A drink at the end of a marathon

This place is like a long drink of water at the end of a marathon. And in a way it is hard to determine whether it is the place itself, (a part of the camphill community, (www.camphill.org.uk) which is set up to create homes and support for people living with disabilities in the most holistic of ways) or this particular family and the fact that this is the home of a friend, Mina, who in so many ways has stepped over the boundary of friendship into an extended member of my family.

We are in the middle of Goustershire. On the outskirts of Stroud. It feels like the very essence of how I imagine idyllic England. A small village surrounded by forests and hills and splatterings of the sunshine of a British summer. Right now I am curled up on Mina's bed in the roof of their sprawling house. It is a house that expands and extends so that every time I visit I feel like I come across new parts I hadn't noticed before. Nine people with special needs live in amongst two families, with a rough split between the two households who overlap into each others kitchens and lives, along with the new kittens and the added guests - like me.

I arrived two days ago with a residue of exam tension and worry over money for Meta hanging over me. From Mina's nine year old twin sisters hugs when I arrived, to dinner and the blessing of the meal around the long pine kitchen table, this place hadn't changed a bit from the last time I was here, or the first time I visited four years ago. Like the seasons, there is time for everytihng in this rambling community. Stories before bed for the twins. Lunch at one o'clock. Shared washing up duty and the Guardian that is collected by Robert each day. I have been drinking deeply from the healing atmosphere of a tranquil routine and a peaceful loving home for two days now.

Our long walk up into the hills has left Mina and I sunburnt and giddy on strawberry wine sent from Rwanda (where she's been working for a human rights organisation for the past few months - colours-in-the-desert.blogspot.com). Another friend's arrival and an evening at a local artist exhibition of War and Peace yesterday has fed our discussions over cider and later over chammomile tea. Reading bedtime stories to the twins has reminded me of story telling and inspired further play reading on the hills and shakespeare sonnet quoting. An evening with Mina's parents over wine chatting about the future year on their enormous bed in the eaves of the house has made me absorb yet again this sense of time, place, purpose and lack of hurry that is so central to life here. Coffee and breakfast this morning, while Mina's mother kneeds dough for bread in front of us is another example of the pace of this community. Never stagnant. But never hurried.

The conversations of the last few days have, as usual, been inspiring, colourful and clarifying. I thought when I first started this blog that that is what I wanted to write about; our discussions of conflict and peace, the man we met yesterday who has just returned from the DRC and his video footage on Liberia, this constant struggle that we have of wanting to effect and change the world and yet realising our own impotence to do so without more concrete skills, the non governmental world and training for interns, whether we should judge on people's words and rhetoric or their actions, where does art fit into protest? Does the Quaker faith settle our struggles over organised religion and spiritual desire? What does 'preaching to the converted mean' and is it helpful to say that or misleading and presumptuous?

But, it seems I am running low on time. Mina and our other friend are playing cello duets downstairs, and soon lunch, as the structure of the day here predicts, will begin. There's games to be played with the twins down at the lake and I for one am still thirsty.