeding it, sitting with the weight of it, toying wth it, waiting while it gradually gathers in on itself. Most of what gravitates never catches. That long invisible compression before anything can be seen from the outside, that’s the part that can’t be rushed. I stare, a lot. Then, in a burst of formation, something binds together enough to give off a beam of light. I publish, and a brief peace follows. Then it starts again. I never quite know what will take shape; my understanding works in the dark as much as the thing itself, sifting through countless fragments for the one that takes enough form, allowing me to perceive it. The ‘why’ that drives me, though, remains unchanged: to bring beauty into your world, to help you feel seen, to give you hope.
This is the poem from which this publication takes its name, Beauty by Eugene H Peterson. The search for beauty in the most unlikely places is the scent upon which my senses are fixed.
“He had no form or comeliness
that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.”-Isaiah 53:2
A whiff. A beagle for beauty I sniffedMonet’s haystacks, Van Gogh’s sunflowers,
Devoutly meditated Marilyn’s breasts,
Watched kingfishers -- lost the scent.
Kiss the lepers wound: taste honey.Touch the blind eye: learn Braille.Keep vigil at the cradle: change diapers.Drink tears from the chalice: live Eucharist.
Happened on found things, found in gutters,
Found on a cross, found under a stone,
Heard in the rustling grass, heard in
A tongue stammering sabacthani.
Found when I wasn’t looking, heard
When I wasn’t listening. Found beauty.
I’ve been following this trail since the Beagle’s inception and even well before it took shape.
Many of my musings, my ruminations as I call them, are my personal wrestlings. When I first began writing some thirty years ago, I did a lot of the talking, because, you know, I knew a lot apparently. I giggle at that idealistic, beautiful, somewhat self-inflated but hope-filled, naive twenty-five-year-old. She thought she was full and ready to pour out but could not see how very much she still had to learn.
I wrote an entire book in a few days when I was twenty-six. I found the manuscript last week, and giggled once again as I saw that passionate young woman in the pages, but also a little grief. I miss that unfiltered, raw writer. I wrote purely for the hearts and minds of my audience and had no concept of other writers critiquing my work, nor did I compare myself to others. I ache for the young woman who didn’t think anyone would scrutinise or compare her style, or run it through AI, which could potentially create a false positive (it’s happened before!). She was not careful and tidy with each line, but she was overtaken with care for those she wanted to help. For any craftsperson, skill is to be desired, yes; as much as there is AI slop, there’s also human slop, but I’d rather write messy than mechanical.
For those of you who have tracked with me for more than a couple of years, you will be aware I’ve been undergoing somewhat of a challenging season. For those of you who’ve known me less than that, you might simply understand me to be the melancholy sort. I promise you I’m also quite funny.
This melancholic chapter
is not my whole story
But a valuable section
In the book of my life
that surprisingly becomes
the most relatable part
To the whole world.
by Scott Erickson. Image Copyright Scott Erickson, from In The Low book
Relatable, Scott says, because we share a messy human experience. This is the driving unction that compels me to put pen to paper, fingertip to keypad. None of what I’m carrying is unique to man; there’s nothing new under the sun. Here’s the plot twist: through the compound pressure of being over-connected digitally, I’m actually carrying far more than I’m capable of processing. I treat my body like a machine, like a data centre, and I am neither! My humanity struggles under the weight of its own sufferings, and I am mindlessly stacking more on.
Can we just disappear? I don’t mean that the way it sounds, especially late at night while that little screen glares onto glazed eyes. I mean, can we get off this hamster wheel, lockdown-esque but funner. We are already carrying enough. Sorrows swallowed, disappointments swallowed, pain swallowed behind closed doors, so we can stay kind to the people in front of us. What we don’t need is more. More information, more opinions, more of somebody else’s “I-feel-sorry-for-the-people-who-just-paid-full-price-for-it” magic cooling bra.
I am not a data centre that just needs a bigger drive. More input was never going to be the cure. What actually helps is a friend face-to-face, heart-to-heart. A voice that isn’t coming through a little palm-held mic. Someone who already knows what I’m carrying or is willing to sit still long enough to find out.
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
is equivalent to the weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
- Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
And now, like all good melancholic afflicted persons, having begun my healing quest in the pharmacy of folly, I circle round once again, back to Christ, back to the true source of my relief. How is He not tired of these same conversations! How does He bear with His remarkably silly, predictable creatures?
There is One who has swallowed more anguish than any other, in fact, swallowed an entire reservoir of pain that was not even His to absorb. I know this because I get to watch as He takes into Himself the sorrows destined for others, for me.
Christ took the cup presented to Him by His Father, and drank it to its bitter dregs. The sin of the world was absorbed into the flesh of One who held no guilt for its origin. He gave His life for an undeserved death, for a joy that was set before Him, that He could glimpse by faith even as the taste was still on His lips.
I need that same joy to be as real to me now as the steaming cup of tea in my hand, something solid I can wrap my fingers around, warm enough to hold close to my chest and not just a fanciful idea.
I am not Christ. Some days the relief of being unburdened from that is like a burst of oxygen into gasping lungs. Other days, it’s an uphill struggle. But Jesus doesn’t ask me to swallow what he has already taken; He invites me instead to take Him into myself, His body, His blood, to stand in His strength and rest in His finished work.
I’m ging to say something now that my Oxford markers would mark me down for: I firmly believe the reason why that younger me lived more lightly (aside from being an 80’s teen, last best decade to grow up in imho) was that she wasn’t carrying the weight of the online world around inside her, only the burdens God had given, His cup for her. She felt driven to care for the things that burned in her heart, not feeling responsible for a whole world on fire.
So here I am, once again, relearning, practising afresh what I already know, to take up His burden and not fifty others. “Come to me”, Christ says, “and I will give you rest…for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30). Not the yoke of a constant news cycle and tragedy. Not the yoke of an internet-stranger’s opinion. Not the yoke of the latest things I absolutely must have lest I get kicked to society’s fashion/youth/beauty/trend kerb.
Tomorrow will have its own troubles (Matt 6:34). I don’t need to give them rent-free space in my head today. I’m trying, one deleted app at a time, to make room for His voice, to clear the inner noisy room and hear Him above the crowd. To guard that inner meeting place so I can make His voice loudest, not the only voice, but the main one.
And now, I’m going to go touch some grass as they say. I invite you to do the same. I would also add I’m going to touch a friend, but that comes out weird.
Don’t be afraid of the desert and wilderness seasons of your life,
God kinda likes taking His favourites there
Tulips on Headstone
I enjoy playing around with textures; this particular composition has been created by layering the surface of a headstone underneath. If you look very closely on the left-hand side, you can still see some wording, weathered and worn over time. I love me a good cemetery; how about you? Not everyone shares my enthusiasm; some folks find them morbid and a bit creepy, depressing. To me, they are a haven of peace, often green and brimming with wildlife. Each headstone a story, some wishing to go quietly, a modest and simple plaque, others still giving main character energy with their dramatic statues and tomb carvings. Westminster Abbey has some fabulous examples of dramatic burial places (seen below). Though not a churchyard, its vast, hushed spaces still evoke a sense of rest, a calm, contemplative invitation amidst busy city life. But I digress. I hope you enjoy this bountiful bouquet today. The mauve and dusky lilac are by far my favourite shades of tulip.
Monthly paid supporters will have full access to each image for their personal use. I am deeply grateful to my financial partners, it means so much to me that you get behind my work. Thank you!
Let me introduce you to the incredible artist who is Veronika Blyzniuchenko. Veronika was born in Ukraine in 1996 but, since the war, now resides in Portugal, where she is able to pursue her craft undisturbed. Veronika says “beauty is my choice” and holds the pursuit of beauty and harmony her driving passion. She began taking inspiration for her work from her internal musings and personal transformation, but now seeks nature and architecture as her muse. Many of the pieces are created with 24K gold and her signature varying shades of blue.
Please browse her luminous work on her website; it is a feast for the eyes and soul.
Do it sad -
Do it angry
Do it heartbroken
Do it miserable
Do it excited
Do it energised
Do it happy
Do it tired
Do it confident
Do it discouraged.
Do it anyways.
Something a little fun this month…
Paint dry, nail polish to be precise. I rarely do my nails as I keep them trimmed for practicality and the polish seems to chip as soon as I have the lid back on the bottle!
A family of magpies sweep in each day to drink from the little bowl of water I put out.
Chonky and Wonky, the pigeon pair who like to examine the apple pile each night.
My son’s almost 3 hour home video from his recent trip, filmed on his JVC camcorder. His love of analogue and old school gives me so much hope for the future.
The New Boy, starring Cate Blanchett.
I went into this film knowing nothing about the story and discovered an absolute gem. Aside from the stunning cinematography and stellar performances from Cate and Aswan Reid (the boy), this is a powerful commentary on religious colonisation and Western religion’s rejection of other spiritual expressions.
Many Beautiful Things, the story of artist and missionary, Lilias Trotter. I have this on DVD, but you might be able to stream this somewhere. This pairs beautifully with Jennifer Trafton’s book, If Only We Could See and Sally Clarkson’s podcast, in conversation with Jennifer.
[Occasionally, my recommendations may not be for everyone. My choice of films, books etc are based on my particular tastes and tolerances. Just a note for my G-rated friends]
The pigeon’s cooing.
My friend’s as they share about their lives, the joys, the struggles, and dreams.
The conversation of an adult daughter with her mum as I walked behind them on the High Street. Apparently, they want to “go out together” and mix their ashes into one big bag! They were laughing, but you can hear the deep, beautiful love in this.
My elderly mum and Aunt with their sibling banter. One hard of hearing and full of opinions, the other with a sharp wit and maybe a bit too much wine.
Neighbours trimming the garden while the laughter of a party group drifts across the dusk air.
My breath, slowly, four counts in, four counts out.
Triple One Pancakes or the 1-1-1 Mix. This is an old Jamie Oliver recipe I’ve adapted over the years but makes a never-fail batter base.
1 cup of flour (plain, self-raising or make a half/half)
1 cup of milk
1 large egg
1 grated pear or apple (add in after the batter is mixed)
1/4 tsp baking powder, optional if you want them fluffier, don't add if you’re using s/r flour.
This makes approx 8 small pancakes. Any leftovers can go in a jar in the fridge and will keep for a couple of days. Simply shake well before using to mix the fruit juice back in with the batter, as it will separate.
Once made, put a big ol’ dollop of natural or Greek yoghurt on top and drizzle generously with maple syrup or honey or whatever you fancy. You can put other fruit on the side such as strawberries, blueberries, raspberries. So good, I’ve been making these for years.
I will be writing to my paid subscribers later in the month to share more personally about the ways God has been showing up for me through depression, heartbreak and significant life change. I don’t do that to exclude anyone or fish for paid subs (though helpful 😉), but to speak more privately to those who get behind my work financially. I don’t know what platforms like Substack hold for me in the future as I, like many others, migrated to it as it offered a credible way to financially support my work in a kindred community. But I fear, alas, the model may be at its limits. This is an excellent analysis of the situation by Scott Carney.
Due to my current ‘circumstanceship’, I will be pausing the Beagle in this form for a little while, possibly until Oct/Nov or even the new year. I have several wonderful things in store that I’ve had to hold off on due to study and said circumstanceship, but I anticipate relaunch and revival upon its return. Any suggestions for a 2027 book club list are greatly appreciated, please do email or comment. I’m not totally ghosting you, I will keep publishing here in other ways as inspiration and life allows.
I have recently upgraded my Founding Member benefits to include a 90 minute 1:1 Life Coaching session, a handwritten letter of thanks and welcome, and a 10” x 8” Fine art print sent from my Dutch Masters Collection. Just trying to sweeten the pot with true rewards for financial backers and put food on my table (more likely, books!).
I bid you farewell for now. Feel free to scan this for AI, goodness, I have much to say on this. I will most likely deactivate AI’s ability to scan my Beagle in future for various reasons, but for today and your reassurance, go at it, I’ll only be slightly offended.
Blessings, grace and may grass ever be under your feet -
Jacqui
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