Category Archives: quotes

Quote of the Week – Regret

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Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it is only good for wallowing in.
–Katherine Mansfield

 

This contrast of building vs. wallowing is a good one for me to keep in mind as we approach Lent. Today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. This young man probably didn’t exactly grunt around in the mud with the swine even if he did covet their food, but I wonder if he wasted a lot of time feeling miserable before he said, “I will arise and go unto my father.”

Glory to God, we can get up every time we fall and by the power of the Holy Spirit go to our Father in prayer, saying as did the Prodigal, “I am not worthy to be treated as your son.” And we can expect to be embraced, and to be built up in Christ.

Addendum: By the Linked-Within feature I discovered that I did in fact write about the Sunday of the Prodigal Son before, and even used the same icon. It’s sort of a sequel to this part, discussing what happened after he left the pigsty.

W’y rain’s my choice.

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Street lights shine down throughout my neighborhood, but I was wishing I’d brought a flashlight nonetheless when I went out earlier this evening with my umbrella to deliver a package that had been delivered to the wrong house. In this town we have confusing arrangements of names and streets. Today’s error resulted from something like this: One address is 5211 Fred St and the other is 5211 Frank St, with Fred and Frank being short loops off of Fritz St.

Our mixed-up houses are only two blocks from each other, so it didn’t make sense to drive over there. I would get wetter climbing in and out of the car than if I just took a short walk. I had to strain to see the house numbers, even the ones that have a light behind them. Until I got my bearings I took a few steps up two or three driveways in order to read the addresses.

Rivers of water flowed across the sidewalks, in many places pooling into lakes before they reached the gutter. But that’s not a problem if you have sturdy galoshes like mine. I found that my mind was singing the first stanza of a poem that I learned from Goldilocks when she came for her sewing lesson yesterday, barefoot because her boots had gotten soaked at recess.

This very night her school is having a fundraiser and all the students are reciting together:

It hain’t no use to grumble and complane;
It’s jest as cheap and easy to rejoice.—
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
W’y rain’s my choice.

That’s only the first fun verse of James Whitcomb Riley’s “Wet-weather Talk.” I bet the children are all glad that we’ve been having steady downpours for a few days, because that will help the audience get into the spirit of the poem that goes on for a few more stanzas exhorting us not to be “lockin’ horns with Providence.”

We are likely to rejoice in rain here in dry California. I was also happy to go on a little expedition, and only slightly disappointed when no one answered the door; I left the package on the step and came home again. I passed a man whose taxi was just driving away, and he laughed and said, “Another fine night for a walk!” and I answered with the other lyrics that popped into my head, “Splish splash…I’ll be takin’ a bath….”

But no, I wasn’t even very damp when I came in the door to the lovely warm fire that I’d got going a little earlier. The time to write this blog post was also here. It is certainly easy to rejoice when Providence gives me opportunities and the strength to take them.

Of course, other days rejoicing can cost more. But “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” as the Bible says somewhere. I don’t think I need to worry about those other days right now. A Russian proverb says, “Every day is a messenger of God.” My little delivery errand turned out to be a gift to myself, and that could only come from God.

Quote of the Week – beauty hidden there

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“Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we can contribute nothing to him. One does not help a person by discerning what is wrong, what is ugly, what is distorted. Christ looked at everyone he met, at the prostitute, at the thief, and saw the beauty hidden there. Perhaps it was distorted, perhaps damaged, but it was beauty none the less, and what he did was to call out this beauty.” 

~ Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh of blessed memory.

Mostly I know Metropolitan Father Anthony Bloom from his writings on prayer, which have been very encouraging. They convey a fatherly exhortation, as much as to say, as our Father might, “Child, why have you delayed so long coming to sit on my lap?” There is a flash of sadness that you did wait so long, but it is swallowed up in the joy and comfort of sitting there, and the love that flows, even though, like a child, you are fidgety and not paying attention as closely as could be desired. You find that you have hopped off His lap, hardly noticing yourself, but He smiles and enfolds you the moment you climb back up. 

Fr. Anthony shows you how this is so, and makes you want to get on with the work of repentance, of coming back into God’s presence again and again. Of course it is from Him that I have any hope of acquiring the loving attitude toward people that he talks about in the quote above. So the topics are connected.

This afternoon I went to a lecture by Father Mel Webber, author of Bread and Water, Wine and Oil. When he speaks I want to write down every word, which of course I can’t. But I hope to glean at least one good quote from my notes for next week’s posting.

A botanical theme has emerged.

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Decorating is a homemaking job that I wish I could get over and done with and on to other things. This post is about how the realization of that wish is a long time coming. On one level the story bores me to death, even though it’s my own house I’m writing about, the house I’ve been investing in for 20 years. That should warn most of my readers to leave right now and go read something more entertaining.

What makes me want to tell this too-long tale anyway is the way it illustrates how an incredible amount of mental and physical labor can go into what seems a simple project. I suppose I’m not used to this precisely because I’m not into home decorating and haven’t applied my perfectionistic creative energies to it so much before. In a way it’s a larger-scale version of my doll clothes effort: what I envision doesn’t come in a kit.

If I could make a kit out of it no one would buy it. It’s just the best that we could do given our priorities, and with a tract house that doesn’t have enough walls to be cozy or enough windows to brighten the view. The story I tell is also amusing if one considers the output of my mental energies compared to the mediocrity of the results.

G.K. Chesterton said,

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can. 

I’m not sure what all G.K. meant by that, but he does seem to give me liberty, and even to tell me it is my duty, to spend time on my house and property with the purely physical and aesthetic aspects in mind.

One year ago

So, I push on. Last year we changed the arrangement of the living room furniture so that the pictures on the wall didn’t work anymore. It seemed that the painting that used to be above a couch was too “heavy” after we moved the piano under it. It was then the largest wall item above the largest piece of furniture. Also, the TV had come out of the closet and found a new and permanent place in a corner, and the emptiness above it bothered me for months while I tried to figure out what to put there.

The first thing that came to mind was a manzanita branch such as I remembered my grandmother having in her living room for a while, a natural curio of sorts. Hers had sat on the coffee table, I think, but mine would hang above the TV to fill some of that airspace and balance out the piano nearby. (We’d need to get a smaller something to put above the piano, too.)

I started looking online for manzanita, but I found only small and twiggy, pale specimens, for use in flower arrangements. So I gave up for a while and spent hours looking for a decorative mobile. Nothing pleased. By that time we were in the middle of the remodel, so it wasn’t urgent.

Then in April we went north to Pippin’s place, where the previous winter’s record-breaking amounts of snow had piled up everywhere. As we walked through her forest we saw several manzanita bushes with large branches broken off. My mind started twirling around the idea that I could prepare my own decorative branch. The others helped me choose a couple that might work and we hauled them home.

Nine months ago

I still didn’t know if I could accomplish what I envisioned; I’ve never been one to do woodworking of any sort. I knew enough to trim off the flowers and small twigs. Then it occurred to me that wood needs to dry out before one can work it. I read that manzanita tends to split, so people have trouble making furniture out of it. Maybe my branches would split too much as they dried?

I left them sitting around in the garage for a couple of months and they only split a little bit. On the Internet I read somewhere to paint them with Danish oil to preserve the wood, so I did that. And one of my children said I should stain the trimmed ends of the branch so the whiteness of the wood wouldn’t distract from the lovely smooth and dark bark.

I think this is the one I didn’t use.

It was B.’s upcoming birthday party that put the fire under me to get the chosen branch up in the corner. We bravely screwed two hooks into the smooth new ceiling, and I painted them white so they would fade into the background. Then three strands of fishing line were tied to those, and to the branch.

Soldier was here and helped me position it just so; he’s tall and strong and could stand there calmly holding it in midair while I fumbled with the almost invisible threads. Then voilà! At last, that one part of my decor was in place (now we only had to ignore the empty space above the piano) and all our party guests could admire it. I began brainstorming on a solution to that remaining space nearby.

Three weeks later I dusted the manzanita with a feather duster and the next morning it crashed onto the TV and to the floor. Nothing was harmed. Guess we needed stronger filament. It took me about two months to get to the store to buy it. Then it took another month before B. and I could make ourselves re-hang the branch. See what kind of do-it-yourself-ers we aren’t?

I was sure I knew how to orient the branch, the way Pippin had told me to, but after B. and I got it centered and hung and he’d gone bike-riding, I realized by looking at previous photos that I had it exactly backwards, and it truly didn’t look the best. I tried just flipping it over, and that sort of worked; I only had to re-tie one filament, and we were o.k….except that now the branch was a little closer to the ceiling than ideal, and the top of it was vaguely lined up with the curtain rod, which didn’t look right. I suffered with that all through Christmas, trying not to care. Of course most people said it was fine because no one wanted to go through the difficulty of doing it over.

I had to buy a piano lamp before I could decide what would go behind it; our old one was shot. Piano lamps are expensive! The cheapest one I could settle on was out of stock for a few weeks, so we waited on that. I had looked at so many paintings or other wall decorations, many hours of browsing over several months, and found nothing I wanted enough to spend money on.

So I thought I would saw and paint some wooden birds to hang up there…they needed to be warm and colorful, because the corner with a black TV and a stark naked branch turned out surprisingly modern and chilly. (Maybe what I need is a branch about five times that big, just sitting on the floor behind the TV and reaching toward the ceiling…and permanently trimmed with Christmas ornaments…? )

But then we must return to how I’m not a woodworker, or a painter for that matter. I think it was on New Year’s Day that I felt desperate to make some progress; I decided to spend money and get something. B. and I knew we needed color there, and we knew the parameters of what the measurements needed to be. I bookmarked some paintings, and when B. came home from watching a football game we chose one and ordered it. Whoopee!

The painting arrived and sat on the floor near its destination for over a week. I knew we needed to be in the right mood to even talk about putting it up. In the meantime, one day I got a burst of courage and all by myself re-did the lines supporting my manzanita. I think it might be as much as an inch lower. A most satisfying inch.

Last week we hung the picture. Those are giant poppies providing the splash of color. I hope Mr. Chesterton is happy and won’t mind if I get back to my sewing and reading now.