Monthly ArchiveMarch 2006
Life before 2008 06 Mar 2006 09:04 am
Exactly.
The Lost One
comes back to her
in the month of his thirty-eighth
birthday, sometime in April
when the tiny white crosses
of the dogwoods glowed
ghost-like at dusk
and she felt him coming
too early
for more than a minute’s worth
of breath and a sprinkling
of holy water, his name. Gasp
of the nun, sign of the cross. Empty
handed she had returned
to her kitchen, rubbed
the windows clean of streaks
to better watch her three boys outside
who never thought to ask
where or why
or even to notice the swell
of her belly
gone back to ribs
and now he would be years older
than she was then, a sweet balding man
who, whistling, comes
through the front door with a kiss
on the cheek and a single daffodil.
–Sarah Cummins Small. For my mother.
Food 05 Mar 2006 05:10 pm
Luxury for our inner cheap…
to use a term my friend Carol uses :-). Still, whether we are cheap or not, some of us really really enjoy good chocolate. My sister could easily roll around nekkid in jewels…me, it’s more likely to be gourmet chocolate. The dark stuff. The rich stuff. The expensive stuff.
Ha! Not my life right now. But just not having the stuff until I’m on TMM baby step 5 isn’t an option either. Fortunately, some smartie at Target developed Choxie :-D.
You know the commercial: Choc-o-late with Mox-ie…. Chox-ie. Looks like a brightly colored gimick. But really, for, um, affordable chocolate it’s pretty darn good. Around christmas time I was hooked on the dark truffles and suprised at the texture and complexity of something that cost a mere five bucks. Lately though, I’m hooked on the thins.
They are about a 2.5 x 8 inch long candy bar. Dark or milk chocolate depending on the flavor and $2.50 a bar. Perfect to hide in the diaper bag for a quick mini-vacation, eyes closed, one bite at a time while waiting at a red light, waiting for violin lesson to finish, waiting for kids to hurry on up…. you get the idea. The peppermint /dark chocolate is one of the best variations of that combination I’ve ever had. And totally surprising (and addicting) is the Aztec.
The secret behind the bars amazaing quality is how creamy the chocolate is. Not waxy. Just dense and really smooth, so when you’re eating it, if you are taking the time to really notice what you’ve got in your mouth, it’s transformed almost to the consistancy of really thick hot chocolate. The Aztec has this crumbly topping; the Choxie makers call them “nibs”. They are bits of roasted cacao beans with ground ancho chilies and cinnamon. Sound gross? That’s what I thought at first too. I actually bought it for David, thinking it would satisfy his hunger for all things spicey.
It’s not hot though. Just….deep. Complex. You get this almost liquid, almost fluid creamy chocolate with this layered swirl running through it. First on the tip of your tongue, later in the back of your throat, and you can’t stop eating it. Or I can’t stop. Addictive. Choc-o-late with Mox-ie. Choxie 
Life before 2008 04 Mar 2006 10:14 am
Planning To Endure
So we had a great time last night! Cold and clear with a smiley face moon; new friends becoming closer, aquaintainces becoming friends through laughter. Oh, and cheesecake helps :-D.
George Grant was a very good speaker. A bit different than I imagined…I’m partial to little old men with English accents like John Phillips or gravely like James Boice. Grant’s voice was a just normal, completely approachable, and oridinary. Not meant to be a criticism, but we with minds that wander prefer diction and punctuated points to help keep us in line ;-).
For the most part what he said was just reaffirming…nothing we didn’t already agree with. He spent some time talking about life long learning and what a REAL hunger for knowledge looks like versus what our education system churns out, even at the doctorate level. I nudged David for his pen when brought out the verse, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Lately I’ve been pondering hope. I certainly know what it feels like to be hopefull, and, in turn, hopeless, and the thought that those hopes can become substance as faith…that little seed moved away from the abstract and was planted in the upturned soil of my mind. I suspect it was watered and I’ll watch it grow over the next few days.
Then, totally endearingly, he quoted from the same relatively obscure Lewis work that I did this week from the Kenneth Myers book below! Sychronicity Baby! I love it when God strikes a chord like that!
He moved on to what our society has become as a result of our educational system: junk food lovers. We don’t want our worship to get too demanding, the doctrine to be too challenging. We want the music to be comfortable, we prefer punch-line, bumper sticker theology. Our minds grow lazy; we want literary junk food that is easily digested, even as we know it’s not likely to satisfy for any length of time.
This, of course, is exactly what I’ve been pondering this week. But, engaged as I was, I was beginning to wonder how he was going to make the point that classical education could radically change this for future generations. Then he told this awesome story:
Classical education has a LONG history. I won’t go into that here. But way back when Oxford was being built, there was a building (the dining hall?) at Cambridge that had huge oak beams. Hundred of years later, in the 1960’s, these beams were beginning to show signs of dry rot. The college began searching worldwide for new oak beams and couldn’t find anything big enough. They eventually had to consider alternatives (plastic in a hundreds old building anyone? Ewww). Then one day a janitor was down in a lower closet and found a leather pouch that contained the orgigional bulding plans on parchment!! There were plans for everything, like ” replace the plants in such and such garden after 75 years. Replace such and such after 25 years”. The janitor ran up to the head guy’s office, knowing the problem of the beams was solved. Because there in a sidebar, it said, “after 500 or so years, the beams will begin to dry rot. Replace them with the oaks growing outside”. And sure enough, outside was a long row of hundreds of years old oaks, planted for this purpose.
Lazy minds can’t plan for 5 years from now! Our fast-paced world, with it’s instant gratification mindset, is not on the same level with those from the past, who were able to not only plan for the future but provide for it. The foundational mindset was completely different. They planned to endure in the form of generations equipped with roots of greatness. The abiltity to really THINK and reason and plan…it doesn’t come from sound bites and fast, pre-digested quasi information.
This is me here, and not Dr. Grant: I’d even venture to add that it won’t come from judging intelligence from a report card. From an ability to blend into a system and look educated. Dr. Grant shared how he had two doctorate degrees and yet found he had no real knowledge! Last night I was reminded that classical education isn’t beautiful just for the current individual’s sake. There is an enduring “greater than the sum of it’s parts” kind of legacy that it carries. It meshes perfectly into a biblical worldview where one generation passes on to the next.
Miscellany & music 04 Mar 2006 09:45 am
One of my favorites from the Curious George Soundtrack:
Talk of the Town - Jack Johnson
(feat. Kawika Kahiapo)
I want to be where the talk of the town
Is about last night when the sun went down
And the trees all dance
And the warm wind blows in that same old sound
And the water below gives a gift to the sky
And the clouds give back every time they cry
And make the grass grow green beneath my toes
And if the sun comes out
I’ll paint a picture all about
The colors I’ve been dreaming of
The hours just don’t seem enough
To put it all together
Maybe it’s as strange as it seems
And the trouble I find is that the trouble finds me
It’s a part of my mind it begins with a dream
And a feeling I get when I look and I see
That this world is a puzzle, I’ll find all of the pieces
And put it all together, and then I’ll rearrange it
I’ll follow it forever
Always be as strange as it seems
Nobody ever told me not to try
And the water below gives a gift to the sky
And the clouds give back every time they cry
And make the grass grow green beneath my toes
And if the sun comes out
I’m going to paint a picture all about
The colors I’ve been dreaming of
The hours just don’t seem enough
To put it all together
Always be as strange as it seems
Miscellany 03 Mar 2006 02:12 pm
Everybody’s working for the weekend….
- tonight we will go hear George Grant at a dinner for an area classical school, Paeda Academy. I’d post links to both but my “insert link” function isn’t working. We are super-excited about tonight…our first serious date since we moved! Uninterrupted conversation, brain stimulation, good food, and great friends. Couldn’t ask for better.
- good news: we’ve made it into commissions for two months running! Bad news: commissions can be really, really small. Hopeful news that we hope isn’t a lie: they compound and accumulate month to month so things should steadily improve.
- I’m pondering stretching ourselves, trying new things even if they’re small, what the heck is wrong with having to slow down and read something two or three times in order to absorb it (?!?), sanctification and the growing of our faith and knowledge…
- we’ve heard Cades Cove is postitively punctuated with daffodils this time of year so that’s our big plan for tomorrow.  A picnic (and a hike, if it’s not too muddy) sounds really excellent right now. My lungs could use some stretching, some deep inhaling of a different kind.
Life before 2008 02 Mar 2006 10:10 am
Wondering if it still resonates…
Several years ago some friends and I discussed this poem, one friend especially who had also experienced the death of one of her babies. The accuity that such grief brings is….thin. Hence, the resonating of this poem. I was recently reminded of it, seeing it again in a discussion, and find that it strikes a chord in different places, in different ways. Evidence of more cobblestones in my journey I supose. Here it is:
Thin Place
The road turns right almost as soon as it leaves the village, and
twists again in the other direction at a place where a
bit of lake-edge swamp comes up close to the pavement. That’s
where something changes, at that spot. I don’t know
what it is: but each time I come here, I get that same feeling
whenever I pass that stand of reeds: that I have left one
part of this particular world and stepped into another.
It’s the woods in part: woods almost always get to me, especially
when they’re near water. I know that. I do indeed
have a “thing” for woods and hills, because that’s where I first
sampled this particular taste, in taller forests and
bigger mountains, many years ago. But people report the same
feeling in deserts and dunes, on the top of barren
screes, on buttes, at wide silver water, along a shore at low
tide. There are sacred rocks well known to the people
who live close to them, and holy springs, and clearings that have
a certain radical peacefulness. Who knows? Maybe
there’s some phone booth on a Manhattan street corner that has
something special about it. I’m not willing to rule it out.
Up here in the Madawaska Valley there are miles and miles of wood,
and miles and miles (although not as many) of
riverside and lake edge. It’s lovely, wild, bony country. When
you’re here, you get clonked with the realization that
this is the civilized, highly populated fringe of the Canadian
Shield, and the Real Thing goes on and on, largely
unpeopled, for, oh, something like a thousand kilometers to the
north and west: a huge mass, terrifying in its
immensity. Is that vastness spotted, as this country is, with
places with this feeling? Or do you have to have people
there to notice the feeling? It’s the old tree-
falling-in-the-forest problem. (Would God be in this world if we weren’t here too? I think too highly of moose to believe otherwise.)
But there is that feeling here, just at the turn in the road and
on. It’s somewhat thicker and stronger where the
community has its white-painted house and its working buildings,
and thicker and stronger still on the island among
the reeds, where the log chapel stands. A sense of something
peaceful and yet gloriously alive Of Joy lurking
somewhere in the landscape.
The Celtic tradition had a phrase for it (Celtic tradition would,
of course!): it call places like this “thin places,” or so
I’ve been told. There are spots where this world and the realm of
the spirit come close together, some claim. That
may be; or it may be that there are some places, like some chords
in music, that evoke something spiritual in
people, as the smell of burning leaves can bring back childhood to
many of us; and that some places have more of
that power of evocation than others. Whatever. I don’t know, and
I’m not sure it’s all that important anyway. Even if
scientists could pin down the loci of the brain centers involved
and isolate the requisite stimuli, would it really make
any difference?
The important thing about this particular thin spot (or whatever
you want to call it) is that it fetched a holy woman — a
brilliant, passionate, fiercely courageous woman whose Godlove was
huge and whose energy was boundless — and
she found her own particular Madonna in these sandy pine woods.
Her cabin is on the island and the feeling there is
so thick you could almost slice it and use it for shingles. She
founded a community that keeps going through hard
work and cheerful begging and that has tendrils reaching far out
into the world. I come to visit this community
sometimes, partly for the community itself, but largely because
this place feels like a drink of cold water when you’re
really thirsty.
I was talking about all this to an old priest who lives here, one
who’d been close to the holy woman and had known
this place almost from the first days of the community. I asked
him the tree-falling-in-the-forest question: did that
woman find Mother Mary already here in the woods, or did her
prayers bring Mother Mary here? Mary had always
been here, he said; the woman had only named her and had taken
root here because of Mary’s presence. Question
answered.
But, he said, while there are places that call us toward holiness,
maybe it’s a two-way street. Maybe there are places
that we can help make holy. That felt right: I have known places
(my home church is one such) that seem to seep
the same feeling from their walls as I got from this place, as
though the prayers and joy and pain and angel-wrestling
of the people who had worshipped here had, in some fashion, sunk
into the very fabric of the joint. The priest said (he
had known her very well) that the woman’s cabin was like that; it
was, for him, full of the scent of her agony. What
had that agony been? I asked him. “That Love goes so unloved,” he
answered.
Maybe — I don’t know — if we could be completely open to God’s
love, as we never seem to be able to do, maybe we
could *make* more thin places. Maybe by love and prayer we could
clear some of the rust and debris that evil has left
spotted on the face of this earth, the scars on the faces of God’s
children, by facing them front-on and loving them as
best we can.
A more radical thought: maybe we could work on becoming ourselves
the thinnest places we can manage to be. Not
thin in the sense of meagerness, as fashion models are thin — in
fact, now that I think about it, the “thin place”
people I know are as often as not quite comfortably upholstered –
but thin in the sense of transparency: being as full
as we can hold of the love of God, and leaking it like crazy.
Highly permeable membranes. The priest himself was
like that; he leaked a deep and quiet peace.
Sounds simple, becoming a thin-place person; but in fact, it’s not
easy at all. Our notion of love often isn’t Love but
ego, and it needs to be stripped down to the chassis and rebuilt.
It means giving God leave to do whatever we need to
undergo if we’re to become the vessels God wants us to be. That
may involve being opened and stretched in ways
that I, for one, find terribly painful at times. God’s hand is
very tough on the clay at times, and if you think that’s
rough, you should see what he does to brass.
And sometimes it seems like it’s all for nothing. Listening to the
priest talk about the woman who had lived here, I felt
like a scant and wavering taper next to a glowing potbellied
stove. I feel muffled off from God’s love so much of the
time. I can take only a sip at a time of all the living water on
offer, however much I want to gulp it down. I’ve got my
areas of indifference or cruelty, spite and self-serving. I too
don’t want to see or be seen too much or with any real
accuracy. I too don’t love Love, or at least not often or nearly
well enough.
But the thin-place places and the thin-place people don’t judge
us; they call us, fetch us, offer us the startling gift of
grace, get lodged deep in our inmost selves. They tell us, here,
this is what Love tastes like, this is what Love’s
supposed to be. And nothing else ever really feels the same –
which is good, really; it keeps us from looking for
God’s Love in things and people that aren’t equipped to give it.
It helps if you can see that the idols are only plaster;
you can even feel sorry for them.
God-love is alive and active in this world; God’s fingerprints are
all over the landscape. That love bubbles through
among these particular pines and rocks and in communities like
this, but it also surfaces in all love: in a mother’s
gaze on her sleeping child, in the affection of friends or care
for strangers, for all love is ultimately God’s, love passed
on. It’s in the stillness of contemplation and in the action that
flows out from it. It’s yeasty and unstoppable and willing
to suffer anything to get through our stubborn unlovingness to
reach us. It’s here. You just have to be willing to step
into your particular woods, stand still, breathe deep, and open
your soul to it.
Combermere, Ont.
For Fr. Emile
books 01 Mar 2006 10:07 am
Mean Girls Grown Up, part 1
This one is taking me longer than I thought. It is SUCH a thought provoking book, bringing to my mind each and every female relationship I’ve had, both good and bad. Specifically it’s a look at Relational Aggresion, frankly put, the catty ways women go at each other. In alot of ways the book is compilation of stories and experiences, dividing women into three categories: the Queen Bee (the bully), the Middle-Bee (her go-getter), and the Afraid-to-Bee (the victim).
The opening sentence: “It happens when you least expect it: the sudden, painful sting that hurts deeply, because you thought you were in a safe place, with other women immune from harm.” Relational Aggression is: “the use of relationships to hurt another, a way of verbal violence which words rather than fists inflict damage”. Far from stopping in high school, the author shows how this can continue on into adulthood. What it looks like between mothers, co-workers, etc.
The thought that continually runs through my mind is this: This (Queen Bee stuff) is what happens when women are wounded. It’s what happens when there is a void of Godly older women showing younger women how to maturely relate to one another.
The author, Cheryl Dellasega, is clear that the damage can be undone and behavior can be changed, even after a long time of one pattern and she begins that point right in the first chapter. It’s good to be reminded of as the book goes on. Right now though, I’m in the thick of the descriptions and the explanations of “why” and “how”. Here are a few quotes:
“When we go into battle, our ammunition is our prestigious careers, our brilliant children, our better homes, cars, clothes, and vacations, even our illnesses and shortcomings (my note: women are REALLY good at false humility when competing for who has it hardest!). As long as we have the biggest and the best, we can outshine everyone else and, in some twisted way, legitimize ourselves.”
Security seems to play a huge part, as in this testimonial:
“We celebrate the similarities of our intrests as writers, painters, and middle-aged women who have known each other since undergraduate school, but this did not come to us until we dropped the expectations of each other that kept us unsecure, poised for disappointment, and always competing for a place in the other’s life that we could not trust we already had.”
“Women of all ages develop thier identities in the context of relationships. Who they are and how they feel about themselves often come from friendships and partnerships. ”
“Bullies rarely recognize themselves as such, which is part of the problem. The women…described themselves as “take charge”, “too direct”, “needing help with interpersonal skills”, “high achiever”, and “having ultra-high expectations”. “They…won’t admit they’ve made a mistake despite logical and reasonable rebuttals. They…have an uncanny ability look good to peers and superiors. They…may turn on subordinates who support them. They…act on perceptions rather than reality. (And then) thier vicitims of the attack may search for flaws in thier own behavior that explain the assult.”
I’ve just gotten into the Middle-Bee section, which for all intensive purposes seems to describe the “busy bee” behavior that has been preached and taught against most of my life. What is like a lightbulb moment for me is the discovery that such ‘going in between’ stuff is not just destructive to a situation or the victim involved, but also the affect it has on the middle bee herself and the enabling it does to the Queen. The old admonishions of “don’t gossip or tell tales” play into a complexity that is bigger than that because women themselves are more complex. It’s precisely the lack of “black and white” in women’s relationships that make them tricky to navigate.
books 01 Mar 2006 09:34 am
From David:
“If you remove all the difficulty, you remove the accomplishment.” Easy to apply that to about 101 situations this week! 
Dear Husband is reading a FANTASTIC book that I continally sneak peeks at over his shoulder. It’s called All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture by Kenneth A. Myers.
When he finishes it and I actually get to read more of it myself (and underline all my favorite parts… the true sign that “Tia’s been here”) I’ll post a more thorough review. But for now, I offer this, a section of the book that contrasts “using” art versus “recieving” it and extensively refers to a book by C.S Lewis called An Experiment in Criticism. Here’s my favorite quote:
A work of (whatever) art can be either “received” or “used.” When we “receive” it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern by the artist. When we “use” we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned image, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know the roads we have yet never explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attatchments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. The rides may be in themselves good, bad, or indifferent. The “uses” which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. “Using” is inferior to “reception” because art, if used rather than received, merely fasciliates, brightens, relieves, or palliates our life, and does not add to it……We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you can not possibly find out).
Miscellany 01 Mar 2006 08:50 am
A poem from Sarah for spring!
Chanson Innocente
by: e.e cummings
In Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hopscotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee