"If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." How very true. What with power-cuts (2), telephone calls (innumerable), visitors and minor domestic emergencies, the last few days have not gone according to plan but there have been many good things, including time spent with old friends, a lovely quiet monastic Mass yesterday morning and a completely unexpected but utterly thrilling "owl concert" last night. Just how many were hooting at the moon, I couldn't decide, but it sounded like every owl in Oxfordshire. I wonder whether medieval saints like St Bruno, whose feast we keep today, took such things for granted or were delighted by them as we are. Chesterton once remarked that medieval writes didn't write much about green hills but sat on the green hills to write. We, by contrast, are losing many of the green hills, though we write about them often enough. Is that a manifestation of collective nostalgia or genuine ecological concern? It can be difficult to decide. Monasteries tend to be good about some aspects of conservation but eccentric, to say the least, about others e.g. I have known communities where driving miles to "recycle" a small quantity of paper (which ended up as landfill anyway) was almost an article of faith. As with our personal plans, so with our plans for the environment, we need to remember we are not in charge. That does not relieve us of responsibility, far from it, but it does give us another perspective; just as St Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, should make us think for a few minutes at least about the place of solitude and prayer in our lives. Our spiritual environment is just as vulnerable as our physical environment. (We have decided to postpone the podcast till the week-end as the diary is slightly overloaded this week.)