Fortress of Wellbeing

Marriage should be a fortress of well-being—a place of safety and sanctity not only for the couple, but also for all who live within, enter, or visit.

Yet even the strongest walls can be breached by unwelcome intruders. They slip in unseen—addictions that steal time, attention, and focus from those who truly deserve it. Such intruders wedge themselves between the couple, draining goodness and kindness from this precious union.

Some arrive with malicious intent, driven by selfish and toxic agendas. Others come with goodwill and kind hearts, yet their words and actions unknowingly cause more harm than the worst enemy, chipping away at the very foundation.

Exhaustion, weariness, boredom, and rigid routines can become self-inflicted wounds, cutting off the water supply that sustains the fortress.

So tend to your defenses—together.

Even if torn out by the roots, heartbroken and lost, choose to stumble or crawl back to one another. Rebuild what has been taken, lost, or forgotten.
We build that fortress daily—with kind hands, gentle words, and attentive actions.

Be the sanctuary for the many souls who may one day find shelter in your fortress of love. And above all, be grateful for the immense privilege of walking this life’s journey with a sweet soul by your side.

May your fortress ever be a thing of beauty—mighty, strong, and uplifting to behold.

The most popular blog postings over last 13 years

 

Windflowers — Blog postings

Table of Windflowers blog posts with working links.

Post title	Page views	Link
I am ever so humble, I am	4,130	humble link
Maximinus Thrax - Giant in stature and gigantically flawed	3,210	Maximinus link
Sa Maison Gardens - remembering Lady Lockwood	2,400	Sa Maison
Malta and its underground tunnels	1,600	Malta tunnels link
My father was upset about the library being burned	1,190	Father upset link
Raised Eyebrows and Demented in Dubai	812	Raised Eyebrows link
Slaves Revolt - Malta	827	Slaves Revolt link
I will rip his arm off and beat him to death with the bloodied stump	599	Rip his arm off link
Foxes Furs, Men on the Moon and Peter Pan	498	Foxes Fur link
Grandmaster Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII meet up	531	Grandmaster link

Can I show you something private? He said, and it made me afraid

 

It was a peculiar question. My neighbour had looked suddenly shifty. Everything had gone well up to that point. I wanted to apply for my over-65 bus and train ticket. Here in Northern Ireland, when you reach that age, you can travel free on all buses and trains, even down to Dublin! It required someone you were not related to to sign the application form.  So I chose my neighbor two doors down, as we had been reasonably friendly at a distance. We would wave at each other through windows or if passing on foot or as our cars passed, so not exactly friendly, but an acquaintance. After I knocked on my neighbour’s door he'd invited me into his tidy living room. Unusual in my experience to find everything in place with a neat pile of books on the table beside his armchair. His wife had died some years earlier and I'd expected chaos but no, he was obviously a tidy person. More importantly he'd been happy to sign my form and fill in the details after he had found his glasses and his hearing aids. 

I thanked him profusely and was getting ready to leave when he looked at me oddly as if assessing me in some way. Then he walked to his rear door leading away to a back room and paused with his hand on the door and said, 

“Can I show you something private?” 

This I have to admit caused me some alarm as I was not at all sure I wanted him to show me anything private at all. We stood in a strange awkward silence as I wrestled with my gratitude for him signing my form with deep unease about being shown into the rear of his property. He said,

“It will have to be our secret, you understand? 

This sounded even worse. The word private was already triggering alarm bells but keeping secrets was what paedophiles said or serial abusers. A perfectly innocent afternoon was turning into something altogether sinister. He opened the door to his back room and gestured for me to enter. I'd just got comfortable in my neighbours living room after all had never entered his house before this. Everything seemed to be going pear shaped for me. He repeated,

“Come in, come in but don't tell anyone!”

This was said with some vehemance as well as persistence. It was politeness more than anything else that had me following him into his back room. Things could become nasty in a minute and I readied myself. I never pass a dog or a human without wandering if I could kill them if necessary. Yes, odd I know, but my life has taken many unexpected terms and a readiness to defend myself to the death has become part of my nature. 

I find myself ushered into a back room that opened out into a sunroom and in that space were eight full-sized motorbikes. As he showed me around he explained he used to drive the bikes to competitions in his younger days. These great gleaming machines would compete with others up and down the country. The tidy living room now made sense. 

Such meticulous attention to detail has its rewards, no wonder it had become second nature. I also suddenly understood why this had to be kept secret. These bikes were very expensive. People knowing such riches lay in his house could target this pensioner.

I was simply so relieved that there was nothing untoward being planned and enthusatiatically admired each and every model.  We parted real friends not acquaintences. In this world where women are so often targeted by men inappropriately and even voilently how often does politeness do us no favours. It can all too easily be interpreted as willingness or acquiescence by the male. But the whole episode reminded me too that all the men in my life have shown kindness and consideration.  It made me suddenly want to thank each and every male of the species that has demonstrated gentle courtesy to women as if it was our birthright.  There are so many more of such men out there than we think!

Killing us slowly

It seems absurd, that while the sixth great extinction is underway, with species being eradicated from fish to butterflies to gorillas in eye watering numbers, mankind chooses at this time to wage war. 

Never mind that our planet is evidently weary of us with environmental pollution poisoning our seas and air.  Even our climate is showing distress with areas of the world becoming uninhabitable due to drought or flooding. 

In the face of a global pandemic, mankind could have united and saved millions more lives. Instead some countries bought excessive numbers of vaccines which they never used and others suffered the consequences. 

Businesses cost us many more millions of lives each year, with drugs, alcohol, smoking, fast food, guns and gambling having free rein to cause misery while making huge profits.  Many of them have more lobbying power than nations. 

But knowing all this, at this critical junction, when our eyes need to be on pressing urgent problems, we squabble and race into battle with each other. Blinded by prejudice,  hatred and nationalism we stumble into more deadly mistakes.  This must stop!

There are issues that underpin everything we see around us.  Will we respond with hatred and prejudice or try and address the fundamental problems of which these are only symptoms?

Weeds have mastered resilence

The weeds are rampant in their triumph over all my endeavours. I wrestle them out pulling hand fulls, bucket fulls and even filling my bin. 

The patch looks healthy once more with tiny flowers, free to soak up the sun. It lasts a mere week before the beasts are back. I should have known, they don't come out by the roots like a decent flower. No, they break off just beneath the soil, laughing at my attempts to remove them.  The blasted ivy plays the longer game too, happy to sacrifice stems while sustaining roots hidden below. What better way to outsmart the enemy!  Give them the appearance of victory, job done and soil cleared. But underneath a new revolution is afoot growing in even more abundance from all those severed limbs. 

I look out and see my pansies drowned once more in a tidal wave of green weeds before the week is out.  Lessons learned, when we are cut off and brutally severed. Don't waste time contemplating your losses but look to what remains unseen just below. Go deep and grow like mad. Multiple your roots and trust what remains below will soon find the light above.

The root cause of wrongdoing is ignorance, and we must therefore hold fast to the tools of perception and knowledge. Good character must be taught.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

World Worries

I’ve broken my right wrist and now wear a heavy cast that reaches up to my elbow. I cannot write—only scribble. I've lost something vital to my sense of well-being. I feel robbed of true expression, reduced to flitting about uselessly, distracted.

My thoughts, like my handwriting, wander aimlessly. There is no order, no beauty—only the echo of things broken and damaged, all askew and out of shape. I curse at inanimate objects as if they’re conspiring against me—refusing to be held, slipping behind cabinets, spilling onto the floor.

The endless wars in the world feel much the same—acts of violence carried out mindlessly, with no regard for consequence. I long for order, for health, for peace. But perhaps, like my wrist, the world, too, needs a cast—something to hold it together until healing can begin.

Bedspreads, Saints and Sinners

I had a friend many years ago who I used to tease about her matching bedspreads, curtains and pillowcases. She laughed along with me and then explained her childhood had been something altogether different. Her mother had died of breast cancer and the four girls were left with an alcoholic father. When he became drunk, he became violent and his favourite activity for my friend, as a young girl, was to make her run the full length of the room and bang her head on the far wall. If she didn’t do it hard enough, he became furious. If she cried, he became even angrier. It seemed a very cruel act towards a very small vulnerable child who was missing her mother. 

They slept on beds with coats no sheets no duvets and somehow it suddenly made sense that as a married woman, she wanted her own child to sleep in clean sheets that matched everything beautifully. I was shocked beyond belief that my remark could have triggered such deep hurtful memories of a childhood cursed with alcoholism. Seeing my expression, she hurried to explain that the thing that gave her hope during those dark days was a book entitled ‘The Lives of the Saints’. My friend said this was her daily reading material and it inspired her. She grew to know about wonderful lives, like Saint Francis of Assisi and his love for animals and people. She read and reread these stories and as she described their effect her face became full of joy. I suddenly saw how, even in the midst of misery and suffering, the lives of the saints had shed a light on a spiritual path that led out of the darkness. 

St Jerome (347 AD - 420 AD) was born in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina but found himself a student in Rome. While young he enjoyed sexual experimentation among the students of that city and yet felt afterwards incredible feelings of guilt. In order to make his conscience feel better, he would visit the dark catacombs. This would remind him of the perils of hell and seeing the gravestones of the martyrs and the apostles reminded him that he should choose a better path.  He wrote of this experience later, quoting Virgil, 

“On all sides round, horror spread wide; the very silence breathed a terror on my soul”.

However hard he endeavoured to become a member of the local Christian community he inevitably fell out with the leaders describing them as blind men leading other blind men into a pit as in the biblical parable. Such disunity was also apparent in his family where he had accused his sister of behaving abominably and this caused a rift with other family members. Another significant personal crisis in his own life emerged and he felt his reputation had been sullied.  No one knows what actually happened, but he had evidently done something so shocking and offensive and completely unforgivable in the eyes of the local community of nuns that they never replied to any of his letters begging forgiveness despite his admission of his wrongdoing and asking for their pardon.

Eventually seized with a desire for spiritual growth and penance he travelled to a desert and there lived with many other hermits on spiritual path in utmost poverty in holes and caves. One hermit was said to have lived for 30 years on a diet of barley bread and muddy water. The idea of all this torment was to subdue their bodies, break their will and eradicate every carnal desire. To that end, eating and drinking were kept to a minimum and they would even take steps to make sleep very difficult. 

Saint Jerome, during this time, wrote many letters to those that he had offended in the past and to beg for forgiveness. Unfortunately, anyone who did not forgive him, was written another letter viciously attacking them. Gradually he learnt that even among the hermits in the surrounding area he was unpopular. He wrote to the Pope explaining the situation. It is interesting that his main complaint was how argumentative everyone around him was! This period in the desert left him with a dislike of monks, hermits and spiritual people who he saw as often being filled with hypocrisy and arrogance. When he left the desert, he chose to live with a dear friend whose hospitality he depended on for an entire year.

During this time, he chose to write a biography of an early Saint, who had lived to the amazing age of 105, in which he strongly disagreed with that already well-written by his friend and host on the same topic. The prolonged visit inevitably ended with his friend falling out with him and requesting him to leave.  A pattern surely emerges of someone who could not get on with his own family, his own religious community, could not get on with those nuns, could not get on with his neighbouring hermits in the desert, and even couldn’t get on with a hospitable friend who had generously accommodated him for a year for free.  

Fortunately, St Jerome won funding from the pope to undertake translation work on the Bible at which he showed real talent.  As a result of this, St Jerome at last found himself fashionable and much sought after, particularly by elderly women of wealth seeking a spiritual path. Some wrote to him for advice and he encouraged them to take the course of rigorous chastity and self-mortification. St Jerome felt that women had dangerous desires and appetites that needed to be repressed and suppressed.  His basic reasoning was as follows, since eating the forbidden apple in Eden (largely Eve’s fault) caused Adam’s fall, then logically fasting must be the path to chastity and salvation for women. He argued this so successfully to one of the daughters of a particular widow the teenager proceeded to starve herself and died within four months.  At her funeral her mother fainted in distress at the loss.  A horrible letter exists from St Jerome to the mother berating the widow for making such a scene at the graveside. He did not even spare the biblical prophets, remarking that the quality of their rhetoric made his skin crawl. 

By now like me perhaps you are disliking this saint a little?  It is fairly common now to attack people alive and dead and to use all information available, real or made up as ammunition.  In St Jerome’s case, a very real character emerges that while missing on social skills had a dedication and devotion that left a lasting legacy. There can be no doubt that he was a prolific biblical scholar, who wrote wide-ranging commentaries on numerous books of the Bible and strengthened the quality of his translation by referencing both the original Hebrew and Greek texts. I suspect all of us have our flaws and strengths and too often we learn to distract ourselves from our own failings by focusing on the vices of others. Part of the beauty in examining the lives of the saints is that they not only painfully remind us of our own weaknesses, but also inspire a powerful urge to choose a better and more noble path forward.