Blob Thing is happy.
Last night something very special happened. He and his person are currently staying with his creator. And last night they shared in a meaningful experience. He will tell you all about it when he gets home. For today though he wants to continue telling you about his adventures in Hexagon. He's not going to write as much - unless he gets totally carried away - because he's on holiday and wants to go out and have some adventures if he may. But this is Blob Thing. He might get carried away anyway. It wouldn't be the first time!
Blob Thing had been enjoying walking round Hexagon Abbey. Everything was so pretty and he could almost sense the air resonating with the voices of the thousands who worshipped God there over a thousand years, lifting themselves to heaven in hymns and prayers. The air was rich with the memories of sacred moments, coexisting between each molecule, to be breathed in or seen or even heard by anyone open to the idea of bringing those memories into the sea of their own being.
Then Blob spotting something exciting. There, in the middle of the church, were some steep steps leading downwards. It looked like they led back in time into a forgotten past. And the air down there looked to be even richer and each particle bounced against each other particle and sang out of the lives and deaths and purposes of every person who had walked there in that past, or knelt before an altar and cried out to their God for mercy, or blessing, or in thankfulness for the harvest, or for their families, or perhaps even for surviving a Viking raid.
Blob almost had no choice. He was under a compulsion. He had to go down the steps and explore what lay below, to touch the walls and to seek even to become one with the past, to see those men of faith live lives of piety - and sometimes lives far from true piety. Blob Thing felt that he might be able to join them in those lives and to know by intuition a little of what it would have been like to worship among them.
Blob Thing descended the stairs and at the bottom he sat and breathed in the air, letting the past between the molecules enter him. He doesn't quite have words for the experience but he recommends it. While he's grateful to have the photos that follow he things that his person would have been much better off joining him in entering the past than she was in recording the present.
Blob opened his eyes again and before him saw an altar. It didn't look like it was the original one but Blob knew that the original altar had stood on the same spot, 1300 years before. That it was perhaps here that Saint Wilfred had brought holy relics of Saint Andrew. He knew that he was walking where Anglo-Saxon monks had walked before him and prayed. Blob could feel their presence lingering in the infinite spaces. He could almost hear and see them and was able to catch just a glimpse of a robed abbot raising the Host high at a Mass that had been celebrated in AD 698. Blob isn't saying how he can be so exact about the year.
Blob Thing wanted to become even closer to the past. He sat on the altar and let himself fall further into the background in hope that the distant days would become the now. Remembrance becoming a bringing forward of the past into the presence - just as the Catholics claim is happening each time there is remembrance in their Masses. The ancient abbot would be bringing the death and resurrection of Jesus into his present - if he believed in the story. Blob would be bringing the abbot's re-enactment of Jesus into his present.
Blob has lots of thoughts about the Jesus story. His person's room still contains quite a lot of Jesus books, even though she no longer goes to church or believes the things she used to. Blob Thing has read some of the books - or at least browsed them. There are some he is very impressed with and others which he looks at and wonders why his person ever believed the things she did. He is glad that she has been able to move on. The Jesus she believed in didn't really bring her happiness.
Blob walked further round the special crypt and touched the walls. He was able to sit in the walls too in a little hole between the bricks. It was then that he noticed something that was, to his mind, even more amazing than anything that had gone before. The walls. The walls. Oh, how good the walls felt. They told of an even more distant past. Because while the sacred altar room was Anglo-Saxon, the bricks that made up the crypt were Roman. Yes, Roman. Blob was so pleased and surprised that he happily flapped about it so much that he almost fell out of the hole he was sitting in.
Some of the stones even had ancient Roman inscriptions. One of them was over 1800 years old. It talked about "Emperor Lucius Septimus Severus Pius Pertinax and his sons the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius Pius Augustus and Publius Geta Caesar" but there were words missing and it didn't get as far as talking about the things they did. Blob has been researching it a bit and is over-excited to discover that some of the missing words are about a murdered emperor and how his name had to be erased. That's a big story.
Blob Thing notes that today we have politicians who spend a lot of time being nasty about each other rather than spending their time getting on and trying to do good things. He hears parliamentary debates quite often on the radio after his person falls asleep and every day people are very mean. Especially in the debates where the actual leader of the country is being asked questions. The last leader was mean. He said too many things that had no substance in order to insult good people. The present leader doesn't seem to be turning out any better. Blob believes that the leaders of the country need to stop being like that. Sometimes when he hears the debates he feels very ashamed that such things are allowed to continue.
Unfortunately Blob Thing can't do anything about it. He's not entitled to vote, let alone to join any political party or campaign as an independent candidate. He probably wouldn't want to do it anyway. He doesn't feel that his calling is to lead the country and he knows he probably wouldn't have the necessary gifts to manage it. He knows his calling is to be the best possible autistic little pink blob that he can. Others may lead. Blob must be true to himself. He will never become Prime Minister.
Our leaders may be mean people when they are leading. But at least the leaders in our country aren't going round murdering each other and trying to erase the names of party leaders they have murdered. Not literally anyway.
It was time to leave the crypt. Blob Thing looked back up the steep stairs, out of the half-light of the below and into the three-quarters light of the above. From the stairs he could see a beautiful stained glass window. Light shone into Hexagon Abbey from outside. Maybe that's a picture too. The abbey being a place of darkness filled with people who go there to seek the light when a much greater light is found outside the abbey. Perhaps it is a picture of people of faith missing the point, finding some light and holding true to it, while missing the Light. Blob will stop this paragraph right now. He's got wildly carried away with his spirituality too many times recently. He's determined not to do it again. Blob's person has to admit that for a small pink toy who is still less than seven months old, Blob has an amazingly developed spiritual outlook. It's more developed than her own!
Blob looked at the time. He knew that he and his person would have to go and catch the bus home very soon. That was disappointing. Even with his earlier worries it had been a fantastic day. And now it was over. Except it wasn't. There was one more adventure to be had before heading to the bus with lots of memories - and with some charity shop purchases too.
[1446 words. Damn! Blob wasn't planning on writing much at all today. He and his person have things to do and they need to get ready to go out now and seek out life in abundance this day.]
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