Ordinary time
Joe looking out our front window
The Christian calendar consists of complementary halves: Festival Time, which spans from Advent through Pentecost; and Ordinary Time, which runs, necessarily, from Pentecost to Advent. During the festive season, we Christians walk in time and through time, marking the milestones of Jesus’ incarnation from Christmas to Eastertide. Compressing a life into just six months, Festival Time is busy. Ordinary Time, in contrast, encompasses the months of the Christian calendar that are free from major holy days (“holidays”). This half of the year feels almost untethered from time and offers a chance to drift a bit freer. After all that festival, all that living in time, I always greet the arrival of Ordinary Time with a sigh of relief.
On the walk to the beach in Fish Hoek
Beach in Fish Hoek
Sunset view from our apartment
Coming to South Africa has been like that for us.
Joe takes a breather part way up Table Mountain
The last stretch up Table Mountain
At the top
View from the top of Table Mountain
We arrived in Cape Town nearly three weeks ago, exhausted and craving sanctuary from our ambitious travel schedule, the relentless gaze of other people, the equatorial sun. We needed to float for a few weeks in ordinary time. So we’ve done exactly that. We rented a lovely apartment in a village 40 kilometers from Cape Town proper, overlooking False Bay. It’s summer here and the weather is a dream. Our village has a sandy beach, a homey grocery store (cilantro! curry paste! salami!), a bakery with workable pan de campagne and an Anglican Church I’ve attended a few times. We’ve been doing school, swimming and surfing, cooking and eating, running and doing yoga, reading and playing video games. We hiked to the top of Table Mountain and visited the penguins at Boulders Beach. Most days, someone asks me what day it is. It’s today, I say. Just an ordinary day.
Penguins at Boulders Beach
Bunny chow
Storm clouds over Fish Hoek beach
OK, fine. Our Battenberg cake was a little … stodgy.
Tomorrow we’ll set out for a road trip along the Garden Route punctuated by five days of backpacking in the Outeniqua Mountains. Hopefully we’ll have some lovely pictures of South African landscapes to share when we return. After that, we plan to dive back into the current of time and place. (We’re off to Asia!)
Near the end of Chapman’s Peak Drive
Hout Bay in the distance
