"Go live those things"

It's funny, how many things eventually fall into much the same patterns.

When you've been around Charlotte Mason education long enough, you start to find the phrase "Charlotte Mason education" awkward and redundant; there is simply education, the principles and practice and goal of true education, whatever name you put on it. Education is a discipline, an atmosphere, a life.

In Christianity, you start to hear the idea that there is no "Christian life": it's just "life." That can be an unsettling one.  Some may protest that it's splitting hairs, playing with words; but it begins to make sense. Christ came not that we might have Christian life, but that we might have life.

One of the most interesting blog posts I read this weekend is "Beyond Minimalism," at Simplicity Relished. Daisy, the blogger there, makes some of those same points. Nobody wants to be a minimalist just so that they can be more of a minimalist, right? Cleaned-out closets are not an end in themselves. In attempting to separate the tool of minimalism from the goal of meaningful living, she says,

"Minimalism doesn’t hold life-giving purpose. It can lead us in a good direction– but somewhere along the way we have to find the actual source of purpose. We need to identify what it is that matters more than the items we clear out of our lives. More than stuff, more than busy-ness, more than useless information, more than meaningless social engagements. And then we have to go live those things."

Daisy also has a gorgeously-photographed post about using a variety of fair-trade jewelry on a simple dress. (She says she's building "an accessory arsenal.") Other minimalist writers urge us to curtail accessories, don't have more than one pair of earrings, one scarf, and so on. Is one approach more valid than another? Daisy's sleeveless wool dress might be simple, but it's not cheap; does that make it a more or less minimalist choice than the somewhat-similar navy cotton dress I found recently at the thrift store?

The simplest response is that we're individuals, and we take truths and express them in our own ways. The DHM at The Common Room posted today about Charlotte Mason education (or just "education"), reminding us to "mix it with brains."  There are important foundations, key principles, examples and guidelines; but no precise recipe.

We just have to go live it.

Some special stuff coming on Project 333

For anyone interested in Courtney Carver's Be More with Less / Project 333, she has an upcoming webinar planned, and you can also win a personal session with her. Details here.

(Nobody's asked me to post that, I just thought I'd pass it on.)

To be alive, to be really alive (Frederick Buechner quote)

I found this in Buechner's memoir The Sacred Journey, where he remembers a hungry, cold, wet supper during his infantry training. Just before this he has been talking about St. Francis of Assisi and his Canticle to the Sun--"the madness of throwing away everything he ever had or ever hoped to have for love of the creation no less than of the creator...."

"With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months. Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air."

Why there is more to life (and math) than long division (thought for the day)

"In our age of calculators and computers, we must question how much time even good students of arithmetic should spend working pages of problems of ever-increasing size....Curriculum improvements come slowly in the school world. But homeschoolers have an advantage. With just a decision of one or two people, you can make any changes you want. Will you skip the pages with three- and four-place divisors and let your children, instead, learn some BASIC computer programming? The choice is up to you."--Ruth Beechick, You CAN Teach Your Child Successfully (1984)

P.S. In case you're too young to know this, BASIC here refers to the programming language, not the fact that it was basic.