Would you believe that now it’s raining in England? True, it hasn’t rained here the entire time, but it has rained here or been grey on each day. My B&B outside of Oxford has wireless in the main house only, and I’m in the annex, so I stand outside in the chilly spring wind to talk to my family on skype. I haven’t thought before that I would need to determine how much rain is really too much on my screen, on my keyboard. This morning, it’s too much, and I have to wait for the hosts to open the curtains, the sign that I can go hover in the dining room and log on. Travel requires great flexibility.
I had thought at the beginning that I was coming to a conference and using the SOI workshop in Oxford to fund the conference. It turns out that I was coming to do a fantastic SOI workshop and using the conference as an excuse to be in this part of the world at this time. I have met fantastic people in this workshop and enjoyed it enormously. We have had exactly the kind of conversations I was wanting to have at the conference and I have been in very good company. This is yet another in long train of examples about how we just can’t know the outcome of any one of our choices. Three days ago I was wishing I hadn’t come on this trip—not because the conference didn’t have lovely moments, but because there weren’t 36 hours of travel worth of lovely moments. Today, I’m delighted I’ve come, because the package of conference plus workshop is easily enough to feel good about the travel. Tomorrow I’ll be both sad and over the top with joy to be going home. I working on holding lightly on to all of these things, knowing that I might look up and find them all different. So that’s me, lightly holding my computer in the Sunday morning drizzle of Oxford. Pictures and stories from a fantastic tour of Oxford and a lovely village nearby still to come.
(pictures of the famous Patsy in her garden and me finally getting my castle tour!)
1 comment:
We'll be sad to see you leave.
Post a Comment