Einsteinisms VIII

Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.
                                      ~Albert Einstein

Einsteinisms VII

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
                         ~Albert Einstein 

Einsteinisms VI

It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.
                               ~ Albert Einstein

Einsteinisms V

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.
                                    ~Albert Einstein

And the winner is...

Here we are at high noon. Justin is bandanna'd and all set to judge our Silly Contest.

But before he points the finger, I must say this... It fed my parched soul to see what beautiful songs you all are singing out there on ordinary days. Wow. Go read all the comments if you haven't already. The world is harsh, but you all are brilliant, sparkling points of beauty and light. Keep singing!

As you can see, the Beehive Big Chair Bunnies are terribly anticipatious. Apparently bunnies love silly contests. Who knew?

Okay, here goes...

AND THE WINNER IS...

Congratulations, Androphenese!

Which is fitting, as I happen to know Androphenese loves to sing. A lot. Everything from Bach to Brad Paisley, Buble to bluegrass. And when he gets to hymns, he invariably ropes everyone within earshot into joining him. Which, I'm sure we all here agree, is a Great and Noble Virtue.

And the Utterly Beautiful Prize of Historical Significance and Great Literary Merit is...

Yes, Androphenese, your very own copy. In superb condition. Copyright 1923, published by the venerable Roycrofter craftsmen in their legendary artisan printshop in New York state.

Beautiful. I hope you enjoy it!

And for the rest of you, hang on... this was so fun we will definitely do it again soon! (Justin wants to throw his own contest, also!)

Keep singing!

Einsteinisms IV

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
                                 ~Albert Einstein

Happy Birthday, Miss Mahalia

"When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong. But when you are through with the blues, you've got nothing to rest on."

~ Mahalia Jackson, born this day in 1911, who steadfastly refused all offers to get rich singing the blues, because she knew she was born to sing for Jesus Christ.

My mother played Mahalia Jackson's records while she cleaned house when I was a small child.   It was a time when I still felt too small for the oversized world around me, but when the stunning power behind that big, warm, smiling voice vibrated the air in our old wood farmhouse, I felt enlarged inside, and strong.  Her voice buzzed like a wild honeycomb in the center of my chest, and made me want to sing to the Lord in a big, warm, smiling voice, too.

Do watch these to the end -- she gets more and more warmed up as she goes!

Here she sings the gospel tune she sang in Washington, DC right before Martin Luther King rose to deliver his historic "I Have A Dream" speech.




The visual quality of this one is not great, but goodness, her voice is just amazing.  Imagine how she would sound on modern recording equipment!



Thank you, Mother, for giving me ample doses of Mahalia when my ears were still learning what the world should sound like!

Einsteinisms III

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
                            ~Albert Einstein

"700?" she marvelled. "Well, naturally this calls for a Silly Contest."

This is The Beehive's 700th post!

Sparklers and confetti and virtual Beehive cake for everybody! 



You know us; we'll celebrate most anything as long as there's a cute cake involved.

700 blog posts.  Mercy me.  Some of you Gentle Readers have been around for most (or even ALL) of those missives, and for that I say you deserve some sort of prize, for sure.  So I say to celebrate our 700th post, it's high time we had another silly contest around here.  It's been way too long since The Beehive had a silly contest, don't you think? 

(Anybody still remember our semi-regular "Oh My Word" poetry contests from a few years ago?  Those were a blast!  Maybe we should do another one?) 

Entering is simple.  Really simple.  Just leave a comment telling me the name of the last song you sang.  Not the last song you heard, but the last song you actually sang.  Yourself.  Out loud.  In church, in the shower, in the rain, in your car, wherever.  That's it!

This is not just for Beehive old-timers, either.  Come on and enter whether you've read 700 posts or whether this is the first time you've been here!

Deadline: Wednesday (10/28) at high noon.  Then I'll blindfold Justin with a bandanna (he'll so dig that) and have him randomly pick a winner.

The prize?   Aw, c'mon.  You don't really expect me to tell you, do you?  It's a surprise, silly. 

In the immortal words of Pooh, "You never can tell with bees."

Okay.  Ready?  Go!  I can't wait to see what you've all been singing.

* * * * *

PS.  Incidentally, a while back a young minister wrote to say that he had just finished a personal project of reading Every Single Post in our archives.  No joke.  I was a tad nonplussed, to say the least.  Maybe we should send a silly prize to him, too.

PPS. Cake photo (and recipe!) from Williams-Sonoma. And yes, that beehive cake pan really does make cakes that cute.

said the flea to the fly, let's flee the flu

I've been studying up on flu prevention.  It's not just that I'd like my loved ones to avoid suffering through it; I also have the added motivation of recently learning that cancer survivors are having a particularly rough time with H1N1.  Theoretically, this is because our immune systems are already worn down from all the time they've spent trying to fight cancer cells.

So yes, I'm doing my homework and taking notes.  I figure some of you would be interested, and at any rate it's good to have it all gathered in one spot, so here's my whole Fie On Flu File.  (If you have other helpful info, please do share!) 

This is gathered from various sources, and I guess this is where I'm supposed to type in the "I am not a doctor and this is not to be construed as medical advice" bit.  But all of you know that already, so let's just be sensible creatures and proceed, shall we?  Very well, then. 

I'll start with information various people have reported receiving from their personal health practitioners.

First, the basics:

• Take Vitamin D3.  And get a little sunshine every day for good measure.  D3 works wonders for the immune system, and besides that it makes you good-looking and cheerful and keeps your bones happy, not to mention how dramatically it lessens your chance of getting cancer.  Crazy good stuff. (Incidentally, my oncologist says never rely on milk and dairy for D3 -- that's just not happening.) 
• Take Vitamin C.  It aids cell renewal and is rocket fuel for immune function.
• Sleep.  The immune system does its heavy-duty search and destroy missions while you're snoozing.  If your alarm wakes you up every morning, go to bed 15 minutes earlier every night until you are waking before your alarm goes off.  Then you will be getting enough sleep for your immune system to do its work.
• Wash your hands with soap.  Do not rely heavily on hand sanitizers, as they sometimes take ten full minutes to effectively kill the germs on your hands, and even at that they only kill a percentage.  (They are also toxic and potentially lethal to small children, which was discovered when kids in schools began licking the "booze ooze" off their hands for the alcohol high.) 
• Keep your hands off your face and out of your mouth.
• If you start coming down sick, GO TO BED and STAY THERE.  Apparently some H1N1 patients who've tried to medicate their symptoms and keep moving, and those who get out of bed too soon, have stayed down with this flu for as long as five months.  Those who go straight to bed and stay there usually recover in about five days.

Now for the nitty gritty specifics. 

The flu virus enters your body through your nostrils or your mouth.  From what I've read, at this point the flu is so widespread that we're probably not asking IF you're going to get the tiny swineys in your nose and mouth at this point, but rather WHEN.  So the question now is how well your body will work at suppressing proliferation of the virus once it finds you. 

Therefore, all the following tips are things various health practitioners have recommended for reducing proliferation:

• Drink hot liquids often, preferably morning and evening, and whenever you've been in public.  Hot liquids wash the virus off the throat membranes and down into the digestive tract, where acids will knock it out.  So drink coffee or (preferably) hot tea off and on during the day, particularly first thing in the morning and before retiring. 
• Pediatricians suggest feeding children hot soups daily.  (My note: We've been having some homemade soup with lunch and dinner almost daily.  A cup of chicken broth is sufficient when you don't have time to chop and stir, but do avoid processed soups that include monosodium glutamate, like most Campbell's varieties.  Very bad for you and taxing to the immune system.  I just make a big pot of something yummy about twice a week and we eat a cup of it here and there.) 
• Here's the biggie:  Warm salt water, and lots of it.  (Amazing that here we are in the 21st century being told by doctors to do exactly what Grandma said a century ago!)  Reportedly, warm salt water swabbed in the nostrils with a cotton swab, followed by a good gargling session, does about the same thing before you get the flu as Tamiflu does after you get it.  It's recommended that you gargle and swab once or twice a day.  If you're handy with a Neti pot, go for it (but don't overdo it because then you run the risk of stripping your sinus membranes; the limit I've read is once every 2-3 days).
• Elderberry syrup daily.  I buy this at Whole Foods.  Viruses hate this stuff.
• Drink plenty of water daily, because your body needs to flush the nasty toxins out continually, and also because if you catch the flu you'll have a vital edge on dehydration.  Divide your weight in half, and that's about how many ounces you need per day.

Now for some things I've personally found effective for staring down viruses:

• Avoid sugar.  Sugar consumption immediately reduces the immune system to a fraction of its usual power for as long as three hours.
• Eat the "superfoods."  Enzymes are miracle workers.  My great grandfather drove a streetcar through one of the most deadly flu outbreaks in history and never got sick; he attributed it to eating a slice of raw onion every day.  Laugh if you want, but recent research (which I came across when studying cancer-fighting nutrition) backs Grandpa's claims.  Same for raw apples -- they have enzymes that kill cooties.  We try to eat them every day all fall and winter.  Put garlic in something every day.  
• While we're on the subject, let me toss this out:  if your kids aren't too keen on veggies, by all means get an immersion blender.  Puree soups, whip winter squashes and root veggies into creamy mountains of wonder, smash up beans for burritos, make hummus, power shakes, fresh applesauce... et cetera, ad infinitum.  Amazing how much good stuff you can sneak into your creeped-out kids if it looks all creamy and smooth and non-threatening.  I adore my immersion blender.
• Hit the apple cider vinegar bottle.   This has kept me from getting sick whenever my kids were sick for over twenty years.  I would swear by it if I were a swearing woman.  The theory is that vinegar alters your pH to a level that viruses don't care for. The minute someone in my household starts feeling bad, I get some apple cider vinegar in my system pronto so I can stay well and keep taking care of everybody.  I make my kids do it, too, no arguing allowed.  How to do it:  As soon as you get that first creepy feeling in your muscles or the first slight chill,  put a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in enough water to dilute it so you can get it down. I use about 3-4 ounces of water.  It's not horrible, but don't entertain delusions that you're going to like it.  Stir in some honey if you can't stand it plain.  I just toss it back fast so my taste buds don't have much contact with it.  Drink this twice a day.  It's SO worth it.
• Lime juice is a miracle worker on angry throat tissues.  My doctor taught me this trick.  She said there's an enzyme that only occurs in limes that can work wonders overnight when your throat is sore or you've lost your voice.  How to do it:  Get completely ready for bed -- brush your teeth and drink your last sip of water for the night.  Squeeze the juice of a whole lime into a glass and drink it straight.  Go straight to bed.  You want the lime juice enzymes to sit on your throat and vocal chords all night.  Most likely, you'll wake up feeling much improved.  Lime juice has never failed me yet.
• Sleep warm.  If you're cold at night, your body is using precious energy to stay warm.  It needs all that energy to fuel your immunity engines and renew your cells.  There's research out there somewhere that indicates that most people sleep deeper in lightweight socks, because body heat leaves the feet at night.  Worth a try.
• Disinfect your car steering wheel and door handles daily, along with the doorknobs, light switches, and toilet handles in your house.
• Wash all your household pillowcases frequently, daily during fevers, preferably in hot water with some color-safe bleach to kill germs.  Again, reducing proliferation is what we're after.
• Teach your kids to sneeze and cough into their elbows, NOT their hands.  (Can you even believe some of us were taught back in the dark ages to cover our mouths with our hands?  Ick!  What were they thinking?)  And also teach your kids to keep their hands out of their mouths and noses.  Double ick.
• Brush your teeth several times a day to reduce proliferation.  (I'm so hopelessly hooked on Tom's Of Maine's delicious Cinnamon-Clove toothpaste that this one is easy for me.  Yum.) 

Hope you find some of  this helpful!  If you know other tricks, please share it in the comments!  (I'm pretty sure leaving comments boosts your immune system.  That's my story, anyway.)

Maybe we should pray for all the swine flu cooties to return to a herd of pigs that will then go all crazy and jump into the ocean or something.  Hey, stranger things have happened.

* * * * *

I gleaned all of this information from many sources, but I would like to tip my hat to my friend and brilliant herbalist Shonda Parker for her excellent advice on H1N1 and all sorts of other ailments besides.

Einsteinisms II

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.
                                          ~ Albert Einstein

Einsteinisms I

If you can't explain it to a six year old,

you don't understand it yourself.

                                    ~ Albert Einstein

suggesting, cajoling, insisting, pleading, begging...

YOU
because I want you to have a very large, beautiful life
wherein you contemplate very large, beautiful things

to go straightway to the The CiRCE Institute website

-------do not pass GO do not collect two hundred dollars just go for Pete's sake------

and take advantage of Andrew Kern's brain-tingling offer:

Make any size donation to The CiRCE Institute (always a worthy cause), and they will give you access to a bundle of CiRCE conference lectures. 

This is the deal of the year, people!  I paid for mine.  And I would do it again.  I mean, seriously, I keep going back to the site to make sure I read it right.  And I did.  Yep, it's still there.  I just checked again.  It still says they will give you these lectures for any size donation.  Crazy.

So that is my general plea.  Now here's a more specific bit of begging:

Please do not miss Andrew Kern's profound, amazing talk entitled "A Contemplation of Nature."

No, it's not about nature, as in "Oh, let's take a lovely nature walk."  It's about... Everything.

I'm guessing some of you will go donate a dollar just to hear this talk, and then you'll go back afterward and donate more when you realize how much more it was worth to you.

Actually, I just told my family last week that I would like to buy several dozen copies of this lecture CD and give it to everyone I know.  Stick them in stockings.  My neighbors' mailboxes.  Mail them instead of Christmas cards.  I dunno.  I just know it's one of the top five lectures I've ever heard in my life, and I'm kind of a lecture junkie.

I listened to it with Claire a few weeks ago, and we've talked about it so much that the rest of the family and more than a few of our friends have decided they are going to have to listen to it to be able to have a decent conversation with us anytime soon. 

Umm, you're still here.  Go, please?   Oh and hey, then come back and we can talk about it.

On Leisure, Learning, and Large Rooms

Little did I know when I turned a page and came upon this passage well over a decade ago that my children's lives would be immeasurably changed by it:

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life.–– We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”  (Charlotte Mason, Vol. 3, pp. 170-1; emphasis mine.)

Mason's writings are humbling to me because of the way scripture flows so naturally and organically into her ideas and phrasings.  In the quote above, she pays homage to Psalm 31, and in so doing she loads it with a layer of meaning that we'll miss if we're in too big a hurry (or if we never read the KJV!):

"I will rejoice and be glad in Thy mercy:

for Thou hast considered my trouble;

Thou hast known my soul in adversities;

and hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy:

Thou hast set my feet in a large room."

David exults here in a God of magnanimity -- a God who not only delivers him out of the darkness of adversity, but goes far beyond mere rescue to establish David in a space of remarkable expanse and liberality.  God gave David exactly what he needed, and then far more.

Mason, then, by alluding to this Psalm, is drawing upon David's exultation of God's abundant nature, to assist her in giving Him glory for what that large room represents in the context of her own life:  education.  This is fitting, because education is also a deliverance.  And this deliverance, like David's, is not limited to merely being rescued from the grip of darkness, because with all that God has provided for us to learn and know, education can and should be a transcendent deliverance into a large room -- a magnanimously appointed life of the mind.  

In an earlier post, I echoed a borrowed thought that education is a form of repentance.  We all view education as a necessity, but do we apprehend that it was necessitated by the Fall?  Before sin entered into the world, man strolled in the garden with the Fount of all wisdom and knowledge.  The curse that demotes us from our created state of ease to a life of toiling for our food and livelihood, fighting diseases, and suffering pain and heartache, is the same curse that distanced us from wisdom, that causes us to suffer from ignorance, nonsense, and foolishness.  Education is to ignorance what aspirin is to pain -- both are equally weapons of our warfare against the effects of the Fall.

Mason, by asking 'how large is the room in which he finds his feet set' as a means of measuring the viability of an education, is clearly drawing God into the matter, for clearly God is the one who 'sets our feet.'  And the greatest gift God gives to His people other than salvation is knowledge.  When the Psalmist sang, "The Lord is my light and my salvation," he was proclaiming that both were vital to his welfare.  In fact, we need knowledge from God to even know about our salvation!

Which brings me to Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which I am reading with the Ordo Amoris book group.  (My thoughts on an earlier chapter are here.)  Author Josef Pieper points out that our word for school comes from the Greek word schola.  No surprise there.  The shocker is this: schola, it turns out, is the Greek word for leisure. 

(What?  School = leisure?  On what planet?  Yeah, I can almost hear you out there.)

It is important here to clarify that leisure does not equal laziness in Pieper's context.  Nor does it mean pursuing mindless, passive amusements.  It means, to my mind, ceasing from anxiety and from merely utilitarian preoccupations so that one can contemplate higher things.  Leisure encompasses those pursuits without which we cannot be fully human.

Why have we not acknowledged by now that the human mind, by its nature, does not learn in a state of anxiety?  (Irony alert:  Maybe we can't learn that because the implications make us more anxious?) We all know this from our own experience, do we not?  So we should be willing to at least consider the converse -- that our minds are actually wired to learn, to receive knowledge, in a state of leisure. 

Here's where it gets interesting:  Pieper expands on the connection between leisure (a state of non-work) and the commandment for sabbath rest.  He muses that it is in this state of sabbath leisure that the body of Christ convenes in worship and becomes the bodily visible bride.  This state of worship-leisure, then, is incarnational in nature:  the bride of Christ becomes visible not in a state of exertion and work, but rather in a state of leisure.  This is a beautiful thing to think about.

And it occurs to me that this state of worship-leisure also means that we bring no work, not even the spirit of work, before the Lord in His house... because He has finished the work.  It is only because of this that we can come before Him in a state of sabbath rest.

Sabbath rest means coming before the Lord in stillness, in a turning away from exertion and anxiety, so we can consecrate a space in time "to rejoice and be glad in Thy mercy."  It makes sense to me, in this context, that worship is the only true source of leisure -- for if we do not cast our cares upon Him, if we do not trust in His finished work, we can never be truly at rest.  Worship is indeed what allows us to have leisure in our souls, for the purpose of glorifying and enjoying fellowship with God.

Which brings us full circle... 

Worship, Pieper contends, is the basis of all leisure.

And leisure = schola.

::pause::

Can we concur, then, that worship is the basis for... school?

And can we then concur that school, to be based in worship, should happen in the absence of anxiety and fear, and in an atmosphere of rest and delight?

(I warn you that if you think about this very much it might change how you go about things as early as tomorrow morning.)

Would you say your education happened in an atmosphere defined more by leisure, or by hurry, stress and anxiety?  

What would your children say about their educational atmosphere?


"For God hath not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

 
_______________________________________

Addendum:  While I was battling cancer, that passage from Psalm 31 was written across my bathroom mirror in big letters for over a year, and I chanted it aloud to the Lord every day for many months.  It was immensely calming -- every day, without fail, these words restored me from a spirit of fear to a peaceful, sound mind.  In fact, I can truly say that in these words, I found leisure for my soul in a very anxious time.  

The Best Christmas Card Ever

Tonight I went to a workshop at PaperSource on creating handmade cards. 

Hmm? Oh. Well, because I wanted to, that's why. Because I haven't done anything just because I wanted to in... uhhh... hmmm...

You see how it is.

So I enjoyed every second of it.  I arrived early to find a  h u g e  table covered in brown craft paper (how I love that stuff) and neat stations fully stocked with an array of craft supplies that would make even the uncraftiest among us feel an electric jolt of elementary joy. 

And then, I played. Playing feels pretty good, in case you've forgotten. You have, haven't you? Well now, a little quality time with some office supplies would probably do you a world of good.  Cut and paste, people! Rock, paper, scissors, gluesticks!  It maketh the heart merry. (If you need convincing, pay Ann Voskamp a visit. Now there's a gal who knows how to party with a gluestick.)

So the PaperSource instructor, a chirpy 21-year-old art student named, appropriately, Cricket, showed us craftylicious things to do with engravers and templates and bone folders and rubber stamps.  Funnity fun fun! I even got to use some power tools -- a heat embosser and a Xion sticker maker machine thingy.  Heavens, I'm still trying to settle down.

My table partner was probably at Woodstock. When I glanced up to ask her for the tape runner, she had her eyes closed and was swaying and humming all groovy-like to the music.  I think it was Rocket Man.  "Oh my," she exulted, "I just got lost in the music for a sec. Elton John was just so... powerful, ya know?" And then, while Cricket was chirping about engraving tools, Woodstock Woman kept leaning over whispering to me in countercultural tones, "I don't WANT to do it that way.  So I'm NOT."  Trippin' daisies, babe, way to be revolutionary!  And then she'd nod at me all conspiratorially.  (Probably because I was wearing acid green and purple together.  With teal tights and lots of blue beads.  Right on.)

So I came home with a portfolio of swell projects which I made all by myself.  (Well, all by myself with Cricket and Ms. Woodstock and seven other remarkably normal women.)  I picked up some sweet paper skills, too.

But no matter what... no matter how clever I become, no matter how many ink pads or canisters of embossing powder I go through, no matter how many racks of dollar store Christmas cards I peruse after I've given up on all that... I will never NEVER top the Christmas greeting we put postage on in 1995. Because this, Gentle Readers, was our family Christmas card picture that year:

Not even Martha Stewart can beat that.

*hat tip to Claire for digging up the picture.  And for having those incredible curls.

poetry in the machine

This video is a swirl of metaphors, on so many levels that I suspect I will be thinking about it for a long time.  I feel provoked, in the best sense of the word. 




For my fellow readers of Leisure: The Basis of Culture in the Ordo Amoris book group, here I see a hopeful glimpse of Pieper's unproletariat -- a man both fully at work and fully at leisure, and why?  Because he works at something he finds worth loving.  The work of his hands is fueled by his whole being, by a mind that serves his hands as a wellspring of passion, beauty, order, meaning, and a bracing precision of thought.  For him, this work is both physical and spiritual; it keeps his body fed, but it also feeds his soul.

Here, then, is a rare glimpse of the artes serviles and the artes liberales happily waltzing together.

I see him as an agrarian in spirit -- one whose dirt is ink.  

Both this video and all the preceding chapters of Pieper's book have kept in the forefront of my thoughts a favorite quote from Charlotte Mason, from page 331 of Toward a Philosophy of Education:

"Only as he has been and is nourished upon books is a man able to "live his life." A great deal of mechanical labour is necessarily performed in solitude; the miner, the farm-labourer, cannot think all the time of the block he is hewing, the furrow he is ploughing; how good that he should be figuring to himself the trial scene in the Heart of Midlothian, the "high-jinks" in Guy Mannering, that his imagination should be playing with 'Ann Page' or 'Mrs. Quickly,' or that his labour goes the better "because his secret soul a holy strain repeats." People, working people, do these things. Many a one can say out of a rich experience, "My mind to me a kingdom is"..."

David had sheep to tend, but out in the pastures alone with his flocks, his mind was at play in the kingdom of God because he had hidden the Word in his heart -- and therefore we are blessed to have the Psalms.  This is clearly an example of productivity born of contemplation born of productivity -- an organic, symbiotic dance of heart, soul, and mind.  By the same means, my father's best sermons found their shape and substance and power not at his desk, but on a tractor in a wheat field.

So it strikes me that for any life to have the wherewithal to be enriched by both productivity and contemplation, it must be a life remarkable for its well-cultivated habit of attention.  One cannot have a kingdom for a mind unless one has learned to keenly attend; to absorb and order and synthesize and reproduce knowledge.  Contemplation is, in a sense, a patchwork quilt of all the pages one has carefully beheld, stitched together by unifying, living ideas.

Every good fruit, then, finds it beginnings in the rich soil of the Habit of Attention. 

All that to say that the more I read Mr. Pieper, the more grateful I feel toward Miss Mason, who crusaded tirelessly against the deadening utilitarianism that Pieper is attacking in this book.  Mason's final book, which I quoted from above, begins with a cautionary review of the vile social forces that brought about the World Wars.  Like Pieper, Mason saw clearly the dangers of a world that seeks to shackle the mind to the hands, and starve the soul.   I will be curious to see if his prescription ultimately resolves as akin to hers.

here be dragons and squash

Last weekend I arranged my usual progressive autumnal centerpiece for the Beehive dining room table. I say "progressive" because I usually start with winter squash, colorful corn, and many candles, and then closer to Thanksgiving, I add in some decorative pumpkins, colorful leaves, glass turkeys, sweetgum balls, and some big, frowzy burr oak acorns.

The basic elements have remained constant for years.

That is, until Justin decided to help.

(You need to click to enlarge this to get the full effect.  Really.)

These things are just really different with a son.

her very last first day

Thirteen much-too-short years ago this fall, this beautiful little girl started kindergarten. She was all bubbly elation. Every morning, she lit up like a 1000 watt bulb the second she woke up. She never walked anywhere she could skip or run instead. She was all hugs and dimples and wild exclamations, an electric blur of torn tutus and and mud boots and fairy wings and bursts of operatic high C's that rattled our teeth. She was just sure that every squirrel in our neighborhood loved her.

She almost always climbed in my bed at 5 AM and put her soft, warm hands on my cheeks, and with her  little nose touching mine she would promptly fall back to sleep. So for a small, golden window of my life I got to wake up beholding a cherub every morning.

A kindergartner!  At last, she could do school with big sister! She was so happy to finally be in our first day of school picture and to have her own grade sign! But she didn't want a "K" on her grade sign because that was just a silly letter, and big sister got a nice pretty number on hers. She wanted a number, too. Since she was reading already (honestly, I never saw a child learn to read faster than she did), I caved in and let her have a nice pretty 1. And then I let her be a kindergartner.

Little brother arrived a couple of years later. Then a few fast and glorious years later, big sister's number was rather suddenly a 12... and so her sophomore year, for the first time ever, she had to learn to do school alone. That was also the year I was sick. It was all a very hard transition, and she was lonely and sometimes sad and scared. But in due time she rose to the challenges and emerged from all of that with an even brighter spirit, a will of iron, and a whole new set of fancy superpowers.

And now, my beautiful cherub is a senior. She's still 1000 watts of several sorts of wonderful: she is wise, perceptive, compassionate, ridiculously funny, trustworthy, intuitive, talented, elegant, grounded, beautiful, brave, and one of the most crazy fun friends I've ever had.

She loves the Lord with all her heart, can sing most anything, discusses Shakespeare with gnomes, penguins, and middle school children with equal ease, and really knows how to rock a fabulous pair of shoes.

I feel honored to be her mother, friend and sister in Christ. And I've grown to suspect that the neighborhood squirrels do, in fact, love her.

I know I sure do.

The days are sometimes long,
but the years are so short.

on raising beautiful weirdos

Dear Mr. Mitchell, whoever you are,

Thank you for your recent essay explaining why I've spent my best years turning three perfectly beautiful babies into quirky oddballs.  It's an essay I've been meaning to write for years, but since you so kindly did my homework for me, I now have the afternoon free to go listen to my beautiful weirdos sing and laugh their way through bits of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas at the piano while I make pesto with basil from their herb garden.   

Warmly,
Queen Shenaynay


I suspect you'll feel better after you read this.  A snippet:

If a proper education is to accomplish or at least to seek to accomplish these tasks, then a normal child is one whose moral imagination is well formed, whose soul is oriented toward a love of logos and the Logos, and who knows and loves the best of his own civilization. Such a child will, perhaps unwittingly, become a steward of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In a world where normal is considered odd, such children are desperately needed.

~ Mark T. Mitchell, Education Normal, from the Touchstone magazine archives

Please do go read the whole thing.  A little vindication now and then is sweet for your soul.  Pesto recipe available upon request.

pen zen

Ahhh. First post-it note performance art, and now this. Fountain pens! Graph paper! Sky blue ink in handsome glass bottles! My heart verily fluttereth.

This, too, is performance of an art, and one I wish to perform better. And you, too?


Well, Christmas is coming. And you'd really like a fountain pen, now wouldn't you?