The Fosse Way. Ancient, straight, unbending.

Full of old memories.

Roman soldiers marched it. Horse carts stuck in its mud. Cars still drive most of it. My friend and I walked some part of it today, heads tossed about in the wind, hairfree, carefree, glad to BE.

We walked. We talked.

Glossy black cows and speckled herds were over the hedgerows.

We found blackberries sweet, small, sun-kissed.

There was a sadness in each of us, a year or more of hard places. Parents departed. Children making nests empty. Struggling spouses. Illnesses. Finances. Life.

And the book I recently encountered. Eucharistic moments – the breaking of bread, the giving of thanks in the brokenness, the miracle ensuing. Looking for charis, gifts of God, so often unnoticed yet there for our accepting.

We strode on, the ground dry and cracked, the path hard to our feet.

And then.

The farmyard, horses, a tractor from which to stand aside. The gate to the next field, always open – always there a puddle thick with farmyard mud to straddle.

More dry earth, more fields, more cows. More sun and wind and glorious freedom in the views. And then that final wet stretch, teetering along its edge, trying to find a pathway through, and I knowing it to be always wet, “Perhaps it’s a spring, fresh water always leaching through.”

Hop skip jump and we are over and onwards.

Remembering later, I write to her.

Thinking of that cracked dry soil we saw in some places this afternoon; and the puddles which never seem to be dry - a metaphor of what happens when joy and grace and God's gifts penetrate our broken, cracked lives.

And looking for the Gifts. Searching out the Eucharistic moment. Allowing Him to leach into our crackedness. Dry hardness becomes soft.

Life giving.

Life healing.

Life refreshing.

Life in all its fullness.

His life filling into ours.

Jesus replied, “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” John 4:13.14