Multitude Monday

It's been a long time since I've done a multitude Monday post -- a post where I add to my list of things I'm thankful for.

I don't, of course, only feel thankful when I write things on this list. But it's an exercise that does help me focus on gratitude. When I haven't done it for a while, and when I find myself thinking "ohhh...I don't feel like doing a gratitude post today" then I know it's time to do one.

Mondays have gotten very hard for us lately. Sundays have become far busier than I ever expected them to be: church, usually meetings (sometimes one, sometimes multiple) and somehow never enough rest. I often have to stay up late on Sunday evening, catching up with my class (they post on Saturdays) and prepping for the school week at home. And somehow we just never hit the ground running on Mondays anymore.

That would be fine with me -- I'm really getting into slowing down. But the sweet girl is having a hard time with that concept lately. Stillness, relaxation, spontaneity: they're not easy things for her. We do manage pockets of quiet in the day (hooray for paper dolls and classical music and good books) but her intense and often anxious nature can still easily obsess about doing things a certain way or in a certain format/order. So when Monday gets off on the wrong foot, as it often does lately, it can sometimes just stay on that wrong foot all day. Like a one-legged kangaroo.

I used to get uptight and frustrated in response (oh, okay, sometimes I still do) but nowadays I am better at trying to gently defuse the struggle and help her grapple with her feelings. Sometimes that means humor, sometimes it just means refusing to enter into the anxiousness. Sometimes it means calmly going on and doing whatever I'd planned for us to do and waiting for her to want to join in. Sometimes it means singing. Tonight she got uptight about reading the Bible: she's struggling her way through Genesis, but is determined to read it all on her own and all the way through, no matter how hard it feels and no matter that I've told her that it's really okay if she doesn't read it all right now (this was a goal she set for herself, and while I love that she did, it's so hard to see her struggle through something that I long to be a quiet joy...)

But you know what? God knows what he's doing in her heart. And maybe it's not my place to derail this particular struggle, beyond my gentle encouragement that she not get discouraged, that she takes it slow and easy. So I didn't fight it tonight. I didn't lecture her about how Scripture is supposed to be a joy (because really, is that going to help her heart?). I let her storm off in some petulant tears, and then I stayed at the table and read my Bible for a while. And then I sang some hymns. By the time she came back into the room in her pajamas, I was still singing hymns and I felt a whole lot better. And she looked at me with that loving "hey, my mommy really is a little bit crazy" look, and then she smiled. And I felt God smiling on us both, in all our raggedy, messy struggles.

So my thanksgivings...

115. I felt God smiling on us both, in all our raggedy, messy struggles.

116. Spring is truly coming! Crocuses are in bloom! Light is changing!

117. My precious husband and I took the trash out together this afternoon. Which means we got a little walk in the sunshine in the midst of an otherwise incredibly busy day when we hardly saw each other. And we laughed a lot over the fact that a walk to the trash could be such a blessing.

118. Time with friends yesterday eve, including some we'd not seen in a while. A chance to rejoice with them and their little one as he celebrated his third birthday.

119. Time with some of those same friends the evening before, at a local restaurant.

120. A beautiful CD of classical music from the library this weekend, which the sweet girl spent part of the afternoon dancing/skating to. Imaginary skating, but nonetheless beautiful...and great exercise!

121. Some Puccini on that CD that is breath-taking.

122. A good start to my Lenten reading plans. I'm not as far along in the Psalter as I planned to be at this stage, but I am finding a reading rhythm, and I am loving the reading.

123. Gifts from four families to help with our livelihood and ongoing expenses (as we face upcoming job transitions). God's amazing and faithful provision through his people, and through opportunities to work.

124. An opportunity to share the gospel with a child last week who truly had never heard the good news.

125. Safety for various people we know (or friends and family of friends) who could have been in harm's way during the earthquake/tsunami in Japan, but who are safe. Though many prayers and tears for all those harmed or lost in that terrible tragedy. I'm not thankful for the tragedy, but thankful for prayers, tears, outpouring of love, and God's faithfulness and love in the midst of suffering.

126. A creative plunge I'm taking. More on that soon.

Saturday Evening Prayer

Dear Lord,
Give me a few friends
who will love me for what I am,
and keep ever burning
before my vagrant steps
the kindly light of hope...
And though I come not within sight
of the castle of my dreams,
teach me to be thankful for life,
and for time's olden memories
that are good and sweet.
And may the evening's twilight
find me gentle still.

(Found on the faithandworship.com site while hunting down resources on St. Patrick and Celtic prayer for catechesis class. I'll have to see if I can't hunt down a specific attribution later. But ah, this one spoke to my heart this evening. Or my heart spoke it.)

The Start of the Lenten Journey

So many years Lent sneaks up on me. It usually begins sometime in February, and I hardly ever feel completely prepared to begin the journey. This year the start of Lent comes just about as late as it possibly can, given the late date of Easter. And I still found myself not prepared.

I'm not sure what my excuse is this year (or if I need one) but I do know I'm tired. I've spent some time in the past couple of days looking at Lenten resources online, reading some excellent blog posts and articles, and thinking about how I hoped to approach this Lenten season, individually and as a family.

And in the end, I realized something...even if I'm not at all "ready," even if I don't have neat lists, calendars, posters, devotional materials, etc., all lined up and ready to go, it doesn't really matter. Because if I'm open to his forgiveness and his hand, God can do the work he wants to do in my heart, in our hearts. And it will be quiet work, maybe even hidden work. And because it's God's work, it will be good.

So this year's Lenten plans are very simple. Instead of searching high and low for reading materials, I decided to continue the spiritual reading I'm already doing in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together. I've also set myself the goal of reading and praying through the entire Psalter between now and Easter. I may post some thoughts, from time to time -- so you can expect some Psalm-drenched reflections over the next few weeks.

And for our family? We brought out the Lenten candle (a round candle with space for a tea-light, the wax painted with a desert scene -- this is a candle given to me by a dear friend years ago, and we use it every year) and we're listening to songs from Michael Card's Starkindler. We'll read one of the daily Scripture readings each day as a family, most usually the gospel. I also brought out a fresh, brand-new notebook, its pages completely empty, for us to use as a family prayer and praise notebook. The sweet girl decorated the cover with the picture of a simple cross and the words "God Loves Us." We've agreed that during the Lenten season, any of us can write, draw, or paste any prayers or praises in the notebook that we feel called to put there. We started tonight by pasting in a picture of a refugee family in Haiti -- a photograph that moved me to tears yesterday, and moved the sweet girl and all of us to prayer.

I'm working on a small "giving up" area in my life, and the sweet girl has expressed an interest in learning more about fasting (we're starting by having her give up a snack time). We're also joining our church's usual almsgiving project by filling a baby bottle with coins for a local crisis pregnancy center.

And that's Lent this year. Simple and homemade but what I feel called to. Of course, God is always a God of surprises!

A blessed Ash Wednesday! Following St. Ambrose, may the Lord give you a heart to love and adore him, delight in him, follow and enjoy him.

Crocus Sighting

Twenty-two crocuses make my heart sing.
Their small purple cups set the table for spring.

EMP 3/8/11

This could get to be a habit. I posted a spring snippet last year when we saw our first crocuses. Nineteen of them that time, and spotted on March 11. We're three days earlier this year, and spotted three more flowers. Somehow that feels like a cheering sign!

"But God Meant It For Good"

And as for you, you meant evil against me,
but God meant it for good
in order to bring about this present result,
to preserve many people alive.
~Genesis 50:20

That's the verse we're focusing on in learning time this week. It was playing in the background while I was cleaning up the kitchen this morning, and as I sang it, I found myself pondering it anew.

We often think of this verse coming in the context of Joseph's story, and it does, of course, though not precisely where I tend to place it in my mind. I tend to think of Joseph saying this to his brothers during their initial reconciliation. But he doesn't -- it comes much later, after the death of their father Jacob. Because it turns out that Joseph's brothers, even after all that time and even after their brother forgave them, are still worried that he might yet move into vengeful mode and pay them back for all those years of suffering he endured in Egypt. Even after all the weeping, kissing and caretaking Joseph's done in the preceding years, they're afraid once their father is gone, all bets are off.

Isn't this just like us? Even forgiven -- even assured of loving care, protection, friendship, GRACE -- all the things we don't deserve, we still sometimes go running back to the shadows of our sin. We're sure those shadows are long, way longer than the grace that's been extending over us. We're sure somehow that those old sins are going to find us out one last time and give us one more good kick in the teeth.

Joseph's words, which are so wise, also give us a glimpse into how much his heart has grown. Not only does he point to God's sovereignty, a lesson he learned in the trenches (and a lesson that took many years to reach full fruition) but he shows how very different he is from the teenager who stood before his brothers telling them about his dreams. Let's face it, the young Joseph was a bit of a braggart. He didn't deserve to be thrown into a cistern and sold as a slave, no, but his brothers' frustration, annoyance and jealousy of him is at least somewhat understandable. "Hey, cool! One day you're all going to bow down to me!" is pretty much the reading I take away from the young Joseph's initial telling of the dream. Of course the fact that he dreamed true (a gift from God) is only part of the story -- he couldn't possibly have imagined why his brothers would be bowing before him, or how it was all part of God's tapestry to save his people.

But here, older and wiser Joseph, assuring his brothers once again of his pardon and forgiveness, teaching them about God's sovereignty over their collective story, shows a deep humility. "Am I in the place of God?" he asks. It's a telling question, not only because it shows that Joseph's understands vengeance, grace, forgiveness ultimately belong to the Lord, but because it shows that Joseph is no longer dreaming about how awesome it would be to stand in that place -- to be the one receiving homage and worship. He knows now that whatever place God puts him in, even one of tremendous responsibility and power, is derived -- a place given to him by God, and for deeper reasons than he himself might possibly imagine.

Poetry Friday: Da Vinci's Parachute

I was on a website the other day that had one of those calendars with days you can celebrate in March. I was chuckling over some of the funny things that people celebrate when I was brought up short by the notation for March 5. It read: "the invention of the parachute: Da Vinci."

Many, many years before what many people consider the actual invention of the parachute, Leonardo Da Vinci sketched his ideas for a parachute in one of his notebooks. And 11 years ago a British man actually dropped from a balloon, about 10,000 feet above the ground, using a parachute made from Da Vinci's design (and using materials, canvas and wood, that would have been available in Da Vinci's day). I remember reading about this, not long after it happened, in a scientific magazine I picked up at a library sale. You can read a brief news article about the event here. It includes the line that still captures my imagination: "It works, and everyone thought it wouldn't."

I bring this story up on Poetry Friday as a prelude to the poem I wrote not long after first reading that inspiring news story. I hope it captures your imagination too.

Da Vinci’s Parachute

They laughed when I took to the sky
buoyed by outmoded invention.
Sheltered by a five hundred year old idea
finally fleshed
in canvas and rope,
I jumped, caught the air,
and dangled
over undulating brown-grey hills.
I did not look down for long.
Upheld by ancient design,
my face turned upward in awe,
I held my breath.
For a moment I was the scribbled sketch
in the margin of Leonardo’s imaginings,
buffeted across the pages of time,
my body, my faith
sustained by the heavy sphinx-like tent
ballooned above.
The tent held true
and I drifted down
lines taut, then slack
in a dance of purposeful pulling.
And true is true.
Lines clear and pure.
Did you not think
the old ways would hold
in these new winds?
Watch me fall
and think again.


~EMP (all rights reserved)

Today's poetry roundup can be found at The Small Nouns.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

It's the birthday of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss, 1904-1991). Our family loves Dr. Seuss books and I've enjoyed reviewing a number of them over the years. So in honor of the day, I thought I'd post a few links.

One of our very favorites is There's a Wocket in my Pocket. When the sweet girl was little, she once informed me, after changing into her pajamas, that the wocket was now in the clothes hamper!

Dr. Seuss also wrote one of the most unique ABC books ever. And even the tried and true bedtime book gets his highly creative touch in The Sleep Book.

I love the fact that Dr. Seuss can use his imagination to pay tribute to...imagination! Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! is one of my very favorite Seuss titles.

And I still retain a great fondness for Hop on Pop, one of the first books our daughter ever read on her own when she was nearing the grand age of five. I have days when I really miss our sojourn in three-letter word land.

Whom Do We Serve?

"Our king is Jesus, not time; we serve him, not it."

This from our friend Travis, who serves along with his family as a missionary/teacher in Uganda.

Our family so needed to hear this yesterday. I think we probably need to hear it every day!

Passing it along, in case you need to hear it too...

Poetry Friday: "O Frabjous Day!"

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

My husband, an amateur actor, loves to recite these lines (and all the rest of them) from Lewis Carroll's remarkable poem "Jabberwocky." People who only know my husband's everyday persona -- gentle, shy -- are often astounded into silence when they first get a glimpse of his confident, humorous acting persona. I've long since reconciled the two parts of his personality, loving them both, but I still delight in seeing jaws drop when my husband moves into actor mode. It's one reason I enjoy this poem so much.

And now here's another...the other day I came across this delightful ASL version of the poem. "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" I must confess I have never heard of ASL poetry until recently, and I am completely fascinated. It seems to combine all sorts of skills: poetry making, translation, performance art.

Today's poetry roundup is at Read Write Believe.

Language Arts Laughter

Yesterday we did a language arts lesson about punctuating direct quotations. One of the optional activities involved reading pairs of sentences that have the same words, but different punctuation -- the point being that punctuation matters to the meaning of the sentence.

Although she punctuates well, apparently this had never fully occurred to the sweet girl -- that one little comma or a pair of quotation marks can make all the difference in how one reads or understands a sentence. She thought it was hilarious!

The children cried today.
The children cried, "Today!"

I thought she was going to fall off the couch she laughed so hard.

Her favorite pair, however, were these two sentences, which I read with great flair and drama:

The duke declared I am now the king!
The duke declared, "I am now the king!"

She thought it was hysterical that I was reading those words. She loves to play with literal meanings. What a silly duke, she teased me, to declare *me* the king -- he should have noticed I was a girl and therefore declared me a queen.

She told her dad all about the lesson last night. And then she got out a piece of paper and wrote with a flourish:

Dear Duke
I think somebody should teach you how to puckcheate.
Love S

Reminding me, of course, that we need to tackle the spelling of punctuate. And where to put commas when writing letters. But mostly making me laugh.

I think we have "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" in our future.

The Power of Stories

I love reading stories about stories. That is, I love reading stories about the way stories affect people's lives, both as readers and writers.

I stumbled upon two of those I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday. I recognized my reader/writer self in both.

The first was in yesterday's entry from Anita Silvey's Children's Book-a-Day Almanac. If you haven't checked that website out yet, you're in for a treat.

Yesterday's entry was, fittingly, about a children's biography of Lincoln. It's one I haven't read yet but now plan to. What struck me about her description of the book was this piece of an anecdote about her first read-through of the book:

The first time I read this book, I was flying to Washington, D.C., to give a speech. When I came to the end, I was sobbing, and the attendant came to me and said, “Miss, is anything wrong?” “Oh yes,” I blurted out, "Lincoln has been shot!”

Yes! The best stories pull us into their narrative with that sense of immediacy. It doesn't matter how old a grief is, we experience it anew as we walk through it again. It's one reason why I often feel bereft when I've finished a truly great biography, because I've just spent a season in the company of someone I've come to love and admire (or understand more deeply) and usually I've walked through their death toward the end of the tale. Sometimes the juxtaposition of living through a life and death, so close together, can leave you a bit breathless. Or in tears on an airplane.

Then there was this bit from a book I'm reading about the life and work of Katherine Paterson. I stumbled upon it when looking for other books by Gary Schmidt; I think it might be his first book and might even have started life as a dissertation. I confess I am becoming a huge fan of Gary Schmidt's (I'll save that for another post) and of course I've been a great enthusiast about Kat Paterson's work since I was twenty. So the combination of author/subject was too good to pass up.

In the introductory essay, Schmidt is exploring Paterson's childhood, and how she was deeply affected by her family's many moves. Her parents were missionaries in China during a time of great tumult there, and they kept yo-yo'ing back and forth between the States and China. Paterson had been born in China and spent her first five years there, and was in many ways more deeply at home in Chinese culture than American culture. When they moved to Virginia in 1937, not long before she began school, she recalled how much she hated it and how terribly displaced she felt.

"When I was in the first grade I didn't get any valentines. I don't think I was disliked. I was totally overlooked," he quotes Paterson as saying. And then Schmidt goes on to say "This incident, too, was to become part of the gathering of stories: 'My mother grieved over this event until her death,' (he quotes Paterson again) "asking me once why I didn't write a story about the time I didn't get any valentines. 'But mother,' I said, 'all my stories are about the time I didn't get any valentines.'"

I had a lump in my throat at the end of that line. It not only rings so deeply true to the best of Katherine Paterson's work (she writes more eloquently of displacement and childhood longing than almost anyone I know) but it rings true to my writer's heart. I suspect there are certain formative moments in most of our childhoods, some of them joyous and some sad and lonely, which we are always writing "out of" no matter what else we're writing. We don't have to describe an actual event or memory to have that moment at the back of what we're doing in a story.

I'd like to spend more time with the Paterson book (and Schmidt) in another post. And maybe more time thinking through what sorts of moments are the formative fountains of my own stories. I'll bet you have some of those moments too.

Notes from a Reading Life: Alcuin of York

So....I'm tired. You can probably tell by the paucity of my posts here lately. Or maybe you are imagining me living a life of leisure, eating bon-bons and reading mystery novels. (Not! But doesn't that sound nice?)

In the midst of a crazy-busy life, I am doing a lot of reading. Some of it by necessity, since I'm assisting this term in three sections of a course in Medieval and Reformation Church History. The prof. I'm assisting sometimes piles on the primary source readings for our students, giving them the option to choose which sources they read according to what ressourcement lens they're working with (theology, worship or catechesis). But since I'm supposed to be responding to papers across all levels in the online section, I'm trying (note I said trying) to keep up with reading across all three tracks.

Since I often don't have time until late in the evening to tackle this reading, sometimes it feels like physical plowing. Read a few pages, get up and stretch and try to wake up. Read a few more pages, pop a hershey's kiss after unwrapping it from is pink foil blanket (ha! see, you were right...I *am* eating bon-bons). Listen to some lecture bits, record a few quiz grades, check in on facebook. Then back to the primary source readings, where I plow further ahead, trying to keep those furrows straight (that would be the furrows on my brow, as I try to exercise a very tired brain that's spent the day helping my third grader parse sentences, or figuring out what to cook for dinner, or answering missions committee related email, or mostly likely all three things at once...)

So though I am reading great quantities, I don't often have time for huge a-ha moments. I'm more in scribble-like-crazy-in-the-margins mode, or put-a-really-big- asterisk-next-to-this-important-thought and hope I'll be able to find it again mode.

So it's lovely when something I'm reading stops me in my tracks. Such was the case with Alcuin of York this evening.

Alcuin lived mostly in the eighth century (730 -804). He was Northumbrian by birth, influenced by the world of Bede, but he spent a lot of his life on the continent, where he became an important teacher/administrator/liturgist/writer in the court of Charlemagne. I could have gone on listing things he did, you get the drift. This was an important man whose thinking, writing, praying and teaching lay a lot of the groundwork for later medieval thought and practice.

He was also a poet. Do you know how blessed and happy it made my right-brain to happen upon his poetry in the midst of a long night of left-brain activity? Especially when I came across lines like these:

"Teach us faith, awaken hope, and fill us with love.
Give me the purity that comes from you and cannot come from me,
That I make forsake earth and seek heaven.
My soft plumage is weak without your help:
Grant me the wings of faith that I may fly upwards to you:
For I confess faith in you, through you and from you.

I confess that you are one in substance and Trinity in persons:
You are always the same, alive and all comprehending.
I confess the three in one and the one in three --
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: O blessed Trinity.
You are God, the Lord, and the Paraclete.
You are love, grace and communion:
For God is love, Christ is grace, and the Holy Spirit is communion:
Begetter, begotten and regenerator: O blessed Trinity.

The true Light, true Light from Light, and the Illuminator:
The fountain, the river and the refreshing stream:
All things are from one, through one and in one: O blessed Trinity."


I confess my heart soared (on wings of faith!) when I read these words. My tired eyes snapped open, my heart stood to attention and saluted. I fell into the words like someone who did indeed need to step into a refreshing stream. O Lord, I so need the language of poetry and prayer.

This is why -- and I say it as I've said it to students of all ages and stages over the years -- this is why it's so important that we spend time reading for formation and not just information. This is why we need the language of prayer and poetry and not just analytical prose (as much as I can delight in well-written history, biography, theology). Once in a while, we need to step out of words (even really good ones) that are written *about* and step into words that are *addressed to* the Word. We need to step out of mere thinking and into full-bodied, full-brained, full-hearted worship.

Neck-Skinny

I think we've got a new word for "very loved" at our house. The sweet girl coined it yesterday. It's "neck-skinny."

She's been playing a lot lately with some stuffed dog toys, including one we found last year at a church sale with some other used stuffed toys. It's an adorable dog, light brown with a red collar and floppy ears. Its fur is slightly worn in that loved way only an old stuffed animal can be. And its neck, underneath the red collar, is extra floppy -- mostly because it looks as though he once spent a lot of time getting his neck squeezed.

The sweet girl hugged him fondly yesterday. "He's all neck-skinny," she told me. "You know, really loved so really squeezed hard around the neck."

The Valentine Mailbox

In a little while, my dear husband will be home for lunch, and our family will commence to open the valentine mailbox.

Yes: THE Valentine Mailbox. Your family may have one -- and I'm sure it's a lovely one -- but our family has THE mailbox.

It's the one my dad made for my family when I was a little girl. His printing company was doing some sort of advertisement for the post office so the front looks like the front of an actual mailbox from my childhood (complete with "zippy" the little zip code guy...remember him?). The box itself is an old flat kodak film box, reinforced with tape. It opens for easy mail distribution, but Dad also put a slit in the front so you can slide the cards in.

When the sweet girl was tiny, my folks passed the mailbox on to us. We have loved it and every year fill it with homemade Valentines (and sometimes a few store-bought, but those aren't the main attraction) to give to each other. This year the sweet girl begged to get it out a couple of weeks early, so she's been stuffing it for a while. It's going to be fun to see all the homemade love that spills out.

I've been so swamped that I didn't have a chance to make my beloved's card until a little while ago. While the sweet girl moaned through some math ("products again!? why do I have to do products?") I gathered scissors, glue stick, colorful scraps of paper, a magazine, a computer graphic I liked, and a velveteen bag of crayon rocks. It's amazing what simple things you can use to say I love you.

Happy Land

At the end of this hard week, how wonderful was it to open up a musical treasure from the library hold shelf? This morning we played songs from Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was entranced as these wonderful songs (all of them referenced in the Little House books) rolled out of the player, some of them sounding just like I imagined them sounding when played by Pa Ingalls. A few I know from other sources, but many I only know because of "hearing" Pa play and sing them in the books.

Dancing in the kitchen to "Arkansas Traveler" with my husband at lunchtime, inventing harmonies for the "Sweet By and By" while listening with the sweet girl this morning...I just really needed this today. Beautiful fiddle music, beautiful bright bits of Americana.

You can see the disc I'm talking about here.

And oh, I needed the old-time hymns especially. Doesn't this lyric make your heart soar?

To our bountiful Father above, we will offer the tribute of praise;
For the glorious gift of His Love, and the blessings that hallow our days.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

(Joseph Philbrick Webster - tune; Sanford Fillmore Bennett - words)

Long Overdue Post...in All Sorts of Ways

I didn't mean to fall off the face of the blogging world. It's just been a challenging and busy couple of weeks here at semester's beginning. Lots going on work-wise, but even more going on in our family and in my struggling heart. More about some of that later.

I realized today I was long overdue to write a blog post, and even more overdue to write a gratitude post. It's a multitude Monday! Given the levels of stress I've been experiencing (and surrendering over and over) in recent days, I know the "counting blessings" exercise is more important than ever. So here goes...

107. We weathered January. And we did "weather" it in almost every sense of the word!

108. Some recent email exchanges, cards and notes with/from farflung friends. These have been a bigger source of encouragement than probably most of them know.

109. Eric Metaxas' wonderful biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Speaking of overdue posts...I am now many days overdue wanting to write about this deeply moving book.

110. My precious husband. As we go through hard times together, I am daily reminded of how much I love him...and all the many reasons why.

111. Music that's good for the weary soul. Desplat's Deathly Hallows score; Mahler's 7th; Jeff Johnson's Frio Suite; Patsy Cline.

112. Literary birthdays, which help add fun and celebration to ordinary days. Today we get both Laura Ingalls Wilder and Charles Dickens!

113. The continued sustaining of my dad's health.

114. My niece's beautiful January wedding...and the wonder of being able to see so photos so quickly after (one of those Facebook blessings).

I can't seem to find the Multitude Monday logo, but I did find this old photo I took a few years ago..and one that seems appropriate for counting blessings. Yes, that's the sweet girl's little hand in the sunlight - I remember those snowmen pajamas! I think she must have been around four or five when I took this picture.

Favorite Books of 2010

I determined to post my list of favorite books earlier this year -- last year I didn’t get the post up until February 1! If last year was “the year of the re-read,” this was probably best described as “the year of the biography” because I read some good ones.

I think 2010 was one of the spottiest reading years I’ve had in ages. It wasn’t that I didn’t read a lot – I always do – but 2010 truly was the busiest year I can ever remember in my entire life (even including 5th grade which, at the wise old age of ten, I thought I’d never top). All humor aside, I spent a lot of the past year feeling stretched and exhausted. Reading was a real refuge, but somehow the tiredness lurking in the background made it more challenging than usual to see patterns in my reading or to note reading trails. I have a feeling this list may feel more fragmented than usual, but here goes. Links are to my reviews on Epinions.

Favorite History Book of the Year: Introducing Early Christianity by Laurie Guy. Rarely indeed do I choose a text book I’ve taught from as a favorite on my personal reading list, but this book was such a delight both to read and to see students engage. Helpful, readable, basic but never boring. Excellent grounding for any study of patristic history and theology.

Favorite Children’s Biography of the Year: Wilma Unlimited: How Wilma Rudolph Became the World’s Fastest Runner by Kathleen Krull, illustrations by David Diaz. I don’t think the sweet girl has ever been more inspired by a biography.

Favorite Biography of the Year: This is a hard call, only because I read several good ones, including biographies of two of my favorite writers, Alcott and Austen. But I’m going with Eric Metaxas’ Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. Yes, I know I’m behind…this was the year Metaxas brought out his huge book on Bonhoeffer (which I’m currently reading) but I just now got around to his book on Wilberforce, and oh I’m glad I did.

Picture Book Author of the Year: Mo Willems. Hands down. Though my eight year old is finally starting to move away from total devotion to picture books (weep, weep) our whole family fell in love with Mo, especially his Pigeon books and especially Knuffle Bunny.

Best Devotional Book: I really didn’t read one straight through this year (and think I need to remedy that in 2011). Many blogs functioned as devotional material for me, however, and I did read often from A Year With C.S. Lewis, a daybook of quotations mostly from Lewis’ non-fiction.

Best Novel I Read This Year: Emma, by Jane Austen. Which is cheating, because it’s a re-read. I will cheat even further and say, as a close runner-up, The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong, which is actually a mid-grade novel (and I have a separate category for that below...where I'll choose something else because it's really a tie between Wheel and that one). And hmmm...how did I miss reviewing either of these favorite novels this year?

Best Novel I Re-Read This Year: So as not to bore you by saying Emma again, I’ll go with Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

Favorite Book of Literary Analysis/Criticism: Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James. I’m stretching a little here too, as this wasn’t a deeply analytical book. But James did a marvelous job of unpacking the history of the detective writing genre and thoughtfully considering its present and possible future.

Best “pop culture” book: no award this year.

Favorite “new to me” children’s book, mid-grade reader (8-12 year olds): A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park.

Favorite “new to me” young adult book (12-15 year olds): The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope.

Best Children’s Book I Re-Read This Year: I honestly can’t choose. We’re doing so many wonderful (and long beloved) favorites with the sweet girl during family read-aloud time. The Long Winter and The Magician’s Nephew were the best re-reads of the year for me -- books I love that read aloud so beautifully. I also thoroughly enjoyed re-reading The Great Gilly Hopkins (on my own) and reviewing it for banned books week.

Classic Book I Can’t Believe I’d Never Read Before Now: On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius

Favorite “new to me” picture book: Knuffle Bunny Free by Mo Willems. (As Larry the Cucumber might say: “I laughed. I cried. It moved me, Bob.”)

Book I Wish I Hadn’t Wasted My Time Reading: None really, but I do wish I’d found some other mystery writers in the summer besides Katherine Hall Page. I like her work, but it feels quite uneven.

Book I Should Have Finished (and still plan to): Hmm…I’m sure there are a lot of unfinished books in my piles, but I can’t think of one I’m particularly stuck in.

The Book That Surprised Me The Most: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

The Book That Made Me Laugh the Most: Oh my goodness, I didn’t read anything really funny! Must remedy that this year. (I almost listed the graphic novel version of Pride and Prejudice, but those laughs were mostly unintentional, so I don’t think I’ll count it.)

Book That Challenged Me the Most: Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas

Favorite “new to me” mystery writer: G.M. Malliet.

Favorite “new to me” fantasy writer: N.D. Wilson

Favorite “new to me” Spiritual Resource or Bible for Children: none this year, as we used a lot of resources we already knew and loved. But we’re already using new devotional resources in 2011 (and the sweet girl has a new Bible this year as well) so I suspect this category will be interesting to reflect on next year.

Favorite Book of Theological Reflections: Athanasius’ On the Incarnation

Favorite Book of Church History Reflections: The Changing Shape of Church History by Justo Gonzalez

Favorite Poetry: The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins

Poetry Friday: Cynthia in the Snow

In honor of the beautiful snowfall we had yesterday, and the season in general, I thought I'd share Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "Cynthia in the Snow." I have many favorite snowy poems, but this pops into my head frequently when I'm looking at a snowy city street, especially the first musical line. "Sushes" is such a perfect word to capture that sense of blanketed quiet. The whole poem has that sense of being "just right."

Cynthia in the Snow

It SUSHES.
It hushes
The loudness in the road.
It flitter-twitters,
And laughs away from me.
It laughs a lovely whiteness,
And whitely whirs away,
To be
Some otherwhere,
Still white as milk or shirts.
So beautiful it hurts.

~Gwendolyn Brooks


Happy Poetry Friday! The roundup today is at A Teaching Life.

Stephen Foster and the Rare Library Fail

My gratitude for public libraries is immense. I'm particularly grateful that we live within several miles of a public library that ties into the Carnegie library system, which has to be one of the best in the country. I love that I can find most (not all, mind you, but most) of the resources and books I go looking for, put a request through via computer, and within several days (or a little longer depending on popularity) have that resource hit the shelf.

I honestly don't know how anyone homeschooling (on a nonexistent budget or elsewise) gets along without libraries. We use the library for everything we study, from science to history to art and music, and lots more besides. One thing I love about exploring the library system is that I often turn up resources I never knew existed. We've fallen in love with many a book or recording that I just happened to stumble upon while looking for something else.

I've gotten so used to that serendipity and to the library's impeccable service that I'm astonished when a little glitch, or a little human error, creeps into the system. Take today, for example...

Friday is art and music day, and I was excited to be introducing the sweet girl to composer Stephen Foster today. He not only wrote some of the most memorable American folksongs, he's from our area. And (as a cherry on the sundae topping) while scrolling for library resources I'd found a version of his "O Susanna!" on the CD The Arkansas Traveler by a group called Pa's Fiddle Band.

Yes, that Pa. And yes, that Fiddle. This group apparently has three CDs out, all recordings of music from Laura Ingalls Wilder's wonderful Little House series. Given the sweet girl's love of all things Wilder right now, and the fact that we just last night finished the last page of These Happy Golden Years ("THAT was the BEST BOOK EVER" she pronounced, with her hand over her heart) I was really excited to introduce Foster by way of this CD. In fact, I gave it a really big build up (not something I usually do) before I opened the case with a flourish and...

discovered that the CD inside the case was a copy of Puccini's La Boheme.

After the requisite weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, we settled down to enjoy some other Foster music I had happily picked up. (It's amazing to listen to his work and to realize how many of these melodies have seeped into your consciousness over the years.) I'll return the CD to our library this week, so they can send it back to the lending library that provided it, hopefully with a note for them to check their Puccini. I'm hoping it's a case of simple mix-up and we can still check out Pa's Fiddle Band.

Meanwhile, I'll keep being grateful that mistakes like that are rare, and try not to take our library system for granted!

The Art of Biography, the Art of the Quote

A few days ago I started reading Eric Metaxas' biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's been on my reading list for months, but I purposefully held off until January because I knew I would need to a book like this to fall into during the hardest, cold days of winter.

And I knew I would "fall into" this book. At least I would if it was anything like my experience with Metaxas' other well-known biography of William Wilberforce, a book I almost literally couldn't put down.

Good biographies, the kind that make you feel as though you've been in the subject's company, are some of my favorite reads. Metaxas seems to have mastered the art of telling a life in a way that's colorful, compelling and thoughtful. As I read Bonhoeffer, I keep trying to put my finger on what exactly makes up the art of good biography. I'm still working that out in my mind. But one thing that struck me yesterday was that a masterful biographer knows the value and artistry of a good quote.

A "good quote" can have different types of qualities (or a mixture): one that shows depth of research, one that feels particularly well-placed within the narrative, one that reveals something you never knew or stopped to consider about the subject, or one that looks small and commonplace on the surface but in consideration of the whole of the subject's life, offers a poignant phrase or line that feels weighted with more meaning that its original intentions.

That last jumped out at me yesterday as I was reading about the Bonhoeffer family's great love of music, and how the young Bonhoeffer had a real genius for music. Metaxas cited a quote from Dietrich's twin sister Sabine to make note that he was an "especially sensitive and generous" accompanist. And then he quoted Dietrich's future sister-in-law:

"While we were playing, Dietrich at the piano kept us all in order. I do not remember a moment when he did not know where each of us was. He never just played his own part: from the beginning he heard the whole of it. If the cello took a long time tuning beforehand, or between movements, he sank his head and didn't betray the slightest impatience. He was courteous by nature."

"He never just played his own part: from the beginning he heard the whole of it." A line that makes beautiful sense in context -- can't you just picture the young blond-haired man at the piano, keeping time, patiently observing and waiting for the others, helping them all to pull their music making into coherence and beauty? The whole vignette wonderfully captures something essential about Bonhoeffer's personality, something people never forgot. But that one line also seems to ring with deeper resonance when you consider Bonhoeffer's life as a whole.

And maybe that vignette offers a good analogy for what a biographer, at his best, does: he listens to snippets of music, played at or sung about a person's life, from very different places and voices. And he brings them all together into a harmonious whole that helps you to not only appreciate the snippets, but the entire composition of someone's life.

January Supplemental Reading for Homeschool

Supplemental reading/resources we've used so far this month:

Language Arts

If You Were Onomatopoeia
by Trisha Speed Shaskan

A fun picture book introducing the poetic concept of onomatopoeia. We also read Gwendolyn Brooks' wonderful poem "Cynthia in the Snow."

History

Can't You Make Them Behave, King George?
by Jean Fritz

Longer picture book filled with lots of fun details about the utterly eccentric King George. Good background for American Revolution studies.

Betsy Ross and the Silver Thimble
by Stephanie Green

Early Reader (level 2) read independently by S. Part of the "Childhood of Famous Americans" series.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day
by Reagan Miller

A serviceable book about MLK and how we came to honor his memory with a federal holiday. We usually read a book about King on his day, and this year I had forgotten to put one on hold, so I had to take what I could get. I continue to recommend the wonderful book My Brother Martin by Christine King Farris.

Much better than the MLK book we read this year were the excerpts I read aloud to the sweet girl from the "I Have a Dream" speech. A really hard speech to read without tears.

Fine Arts

How Artists See the Weather
by Colleen Carroll

A really nice book to encourage picture study. Review forthcoming. We'll do more from this series.

We've also been inspired by Jon J. Muth's wonderful illustrations in City Dog, Country Frog (written by Mo Willems). I hope to post some pictures soon of our Muth-inspired art.

Math

Reviewing with Mathtacular 2 (DVD arrived last week...yay!)

S. has also been enjoying some time with "100 Ways to Count to 100." She really digs that she "gets" the pages that use division now.

Science

What's the Matter in Mr. Whisker's Room?
by Michael Elsohn Ross
illustrated by Paul Meisel

A fun picture book in which a creative teacher, Mr. Whiskers (a bit less zany than Ms. Frizzle!) sets up science stations in his early elementary classroom for the kids to explore. He presents several "big ideas" about matter, based on their questions and findings.


(Edited at end of month to add other resources)

Haiti is on my Heart

It's been a year since the earthquake in Haiti.

I was remembering this post I did last year, all my whirling thoughts as I attempted both to process the tragedy and share about it with my little girl.

For a long time -- months, in fact -- we prayed nightly for Haiti. As other countries went through earthquakes and hurricanes, we added them to our nightly litany. For a long time, the sweet girl would not let us forget to pray for the people of these countries, and especially for Haiti.

But time marched on, and somehow...we forgot. All of us. We still prayed for Haiti sometimes. We still talked about the earthquake sometimes, especially when we read reports from places like Compassion as they reflected on rebuilding and recovery. But we did not pray faithfully each night.

And now a year has gone by and I'm reading and thinking and pondering again. The sweet girl and I spent a long time at dinner talking about Haiti and being grateful for our blessings.

Haiti is on our hearts again, and I'm praying this time we won't let it slip back out so easily.

Of all I've read in the past couple of days, this article is perhaps the one that has moved me most deeply. If you have a chance, read it prayerfully: "A Strange Land Where the Poor Are Rich and the Suffering Sing."

Lord have mercy on the people of Haiti. And Lord, do not let us forget.

Favorite Picture Books of 2010 (and Newbery & Caldecott Winners!)

ETA: Well, this is embarrassing! Somewhere I got the date wrong...and thought that the Newbery and Caldecott awards were being given *next* week. So this post I just put up this morning was partly my speculation over what might win the Caldecott this year. I just realized, however, the awards are out today. I've not peeked yet, but am off to do so now...

Well, shows what I know! Congratulations to the Caldecott Medal winner for 2011: A Sick Day for Amos McGee illustrated by Erin S. Stead, and to the 2011 Newbery winner: Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool.

And please kindly disregard my belated speculation and just read this post in its main spirit: a short list of some of our family's favorite picture books published in 2010. Links are to my longer reviews on Epinions.

~All Things Bright and Beautiful illustrated by Ashley Bryan

Vibrant colors and beautiful paper collage accompany the old hymn text by Cecil F. Alexander. This one came out in early 2010, but we remember it well (though it's been months since we've had it out of the library). We recently thought of it again and are hoping to do some Bryan inspired collage art soon.

~City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems, illustrated by Jon J. Muth

One of our favorite picture book author-artists, Mo Willems, handles the writing in this one, while the delicate water color illustrations are done by the wonderful Jon J. Muth. A winning combination, and a poignant book about friendship.

~A Nest for Celeste by Henry Cole

A wonderful look into the life and works of John James Audubon. We loved using this as a companion for our Audubon studies (and we loved Audubon so much that we're probably going back to him this spring, when the birds arrive back.)

I'm cheating just a tiny bit with the inclusion of this book. It's actually a mid-grade novel, but the plethora of beautiful pencil sketches do so much to help tell the story. So much so that I wonder if it will not get some attention from the Caldecott committee despite the fact that they tend to favor standard picture books. Hugo Cabret showed they can go this route, so we'll see.

~Mirror, Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse by Marilyn Singer, illustrated by Josee Masse

An amazing book...creative poetry (in the "reverso" form created by Singer) and gorgeous pictures that play with symmetry and shared borders and shapes. I've been seeing a lot of people talk about this book lately...we fell in love with it early in the fall.

~Knuffle Bunny Free by Mo Willems

Can Willems be given a Caldecott Medal for a series, a la Peter Jackson's Oscar for the third Lord of the Rings film? He's already taken home Caldecott honors for Knuffle Bunny and Knuffle Bunny Too. This third and final installment is an absolutely amazing, age-appropriate ending to these books. We've watched Trixie grow and change from toddler to preschooler and now elementary aged girl, her responses so perfectly authentic every time, her passion, love and excitement for life (and for Knuffle Bunny) shining through every page. Kudos to Willems for using the picture book format to really tell an ongoing story with a great depth of character development in our heroine. This last book (which literally made me both laugh and cry) was so perfect for our eight year old right now. It celebrates growing up, giving deep, and how small acts of measured, loving kindness can be truly courageous.

We loved a lot of picture books this year, but these were some of our very favorites published in 2010.

Reader Girl in January

The sweet girl announced at breakfast this morning: "Hot chocolate, warm cinnamon toast, and The Long Winter. Those are my goals for today."

Good, attainable goals. And a reader girl after my own heart.

Happy Epiphany!

A Patchwork Post on the Eleventh Day of Christmas

Our wise men are still journeying. Every year the sweet girl sets out the wise men and their camels a good ways away from the creche, on the other side of the living room. She moves them slowly across the room, leaving them to fend for themselves while we're out of town -- I think this year they got left on the bookcase, around the midway point in their travels. This year she was so excited when we did our family present opening on January 1st (8th day of Christmas) that she almost brought them to the stable. Then it dawned on her that they weren't supposed to arrive until Epiphany. She quickly faced them toward the wall, where it looks like they've taken a slightly wrong turn and are about to crash into the drama shelves of yet another bookcase. "I made them get a little lost," she informs us. "I don't want them to get there too early!"

*******

It was a very ESV Christmas. D. and I had decided to get the sweet girl a new Bible; we chose the "Seek and Find" Bible which has the entire ESV (English Standard Version) translation plus some nice added features (Bible story retellings, book introductions, sidebars with some information on Biblical figures and times -- essentially an ESV study Bible for the mid-grade crowd). What I didn't know was that my dear husband had also gotten me an ESV study Bible, something I am really delighted to have. We moved over to the ESV a few years ago for all our family Bible reading, and D. and I have used the one copy we owned till it's almost in tatters. Having this beautifully fresh copy, complete with copious study notes, is such a blessing. It's hefty, which doesn't make it ideal for, say, trekking off for a quiet time in the woods (oh...wouldn't that be nice?) but for reading and studying at home, it's great.

*******

It was a bookish Christmas in other respects. We've had some lean years when we haven't been able to get each other much of anything, including books (which used to be a Christmas gift staple). This year was still lean (which is fine, and our new normal) but some precious gifts from friends and family, and a gift certificate I won for a review I wrote for a website all came in handy on the book front. I got the two cookbooks I've been wanting for ages (Recipes from the Root Cellar and Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day) plus Looking for the King, the Inkling novel by David C. Downing. I was also blessed by a few other books that have been on my wish-list, including Karen Edmisten's Through the Year With Mary. D. found Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals under the tree, and the sweet girl got several books she'd been hoping for, including These Happy Golden Years, Thee Hannah, and The Wheel on the School (the last two thanks to my sister) along with some picture books.

*******

We continued our yearly tradition of reading Madeleine L'Engle's The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas on our way to Virginia. We may have a new book tradition at Christmas from now on too: this year for the first time we read The Trees Kneel at Christmas by Maud Hart Lovelace. It's up there with other Christmas-time favorites like The Light at Tern Rock. We were hoping to try A Christmas Carol as a family this year (even got the Jim Dale audio from the library) but had forgotten that the CD player in the car has gone caput. Maybe next year, if we start early and do it as a read-aloud in the evenings in December or listen to it here at home.

********

We saw the new Narnia film in the theater the day after Christmas. I'm still wrestling with a review: so much to enjoy (and I think Michael Apted's direction lends much more confidence and coherence to the storytelling) and yet it still just falls flat in certain places. They still have not gotten Aslan right, and never will. But laying that aside (a huge thing to lay aside) I still thought this was the best of the three films overall. And I'd enjoy seeing Will Poulter tackle the role of Eustace again in The Silver Chair -- he's a fine young actor. Voyage of the Dawn Treader is worth seeing for his performance.

********

Christmas day itself was a strange mixture of displacement and stress for all sorts of reasons. The trip seems to get harder every year. It helped to remind myself of how displaced Mary and Joseph must have felt as they made their way into Bethlehem. It also helps to keep things in perspective when I remember that there are many people in our world who are that displaced every day.

*******

We were blessed to spend a day with my parents: an amazing day, simply because it was yet one more Christmas with my dad, something I was not at all sure we'd ever have again when he went into the hospital last spring. He and mom were feeling extra grateful for this Christmas too. Dad and I spent some fun time just hanging out and watching stuff on the MLB network. Baseball and Dad...doesn't get much better than that!

We were also blessed to have some extra time to spend with my mom-in-law, who is under a great deal of stress right now as as a caregiver for her husband who has alzheimer's. His confusion has grown much worse, but his essential sweetness often shines through, which makes seeing this happen to him both easier and harder, if that makes sense.

**********

Not long after we got home, we received the news that the home of my husband's late grandparents (his mom and aunt's parents) had been demolished. We knew this was a possibility, but no one realized how soon it might happen -- so we didn't even drive by the house while we were in the area. We said our good-byes to the house last April, when it had to be sold, but we still feel great sadness to know it's gone. D's grandparents built that little home with great love over a great many years. And for many years, up until their deaths (including the first ten or so years after I joined the family) the house was the central meeting place for all family celebrations. I have a decade's worth of Christmas, birthday, anniversary, Easter, and July 4th memories all centered at that house. My husband (who turns 50 this year by the way!) has a whole life's worth, as do his mother and aunt. It was in that house that his mother and grandmother awaited their father/husband's return from Europe in WWII, where he fought with Patton. It's hard to make peace with the idea that the lovely little plot of land the house was on will soon be crowded with a new "McMansion."

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So...it's the 11th day of Christmas. My fall semester grades are almost ready to turn in, I'm almost finished responding to diocesan students' papers, I'm starting to turn my mind toward spring semester work. The sweet girl started back to school here at home yesterday, though she's still watching Rudolf at lunchtime - hooray for Burl Ives! Things are slowly returning to our regular, daily winter schedule. I'm grateful Epiphany is on the horizon...and hopeful that the wise men will soon figure out where the stable is!

2011: The Year of the Lop-Eared Bunny

Happy New Year!

Chinese culture often celebrates with a "year of the..." (dragon, monkey, etc.) In our family, I've begun to realize, we celebrate with the "year of..." whatever animal graces our kitchen calendar. It's been tradition since the sweet girl was about three that she gets to pick the calendar for the kitchen, and creature of habit that she is, she always chooses a different animal. We've had the year of the owl, the year of the chocolate lab, the year of the dachshund, and the year of the butterfly (those are the ones I remember...I think we might have had cats in there somewhere too).

So yesterday after a beautiful lessons & carols service at church, we headed out to lunch and then went calendar shopping. And I'm here to announce, it's the year of the lop-eared bunny!

Not so surprising, given the sweet girl's continued fascination with rabbits -- and given the fact that she got to meet "a real, live rabbit!" at the annual new year's party given by our friends the Jernigans. Their son, just one week older than our daughter, now owns two rabbits. She was in raptures of joy because she got to pet one.

Whatever your new year's celebrations look like, I hope 2011 has gotten off to a healthy, joyous beginning.

Why I Love the Lectionary

Yesterday was one of those days when I remembered how close joy and sorrow can be. Some of the reasons I won't go into here, but maybe a "big picture" view will be enough to share what I mean.

My niece in Minnesota gave birth night before last to a precious baby girl. Mom, baby, and whole family are beautifully well, and there was great rejoicing throughout our extended family.

And yesterday's lectionary gave us the readings for Holy Innocents Day (transferred this year, because of 1st Sunday of Christmas falling on what would normally be St. Stephen's Day).

Rejoicing over a new baby....

Sorrowing over Herod's slaughter of the innocents in and around Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth.

It would seem that those two things are miles and miles apart. And yet...

This is one of the many reasons why I love the lectionary, love the scaffolding it provides for my life and my daily leaning deeper into God.

Left on my own, I am pretty sure I would gravitate to certain passages in the Scriptures again and again. In fact, I do -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing, as I think the Lord draws us, by His Holy Spirit, to certain places in the Word that speak to our deepest needs. It's why some of us have "life verses" or have memorized certain sections of Scripture or feel a deep affinity for certain figures in the Bible, the ones whose stories seem to connect with our own stories in startling ways, and so we go back to their stories often to mine them for riches.

But I still need the lectionary. I need it in is four-fold messiness, its imperfections, and its sometimes seeming arbitrariness about what to read and what not to read. I need it to pull me to passages I'd rather skip, thank you, and would probably not go near if I were given the choice for the day. I need it for the way it disciplines me to listen to snippets of the Story, and to hunt for the gold thread that binds that particular snippet to the wonderful whole tapestry of God's unfolding narrative.

I need it for the way it tempers my high ecstatic joys with reminders of the suffering that still exists, with reminders of the "now and not yet" nature of the kingdom.

I need it for the way it tempers my deepest, darkest despondences with real hope and light -- not sprinkled on top of the despondency like sugar on a cookie, but hope and light stirred deep into the batter of my soul, even on days when I really struggle with despair and frustration.

I need it for the way the voices in the daily passages sing, not just to me, but across the centuries to each other. Think of robed choirs on opposite sides of a chancel, or monks chanting Psalms in a darkened chapel in the early morning. Or friends at a table drinking coffee and sharing their hearts. Do you hear the way the words dance together, then apart, then together again?

The song across time this morning came from Isaiah 25 and Revelation 1. Isaiah and John sang together, a duet whose harmonies were painfully rich and beautiful. You could hardly tell where one voice started and the other stopped.

Jesus holds the keys of death and hades.
He died, and behold, he is alive forevermore!
He will swallow up death forever -- the covering, the veil spread out over all the peoples.
He will wipe away tears from all faces.
He will take away the reproach of his people.
He is a stronghold for the poor and needy, a shelter from the storm, a shade from the heat.
His voice is like the roar of many waters.
His face is like the sun shining in full strength.

To which we cry: YES! And we see and know, deep in our hearts, that who and what Isaiah and John saw and knew, across the many years that separated them, was one and the same Lord and God, one and the same kingdom vision. The seamless Story told in different pieces, different patches, different pictures and voices. If only we have eyes to see. If only we have ears to listen.

Praying that God will give me those eyes and ears more and more in the coming year.

Advent Joy, Christmas Light

One candle burning bright
Reminds us of the end of night.

Two candles, shining, glowing,
Guide us on the way we’re going.

Three candles, slender blooms
Whose fragrance graces our heart rooms.

And in the middle, one true light,
Always shining, always bright,
Hands outstretched to lead and guide,
Love from which we cannot hide,
Rose that blooms in desert wild –
King and Ruler, Holy Child.

~EMP, Advent 2010

If Betsy and Tacy Had Blogs

I was up very late again last night, reading through and making responses to papers and posts in my online class. Nearing the end of the semester, the only way to make progress up the mountain is to take a deep breath and just climb.

One of the things getting me through these good but exhausting late night teaching treks is beautiful Christmas music. In addition to playing through some of my old favorites, I've been finding some Christmas gems on youtube. When you're bleary eyed at 1:30 am from reading patristic theology (a fine thing to do during Advent, by the way) it can put tremendous vigor into your soul to spend time listening to Andrea Bocelli sing "Adestes Fideles".

Somewhere in the midst of recent late-night multiple play-throughs, the thought came to me suddenly: Julia Ray would love Andrea Bocelli.

Julia Ray, of course, is the older sister of Betsy Ray, the main character in Maud Hart Lovelace's beloved Betsy-Tacy series, set in the early 1900s. Julia's heart belongs to opera, but she also enjoys popular music, and she is quite a fan girl of Caruso. It dawned on me that if the Betsy-Tacy characters lived in the internet age, Julia would no doubt be the administrator of the Andrea Bocelli fan page on Facebook.

(Side note: does anyone else ever do this: see or hear something and think "oh, so- and-so would just love this!" when "so-and-so" happens to be a fictional character? It helps, of course, when you've grown up with fictional characters and loved them for so long that they feel like friends.)

Picturing Julia Ray on FB gave me the late-night giggles. Suddenly I found myself thinking about other Deep Valley characters, and what they might be doing if they had access to the internet.

Grown-up Betsy, of course, would have a very writerly blog. I think she'd name it "Willards' Emporium" after the now-defunct store. I picture its banner as a photo of rosy apple blossoms. She'd have an oft-changing quote (with things like "to thine own self be true") and a sidebar picture of a long-legged crane. Joe would pop in from time to time to guest post, and she'd also keep a neatly organized side-bar with clips of his online journalistic endeavors. Whenever she or Joe got published, she'd post about it with a picture of the naughty chair from the Violent Study Club. And of course, she'd be the one keeping the Study Club's calendar in Yahoo Groups.

Tacy would keep a blog too. She'd include cute photos of her homeschooled kids. Yes, I've pegged Tacy for a homeschooler. I think she'd be an unschooler with a bent toward classical education -- something in gentle Miss Clark's freshman ancient history class must have stuck somehow! She'd share recipes for her best company dinner too -- roast chicken, giblet gravy good enough for a millionaire, and chocolate meringue pie. She might even tell a few good-natured Irish jokes.

I can't quite picture Tib keeping a blog, but I do think she'd have all the latest technological gadgets, including a really smart phone. She'd no doubt snap pictures of her latest brilliant dressmaking creations or fabulous dinners and send them electronically to Betsy and Tacy, sure they'd want to post her pictures on their blogs. And she'd be right. Naturally. (She'd also make sure that any new friends got a look at the Betsy-Tacy cat duet she put up on youtube.)

Carney might have a blog too, though I've been wavering about what kind. Somehow I can picture her creating a very cool looking sewing blog and running a brisk, efficient business of handmade items on etsy. She's gotta help pay for the kids' music lessons after all. She's also busy with vice presidential duties on her Vassar alumnae FB page (she generously let Isabelle be president).

You can find out a lot from the online CV of Emily Webster-Wakeman, MSW, PhD. It's posted at her university website. You'll note she's on the board for several refugee and immigrant advocacy groups and is in demand as a public speaker. Emily also enjoys a wide circle of friends on FB, where she proudly sports flair and fan pages for Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moosers, Jane Addams, and Robert Browning. Her husband Jed is busy on FB too, especially with his college wrestling buddies and his fellow civil war re-enactors.

Okay, okay...it's been fun...but the mountain of end of semester work awaits! I'll stop for now. Of course, if you're a Deep Valley fan, feel free to chime in with your own ideas about Betsy-Tacy in the internet age!

Chesterton: "....a lingering fragrance...from the exultant explosion"

Amazing words from G.K. Chesterton that I needed to hear this Advent season.

The power of God. The love of God. The descent into enemy territory on our behalf.

Wow. Just wow.

H/T to love2learnblog


"All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw's den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace."

- G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Supplemental Reading List for School (December)

I've been doing a much better job of record-keeping this fall. But one thing I keep intending (and forgetting!) to do is a list of the supplemental books we're using in our studies.

By supplemental, I mean books we're using to back up the core/spine texts we're using in each subject. Usually these are library resources, picture books or other sorts of books (or videos or CDs) that add an extra layer to our learning. Sometimes I choose them purposefully; other times I pick them up "on the fly" as the sweet girl develops a sudden interest in something she's studying (or a side trail connected to it). Sometimes we read these books cover to cover, and other times we skim them, enjoying pictures and reading excerpts. But all of them enhance our learning in some way.

I like to keep annotated lists of these resources, but I often find myself scrambling to remember to do it. Then the book or CD is due and I turn it back in without ever adding it to the list. I thought perhaps if I kept ongoing monthly lists here (edited as we go along) it would provide more incentive to remember! It's a lot more fun to share about good learning resources with others than simply to annotate for myself.

So here's the list for December so far, categorized by subject.

Language Arts:
Robert Frost (Poetry for Young People series)
~I'm not sure the sweet girl has been entirely ready for this: many of the poems have felt like huge stretches for us. But she's been game for it, relaxing into my counsel to simply enjoy the sound of the poems, even when she doesn't understand what Frost is saying. Of course some of the poems have worked better than others -- I think I will likely write a whole post on the challenges of reading Frost with children. But I do love Frost, and I love this poetry series. This one feels special because it's edited by Gary D. Schmidt, a writer whose work I love, and illustrated by Henri Sorenson, whose picture books always charm us with their beauty. A winning combination.

A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms
by Paul B. Janeczko, illustrated by Chris Raschka
~I'm not sure we've been quite ready for this one either, but it's been fun to "read at" it. Some of the poetic forms are too advanced to try to teach in any significant way to a third grader, but the poems are nevertheless fun to enjoy (even without the instructions about the forms). And at least the book is helping me get across the idea of what poetic forms are. The sweet girl has been most taken with the simpler forms she can try herself, especially the rhyming ones like couplets and quatrains. Today she tried writing a set of Christmas "cuplets" (as she spelled it).

Science
A Drop of Water
by Walter Wick

~Hooray for this marvelous photo esaay. The pictures are gorgeous, the science ties in almost perfectly with the work we've done all semester in Adventures with Atoms and Molecules. I plan to review this one on Epinions and will try to update with a review link here.


History
William Penn, Founder of Pennsylvania
by Steven Kroll, illustrated by Ronald Himler

~A picture book biography with very nice pictures, but a disappointingly dry text. It's stuffed with information, but not told engagingly. And we'd learned most of it already from other resources, especially Story of the World (Vol. 3) and a video about Penn. I mainly tried this as a way to stretch our learning time on Pennsylvania history, and Penn is such an interesting subject. This might work better for slightly older (5th-6th grade?) kids who are researching Penn's life on their own, but I wasn't impressed with it as a read-aloud.


Peter the Great
by Diane Stanley
~Stanley, on the other hand, really knows how to create scintillating picture book biographies. Meticulously researched, beautifully illustrated, winningly told...it really helped the sweet girl to understand Peter's desire to learn more about the West. Me too!

History/Christmas
We've taken some time during this Advent to study about Christmas customs, traditions and legends. We've read at several books...but I think I will save them for a separate post.

Poetry Friday: Aileen Fisher

I fell in love with Aileen Fisher's poems when the sweet girl was a toddler. We seemed to come across them regularly in poetry collections and anthologies, and almost every one became a favorite. Sometimes her work is hard to find (and I think a lot of it is out of print) but it's always worth looking for.

I couldn't find a copy of this one online, but I wanted to share it -- it feels so wonderfully appropriate for the month we're having!

December
~Aileen Fisher

I like days
with a snow-white collar,
and nights when the moon
is a silver dollar,
and hills are filled
with eiderdown stuffing
and your breath makes smoke
like an engine puffing.

I like days
when feathers are snowing,
and all the eaves
have petticoats showing,
and the air is cold,
and the wires are humming,
but you feel all warm ...
with Christmas coming.

Happy Poetry Friday! The roundup today is at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup.

Christmas Music Review (from the Epi Archives): John Michael Talbot's "The Birth of Jesus"

Some fellow reviewers at Epinions have been posting their lists of favorite Christmas songs. I haven't had time to join in the write-off yet, but I've found myself contemplating some of my favorites...and of course, at this time of year, I'm doing a lot of listening to Christmas music!

Scrolling through some of my old music reviews at Epinions, I found this review I posted in 2005 of John Michael Talbot's "The Birth of Jesus."

Whether you're familiar with Talbot's wonderful work or not, this is truly a special recording. As I wrote in the review: "He knows how to arrange music so that the essence of the song shines through. The sensibility I get from this album is of dark bare limbs of gnarled and ancient trees illuminated by bright, contemporary street lights on a snow-hushed winter street."

Yes. Reading this review over today, I found myself wanting to share about this music again. This is a recording I have loved so deeply over the years, one that has moved me time and again to worshipful prayer and praise during the Advent and Christmas seasons.

Belated St. Nicholas Day & Second Week of Advent Already!

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Nicholas. This one always sneaks up on us, and given how sick 2/3 of us are, we didn't do much yesterday beyond remembering it was his day during our regular Advent prayers around the wreath. The sweet girl drew us a couple of quick pictures and put them in our shoes/slippers, which was very sweet. Next year, my plan is to have us make some special cookies/treats and take them to friends.

One reason we've come to love St. Nicholas is because of the wonderful story about him in Bob Hartman's Early Saints of God. I know I've sung the praises of this book before: it's our family "go-to" book during November, and we often go back to it in December and January too. We always bring it out on All Saints and begin to read through it again. We usually get through it a couple of times during fall/winter months, and it's always a treat to revisit these beautiful stories and the reflections they inspire.

I was happy to see find this link for the St. Nicholas Center via Karen Edmisten this morning. I must say I love the St. Nicholas traditions they have in Karen's family, especially the socks and chocolates. We may have to borrow those for next year too!

It's second week of Advent already, and I can't believe how quickly the season is passing. Despite illness and tiredness, we're enjoying our nightly time around the Advent wreath. This year we're using a couple of small booklets we ordered from The Printery House. One is a booklet called "Happy Birthday Jesus All Over the World" and details Advent/Christmas traditions from different countries. We're having fun marking each place on a big laminated world map as we talk about those traditions. We're also using the "Gifts of Love" Advent Sticker Book, and placing a sticker each night on a little cardboard centerpiece (instead of using an advent calendar this year). You can see both of those booklets and some other advent resources, for adults and children, at the Printery House page here.

Happy St. Nicholas day (a day late) and Happy Second Week of Advent!

Creativity Visits...

at the strangest times.

I must confess that I'm running on fumes right now. We've been passing sickness back and forth for quite a while in our little family. D. is on antibiotics for sinusitis, and has also come down with laryngitis (usually my m.o.). He's had a nagging cough for a couple of months.

I've battled the cough now for about three weeks, and it's taken a turn toward my chest. My throat is killing me, and over the weekend it's all gone to my right ear (as it so often does). I'm pretty sure I have an ear infection, and am heading to the doctor tomorrow.

Thankfully the sweet girl is A-OK. Though of course that means her energy level for school is a lot higher than mine at the moment!

It's incredibly cold and pouring snow.

I face a mountain of work before end of semester. I was a little behind before we left for Thanksgiving, became a lot behind before we got home, and spent most of last week dragging energy-wise (as I fought the worsening of this sickness) so have only made a small dent in the piles of reading and grading I need to do, even after several hours of plugging away over the weekend and this evening.

And in the midst of all this...what do I want to do? Write a story.

I do think that stories visit at the strangest times. This has often been the case for me in recent years, that I get ideas for a new story, or an urge to revisit an old, unfinished one, right at a time when I simply have no energy to give to it.

This is a revisit. I've been falling asleep imagining scenes from this particular story, which I began writing over a year ago. It involves four princesses, seven princes (excessive I know) and a lot of interesting political intrigue. It has some moments of romance and humor and a lot of sister time.

A couple of weeks ago, I actually found myself penning new scenes. Only a couple, scribbled in a sprawling hand late at night when I needed to be working, but they were enough to jump start my brain. These characters keep knocking at the door, inviting themselves in, sitting down for a cup of tea. I keep telling them I'm really too busy right now but they won't listen.

I need to be writing my yearly advent poem, and yes, scraps of a possible poem have started coming, but my late night mind keeps going to these characters and this story. And it's getting hard to ignore, despite my exhaustion levels.

A very funny moment has come more than once, very late at night, when I'm up and still on the computer (like now) trying to wind down after working. I find myself wanting to google the characters' names...like I think the story already exists somewhere besides my mind and a few scraps of scattered paper...as though I could find out what happens next by looking them up online.

Creativity...what a mysterious process.

Like Powdered Sugar...

I love beautiful blogs this time of year. You know the kind I mean, the ones where bloggers post pictures of their lovely red-cheeked kids playing in incredible looking landscapes that just happen to be their backyards. They then post wonderful ideas for getting the kids out into nature, no matter what the weather, so they can feed the deer or hang birdfeeders or snap photos of snow laden pine trees or brightly colored birds in the bare branches of a birch tree.

I love those blogs, and I don't.

They can help feed my need for natural beauty, and I do seem to have a deep hunger for it. Living for the past thirteen years in an apartment in a tiny post-industrial city can sometimes up my need for green to alarming levels. (Picture "green alert" like a Star Trek "red alert.") Even though I've made peace with our call here, even though I know we're where we're supposed to be, there are days (especially slate-gray-sky ones filled with spitting snow) when I think if I see one more bit of asphalt, I will scream.

Because sometimes, truth be told? Such blogs make me envious. And then I get grumpy because I know envy is such a scurvy little green-eyed thing and I need to get rid of it. Envy can grow into discontent, and discontent is not the land where I want to live, not during Advent or any other time of the year.

I don't own acres of land or a farm or a patch of Christmas trees. We don't have huge lovely windows that open out onto quiet tree-filled vistas. Sometimes even our glimpses of the sky are blocked by electrical wires and brick buildings. We do get out and nature walk, even in December and January and February, even here. We look for bits of beauty and thank God, we find them.

We even occasionally go somewhere else where such bits of beauty are more readily abundant, like our time at my parents' last week in Virginia. I thought my heart would burst when I saw a red cardinal in the bare branches of a crepe myrtle. He perched next to a green bird feeder and was backed by copper and yellow leaves still hanging on other trees. When I let my glance wander over to the right, I saw the fall-blooming camellia bush, laden with pale pink blossoms, and the coppery-plum leaves of the smoke tree. Tucked almost hidden in their side yard was a miniature Japanese maple whose leaves rivaled the cardinal's feathers.

That's a rich day, and I'm thankful for it, storing it in my memory banks. Here such moments are rare indeed, so I'll enjoy what I see: my eight year old curled up on the narrow sill of our window with a couch cushion and a pillow (longing for a window seat) marveling over the street below us. "Mommy," she said this morning, in the most enchanted of tones, "the parking lot looks like it's dusted with powdered sugar."

And so it does, a small citified Christmas cookie, baked with love and hand-decorated by God himself.

Wrapping Up Alcott Month

I never got back to posting my last "literary day of days" reflection about Louisa May Alcott, but I decided to go on and post a "wrap-up" post for my month of celebrating Alcott.

I won't call the month a failure, though I wasn't able to do nearly as much as I'd hoped in terms of posting, reading or discussing. Given the somewhat hectic pace of life right now, that's probably not too surprising. I think if I decide to do this again sometime (either with Alcott or another author) I will plan the month well in advance and make sure I get some guest posters involved!

Still, I had a lot of fun revisiting my love for Little Women and exploring Alcott's continuing legacy. Here are some highlights of this month of shared celebration:

~Having Susan Bailey stop by in the comments to introduce herself and her terrific blog Louisa May Alcott is My Passion. This is a great site full of resources, book reviews, and discussion of all things Alcott. I've enjoyed visiting it several times this month and know I will go back.

~Pondering my writer-friend (and fellow homeschooling mom) Michele's comment that Marmee was "strong and modern and full of zeal for her daughters. She was the first homeschooler I ever met." I hadn't stopped to consider how much Marmee (and Little Women in general) may have influenced my own early thinking about education and homeschooling.

~I also loved the fun insight of my friend Erin, a huge Anne of Green Gables fan, when she said that seeing Jo end up with someone other than Laurie was "kind of like seeing what Anne might have turned out like if she'd continued to say no to Gilbert. Or maybe Montgomery was a Little Women fan who was always frustrated that Jo and Laurie didn't end up together..." Maybe! I found myself pondering how Alcott has influenced my notions of romance, particularly what qualifies as good dramatic tension and satisfying conclusion in fictional romance.

~I also enjoyed some Little Women posts that Karen Edmisten generously shared with me from her archives, including this beautiful one about reading LW with her daughters and how Jo's experiences in New York led them into fruitful thought and discussion about the power of pictures and ideas and how they can shape us. Karen also picked up on Marmee's kinship to homeschooling . I would slap myself in the head for missing this again, except for the fact that (despite having read LW umpteen times in my youth) I've not read the book fully since becoming a mother. Must remedy that soon. Maybe with a family read-aloud next year?

~I spent a while scrolling the recent acquisitions of our county library catalog and noting the plethora of Alcott related books. It's not just biographies...it's also graphic novels and mid-grade novels. Love of Little Women has permeated both Heather Vogel Frederick's Mother-Daughter Book Club series and Megan McDonald's Sister Club series (links to my reviews of both LW inspired books). The Sisters Club book had a delightful updated version of the Jo-burning-Meg's-hair scene variety; I almost laughed out loud. I'm happy to see that Alcott's influence is alive and well among the younger crowd.

Thanks to everyone who shared in this celebration of Alcott and Little Women!