Misty Cold Morning

Its nearly the solstice and surely getting darker, making me feel like staying in bed. The past week has been terrible for my husband in terms of getting any work done with the frost..not good working with stone when its freezing cold.

I know its not as cold though as the weather right now in Chicago and other parts of the midwest. Here in pennine England we've had frost, but no snow or biting wind chill factors, at least not where I'm at. Still the frosty slate roofs make it look more like Christmas.

We've got our Christmas/solstice selection of books out this week and have been reading Elsa Beskow's Peter and Lotta's Christmas and also a book about the Winter Solstice. But my son has discovered the Tao Te Ching and is fascinated with it. Not that he understands it, though some of it he does, he's more interested in the 'truth' that my husband told him it was about. My son was really upset by seeing something on the news about global warming.. we didn't get to turn off the tv in time, and they were using this image of the earth on fire throughout the report, and that really disturbed my son. So the line in the Tao Te Ching "Heaven and earth last forever. Why do heaven and earth last forever? They are unborn. So ever living" has given him real comfort.