A Cluttered Desk And Hot Cups Of Coffee

Today I picked something up from my desk and I said to myself ‘what is this doing here?’

Yes on my desk there are a multitude of things and they all tell a story, you can see in the picture above that I am not a fan of the tidy desk policy. What I picked up was a small piece of pipe, a short length of black plastic irrigation pipe from the Arocha project in Lebanon. It was there because I had it in my pocket when going to buy some pipe fittings in order to get the right size. Then for some reason I had to empty my pocket and it found it’s way on to my desk.

I looked at my desk and there is also on my desk a red basket full of envelopes containing seeds we had gathered in the mountains, which we will soon try to grow. There is a Bible and various notebooks, a small power pack, an external disc drive, a mobile phone mount for a tripod, battery charger for the camera batteries, a printer even a pen and pencil. These are the tools of my trade as a wordsmith and a gardener or plantsman or landlover.

New Word Alert – Landlover – someone who loves the land and advocates for its health, who is learning about it’s workings and what it needs to thrive.

• It sounds like landlubber an old term for someone who never went on a ship, a derogatory term used by sailors, and it looks like Landrover the iconic 4WD vehicle which became closely identified with British endeavours and expeditions of the 20^th century and which I love.

Anyway the cluttered desk looks untidy and is supposed to reflect a cluttered brain, one that perhaps is not clear in it’s thinking or behaves irrationally. Life coaches and some offices insist on a tidy desk policy believing that it will help the staff to think clearly and behave rationally. Oh that it was as easy as that then we would all do it, but that is not how it works at all.

For me the cluttered desk speaks of a richness and balance in life, the piece of irrigation pipe and the seeds reflect ongoing projects that maybe are just parked for a season but are important. Every day I find that life is full of chaos and it comes at me like a storm. I usually welcome it, my job each day is to wrestle with the chaos and bring out beauty and peace.

Picture if you will a family walk on a winters day there is a storm howling around us but we are ready we have good shoes and waterproofs and warm clothes, for lunch my task is to find a sheltered spot where my family can shelter and drink coffee from a flask prepared earlier. In the shelter we laugh at the storm and enjoy each others company. The day is not diminished by the storm the day is remembered for a lifetime as the day we drank coffee in the storm and laughed a lot. This is my life, and also this is my desk, in the midst of a life full of unpredictable events and sadness’s I seek with God’s help to bring joy and laughter and hot cups of coffee.