Quote for the day: The Hand and the Ear

"Those who are members of one another become as diverse as the hand and the ear. That is why the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost fantastic variety of the saints." (C.S. Lewis, "Membership")

Quote for the day: These, too, give praise

"So, too, do honest, simple souls who bear affliction willingly, or who live their appointed lives with the sense that they are appointed. All of these ways of giving praise we recognise and bow before; but the duty would seem to pass us by as incompetent persons. We are not angels, we carry no harps. But the duty of praise is not for occasional or rare seasons; it waits at our doors every day." (Charlotte Mason, Ourselves, Book II)

Quote for the day: Face to faith

"The word imagination means "to face"—to visualize an image, to almost make the thought concrete from within. The power of reasoning and the power of imagining go hand in hand. The power of reason without imagination tends to make us materialists and unable to understand faith."

"Rightly taught, every subject gives fuel to the imagination, and without imagination, no subject can be rightly followed....We do not tell the tales, we know we cannot, we read them as well as we know how and without comment, unless questions are asked. We rely upon the imagination of the children to work upon this material until it becomes theirs, and I think we do not deceive ourselves by so doing."

E.A. Parish in The Parents' Review

Quote for the Day: "He has also come down"

"But to my mind the real joy of psalm 47 is not so much that he has gone up as that he has also come down. The great revelation here is that, though heaven is, in one sense, still to come, we can nevertheless begin rejoicing now because God has not abandoned us here on earth but has already come down to be our king and kindle our hope." (Malcolm Guite, "He Is The Great King: a response to Psalm 47")

Quote for a Sunday: In good hands

"'The sea may kick up her heels a trifle,' said Mr. Pipes.  He scanned the blue expanse all around them.  'A blow could follow a calm such as this....However, no sense our worrying over the future; we are in God's hands, my dear, not some storm's.'" The Accidental Voyage: Discovering Hymns of the Early Centuries, by Douglas Bond. 

Nothing to Spend, No Place to Spend It: Toads, Butterflies, and Notebooks

Before all This Stuff broke loose, I was trying to do a couple of new things. I had splurged on a spiral-bound notebook divided into blank, lined, and dot-paper sections, to try out bullet journaling. (One of the only dot-paper books I could find at Walmart.)  I even had some flowered washi tape to make things pretty. But when things started getting closed and cancelled, my "weekly" and "daily" notes went up in smoke. "Do Laundry" did not seem to merit the same use of paper as "CM Study Night." Scheduling "Work on Computer" every day also seemed pointless.

I was also trying to begin a Hundred Days of Keeping notebooking routine (started by Laurie Bestvater). I made a few entries, including this one from Freedom of Simplicity, by Richard J. Foster, which quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (I'll transcribe it below):

"To be simple is to fix one's eye solely on the simple truth of God at a time when all concepts are being confused, distorted, and turned upside down."

Well, Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew something about times like that. But I didn't know then how true it would be for this year.

I also didn't know how hard it was going to be to keep up all those new notebook entries. (My hundred days turned out to be about six.) I had about as much success concentrating on that as the Butterfly did praying in Prayers from the Ark:

"Where was I?

O yes! Lord,

I had something to tell you:

Amen."

What turned out to be more valuable for me was going through older entries on the same themes: simplicity, trust, faithfulness. Some of them I've posted on this blog over the years.

"'I take courage,' Aeneas said. 'Here too there are tears for things, and hearts are touched by the fate of all that is mortal.'" Edith Hamilton, Mythology

"Then there is what we may call the Courage of our Capacity--the courage which assures us that we can do the particular work which comes in our way, and will not lend an ear to this craven fear which reminds us of failures in the past and unfitness in the present." Charlotte Mason, Ourselves

"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again..." Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country

And this reminder:

"We do not stir. It is a hard lesson...Of course YOU know how to keep still, for you are children. And so perhaps you do not need to take lessons of teacher Toad. But I do, for I am grown up...with a world of things to do, a great many of which I do not need to do at all--if only I would let the toad teach me all he knows." Dallas Lore Sharp, The Spring of the Year

The toad is patient, still; the butterfly is simple, even foolish. Bonhoeffer's "simple Truth" is what they both know best.

 So, although I am keeping busy with the projects I've been working on (plus a couple of new ideas), and although I do have a work routine (Wake up. Do the getting-up things. Start working.), I am excusing myself from needing to document the fact that I'm planning to do it and that I did it. Instead, I've been playing with other sorts of looser, less time-sensitive "Journaling" pages. Places I want to go someday. Books to read. A page of spice mixes in my Enquire Within notebook (that's the household stuff). Things like that.

And one day I will have appointments and errands to X-off again.

Quote for the Day: Food and Cheer and Song

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." ~~ Thorin Oakenshield, as quoted by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Isness? (Quote for the day)

The course I'm taking has us talking about ontology, which reminded me of something that Madeleine L'Engle wrote in A Circle of Quiet.

"...[Alan] reads me a quotation from Sartre about the isness of an oak tree; but Sartre felt depressed and threatened by this; the idea that the oak tree simply is seemed to diminish him. I suppose the perfect isness of anything would be frightening without the hope of God. An oak tree is, and it doesn't matter to it--at least Sartre thinks it doesn't; it is not a thinking oak. Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves: not because we are sufficient unto  ourselves--I am not: my husband, my family, my friends give me my meaning and, in a sense, my being, so that I know that I, like the burning bush, or the oak tree, am ontological: essential: real."

Quote for the day: Charlotte Mason says we can but do what we are able for

Eliminating schedule clutter and online overload  is a popular theme these days for minimalist media people (for instance, the book Digital Minimalism). In this quote from a chapter on Loyalty, Charlotte Mason points out that we may have to risk being thought "unamiable" if we say "no" to certain requests.

"Thoroughness and unstinted effort belong to this manner of Loyalty; and, therefore, we have at times to figure as unamiable persons because we are unable to throw ourselves into every new cause that is brought before us. We can but do what we are able for; and Loyalty to that which we are doing will often forbid efforts in new directions." ~~ Charlotte Mason, Ourselves

Quote for the day: We fail to notice

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice, and because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." ~~ R.D. Laing

Quote for a Sunday: What breaks us apart

"At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.” ~~ Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Quote for the day: You Choose

"Greg McKeown, in his book Essentialism, says it this way: 'No one can
take away your right to choose. You can’t even give it away if you
want. You can only forget that you have the power to decide.'” (Quoted by Joshua Becker in Simplify Magazine #7, December 2018)

Quote for the day: Each immediate evil

"I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can....the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race." ~~ C.S. Lewis, from "Why I Am Not a Pacifist," The Weight of Glory

Here's a brain statistic for you

"Use it or lose it appears to be quite true when applied to the brain work of learning. Researchers find that children who are deprived of sensory stimulation develop brains that are 20-30 percent smaller than normal for their age. Although much remains to be learned about the neurological growth of the brain, some scholars believe that people quite literally build their own minds throughout life by actively constructing the mental structures that connect and organize isolated bits of information." ~~ Barkley, Major & Cross, Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty

From the archives: What violence kills

From a post in November 2015

I read an interesting blog post recently: Simone Weil and Homer, by David Beardsley, on the Circe Institute blog. This is the part that struck me:

"By not making the clear connection to the one war, however, she made a clear connection to all War; to the eternal process that is inevitable when one country, one sect, one person, seeks domination.

"She also describes those moments of love that do break through the 'monotonous desolation:' hospitable, filial, brotherly, conjugal, even the friendship that can occur between mortal enemies such as Achilles and Priam.  'These moments of grace,' she says, 'are rare in the Iliad, but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again.'”

Hard question for the day

"Human beings perceive life in its physical, social, and political dimensions as having evolved in steps and stages, not as being assembled and constructed from distinct pieces according to a specific design or blueprint. Sequence and consequence are intimately connected in the human mind; can one let go of sequence and maintain the notion of consequence, let alone accountability?" ~~ Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology (revised edition, 1999)

Quote for All Saints' Day

"With this magnificent God positioned among us, Jesus brings the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be." ~~ Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (italics his)

Quote for the day: Frye on the power of practical decision

"It follows that such a cliche as 'teaching the student to think for himself' is not a simple conception either...In real thinking we first study a given subject long enough to enable its laws and categories to take possession of our minds, after which we may move around inside the subject with some freedom. There is no real thought outside such disciplines...Of course a thinker should be able to return to society with an enormously heightened power of practical decision, but by that time he has lost interest in thinking for himself." ~~ Northrop Frye, "The Critical Discipline," an address to the Fellows of Sections I and II of the Royal Society of Canada, June 1960, included in his book On Education 

Quote for the day: Travels with St. Luke

"As they walked, Luke kept them informed of the history of the area, pointing out where Octavian and Antony had met Brutus and Cassius in  battle.

"How is it that a physician knows so much about history?' Silas asked.

Luke smiled at him. 'An educated man should know about many things. And besides, history is the most fascinating of subjects. Have you never read Thucydides' history?'

Silas frowned. 'I never heard of him.'

Luke shook his head. 'What a bunch of dolts I am forced to travel with! One of the most famous Greeks of all time and you have never heard of him!"

Timothy spoke up. 'I know who he is. I read his history in school.'

'Ah,' smiled Luke, 'all is not lost! Here we have an educated young man. Now tell me, Timothy, have you also read anything by Xenophon?'

'Only his Anabasis.'

'Then you are in luck. I have a copy of Memorabilia. You will have to read it. It is marvelous.'

And so as the four men approached the city of Philippi, Luke and Timothy were lost in a conversation about history and philosophy. Paul silently contemplated the great challenge that lay before him, and Silas complained about the blisters that were developing on his feet." ~~ Lydia, Seller of Purple, by Robert W. Faid (1984)

Quote for the day: First, last, and Wordsworth

"Any temptation I might have to say 'this is my last word on the subject' is checked by the realization that it is probably also my first word. For I find myself constantly returning to the assumptions and intuitions of my earliest critical approaches...I suspect that every critical or creative effort in words is a beginning, a reconstructed creation myth. Its model, for those in my field, is Wordsworth's last work, published after his death at eighty, and bearing the title of 'Prelude.'" ~~ Northrop Frye, preface to On Education (1988)