On the seafront at Fuengirola, Costa Del Sol there is a huge statute in honour of Our Lady, Queen of the Sea – La Virgen Reina de la Mare.

Whilst stood before it, alone and in silence after my morning run, I was briefly overcome by this sense of vastness – the enormity of my capacity to be in the world.

It felt like a new sensation, but increasingly I have sensed within me a growing ability to think and be expansive which I think is a very key component of being able to live a life in the present.

This vastness in my mind, stood in front of this public honour to the Blessed Virgin Mary, translated to the vastness of the physical world around me which took my thoughts skywards, perhaps with my prayers to the firmament – the heavens – deep outer space.

It made me think of how in the past, I had lived and experienced my life so narrowly, and this meant that any turbulence I experienced, was intense and destructive and de-stabilizing because all my problems were all encompassing, overwhelming and made me act aggressively to those around me.

There, before the statue, I visualized myself surrounded by my family, my friends, my colleagues, my neighbours, the general public, the welcoming Spanish people and how the prominence of these relationships change at any given moment.

It is not that these relationships are fixed immovably in the same place – for example, a kindly word from a colleague at work, not a close family member, can bring that person in to my life, real close,  or the Spanish waiters in their kindness and attentiveness can claim an intimacy in the exchange of humour and generosity.

I thought about my faith, this I compared to the vastness of space, and in front of that statue I was grateful for it, because it felt to me that the spiritual dimension to my life increased my expansive capacity and gave it that quality of being limitless, never ending, vast, and amazing.

Gracias a Dios

My next blog will be: Pan

William Defoe