Pensive

This is a correct term to describe precisely how I feel today. The only day I can be practically secluded and detached from the noise of parochial life and activities. I decided to stay home alone today, having celebrated a Holy Mass on Easter Monday in the morning, with everybody gone home to be with their families and loved ones. I needed this time for myself. Having just finished Lent and Holy Week marathon and bracing for the incoming Divine Mercy Sunday with its three days of busy schedule and logistics that brink on nightmare, especially when one takes under consideration frequent power-cuts and lack of running water in Kiabakari and the prospect of hundreds of pilgrims coming to the shrine for the weekend...


I needed this one and only day, the only opportunity I had on my hands to refocus, recharge, recompose myself, reflect and recover more effectively from malaria that has been haunting me the whole Holy Week. In one word - turning on a pensive mood today...

Tomorrow we will be having our customary Easter party - meeting of all priests and religious working in the deanery for a R&R - chats and food together... Then starting from Wednesday - series of meetings and hectic preparations for the annual pilgrimage weekend. Thinking of my daffodils as the poem artfully depicts this pensiveness of my mood:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils....

I find this quote from a poem of William Cullen Bryant amusingly fitting too as I find myself alone in this house like in a tomb, surrounded by rocky hills, valleys, creeks with Lake Victoria stretching on the horizon...

The hills,
Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun, -- the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods -- rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste, --
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.

I'm glad and grateful to Good Lord for the gift of this day. The best gift I could ever imagine under circumstances. Happy Easter to everyone!