No Christmas celebration this year, instead Maqluba with beloveds and a vigil in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Simply grateful for every mouthful and to be together.

Sharing a wish that politicians stop their public readings of Seamus Heaney’s powerful words on seachange, and start living the poem instead.

From Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song 
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change 
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term...