I don’t know if I should stop here – it was hard getting up as far as I did, hard to come backwards, and I can all too well imagine how it looks worse on the inevitbale return journey.

Driving to the Mendips the other day, I felt lost many times. Unbeknownst to me, my sat nav was set to 'cycle' and therefore avoiding all main roads, directing me down tiny country lanes and up no-through streets. I felt frustrated and anxious. I could feel my heart race and my chest get tight. I knew enough to know I was going wrong- I didn't know the area well enough to get me there without the now untrustworthy sat-nav.

I didn’t take my sabbath time today. The weather and traffic was horrible, I had no plans to meet anyone else in the Mendips, and the jobs were piling up at home. I stayed in the house and set to – created my parent’s gifts on photobox, sorted under the stairs, wrote the Christmas cards, emptied the dishwasher. As the Rock says, they all needed doing, and now they are done.

Swildon’s Hole to Sump 1. The Instigator of Chaos, his Colleague and I. The Colleague had never been underground before. He walked in borrowed kit with us across the fields.  At the entrance we checked the lamps and descended into the cave. I went first, turning back to show the Colleague where to place his foot on the way down. He is taller than me and reached the bottom of the entrance easily.

We also need play. Aquinas called it eutrapelia: ‘joyful rest’. We need to have fun, to explore, to create, to move, to tell stories, play music, dance and sing.  There is something of Sabbath in this -not just a cease from work, nor merely rest in order that we can work again but having a time and a space in which we can be and exist, outside of our meaningful toil.

I went caving with my ex, the Instigator of Chaos, the other day.  We visited Swildons', where he had led me that first caving trip of uni, a thousand years ago. Before we fell in love, before we fell out of love.

I was scared. I said it out loud to Guide. "I am scared. My heart is beating." I lay in the water, and put my face in to accustom myself to the cold. Pulled it out, shook water out of my eyes. Took a few deep breaths, held on to the guide rope and then body under water, belly down on the gravel, face down in the cold, pulled my way through.

I'm exploring Swildons' Upper Series with the Guide. We are leaving the cave via the Upper Oxbow and we enter into Butcombe chamber. This is a rift chamber, floor sloping up to our right into wall. The Swildons' book tells me it is 7m long by 1.5m wide and 12m high. There's no obvious way on. The rift narrows to a close ahead of me.

Caving also feels like a metaphor for my journey with God. That the bit I've done, that was the bit where I knew the route and I was surrounded by peers, all going along with me. I felt confident and certain. But this bit of the journey on now, I'm not so sure of the path.

Faith was once this electron ladder, invisible in the dark but for thin wire glinting in battery light .... I am older now

The Digger is off to Snake Pit this morning. They stopped digging it a few years back when it came to not much, and the need to survey it has been weighing on him ever since. But today is the day, and I volunteer to accompany him. The Digger warns me it's going to be a lot of sitting still and holding a tape measure, which after yesterday's experience in Eastwater I feel is about my level.

Saturday morning at the club and all is quiet. A caver is fixing her breakfast. The young caver is writing his trip up on the board. Where are you going? I ask. Can I come?It’s Eastwater. He …

I’m mid forties, perimenopausal, over weight, under fit, and recently recovered from over a decade of a chronic pain condition. I have work, children, a church family and a social life, a his…