Category Archives: quotes

What Am I About?

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When a man is in earnest and knows what he is about, his work is half done.   –Mirabeau

My trouble is, I don’t know what I am about. Or as we moderns would say, I lack focus. Some days the thousand details to be seen to, the hundred or so projects unfinished, don’t bother me. But today is another matter.

Maybe I am in transition from a heavy thinking period into a time when I need to attend more to housework and at least a couple of those tangible projects. The philosophical questions, and the writing projects–I assure you, just cranking out a few good paragraphs for this blog is a Project– can wait. It occurred to me that I should shut just down the computer for a spell, but then I remembered that if I write even a few words on the subject, it will help me come to grips with my “problem.” And in the process, I’ll share a few things from my week, somewhat haphazardly.

I recently started a new project, just to make things more difficult. A baby quilt for which there is a deadline, of course. Deadlines are just a facet of time, and time is not a bad thing. Christ sanctified time, if that were needed–and I don’t want to start thinking too much here!–when He entered it. So time, and deadlines, are all part of being human, and I mean that in a good way, as Christ was The Human. He had a deadline, the cross, but He never hurried or fretted.

This photo is one of two baby quilts I’ve made, both more than twenty years ago! I don’t want to show you the fabric for the current one yet, because I want it to be at least partly a surprise.

The photo of melon and blueberries is a beautiful image, yes? Those two just seemed to belong together. But it was an idea based solely on the visual sense, and failed completely when tested by the tongue. The honeydew was SO yummy by itself, and the blueberries were perfectly sweet and distinctive in that flavor that blueberries have. But together they clashed, or rather, the honeydew completely ruined the blueberries, and you wouldn’t know by that bowlful of color that blueberries were anything but flat and sour at the same time.

The fruit bowl surprise ties in to another somewhat philosophical point–about our western emphasis of the visual– that will have to wait. If I ever get back to that part of what I am about I’ll post the picture again. It’s pretty enough for a repeat.

There are two types of basil here. The green one is growing in my garden, and the purple-tinged bunch was given to me by K.

I washed it and spun it dry and did make pesto, though she wasn’t sure the flavor would be right. “Everyone” has a pesto recipe so I am not going to post mine. I got it about 30 years ago from a weekly very small-town newspaper, a recipe from a local woman who used sunflower seeds instead of nuts. Since then I have adapted and changed the recipe and switched to walnuts and then pine nuts and back again.

Pesto is infinitely variable. Depending on what you are going to do with it you might want to use more olive oil–or butter, as an Italian lady I knew used to do–to make it more runny. You might like to add some parsley or use toasted almonds as the last recipe I looked at did.

This time I was putting it on toast. We thought the flavor was outstanding. And just for good measure, I’ll show you the pan of zucchini I served that night.

I’ve lately noticed a phenomenon repeated from the past: one spends so much time cultivating the vegetables that it’s hard to get back in the house to cook them into the dinner. B. used to come out in the garden looking for me, asking if there was a plan for dinner that night?

Today I knew what I was about when I did my gardening in the morning! Tonight I will be ready.

I watered the vegetables and made a second picking of Blue Lake beans–wait! Do those look like Blue Lakes? You’re right, most of them certainly do not. A few, from last year’s seeds, are true to type, but my packet was mislabeled. The beans I am getting are mostly sticky, coarse and with a flat profile. They will probably have a bean-y taste, if they resemble Romanos across the board.

Hmm…another surprise in life. If you can’t get what you like, you have to like what you get. I’ll just slather them with pesto and everyone will love them.

Anyway, the green bean tower-tepee looks pretty, especially with that Celtic cross my friend H. gave me in the background.

This last picture is of my favorite flowers this summer, some nasturtiums and lobelia in a big pot that was a bargain at Food Maxx of all places. Year after year I try to get new varieties of nasturtiums to grown from seeds or plants in many places all over the garden, but they never take. Instead, the standard variety keeps growing in the cracks in the concrete around the pool pump where no one sees it.

nasturtiums+ 09

So this year I put two healthy starts in a pot, and with more TLC they are thriving. I’m wondering if I should place the pot over against the fence and encourage some seeds to self-sow in the ground…

Now for a closing thought, before I leave you to attend to the other kind of work–or toil:

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.  —Herman Melville


Indigestible Sightseeing

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The time for summer vacations and traveling is upon us. I myself will be departing this week for the first of several outings short and long. So it was timely to discover words from G.K. Chesterton, my favorite philosopher, on the subject of sightseeing.

In an essay he wrote in 1931 he contrasted what he called the “age of monuments” with the “age of museums,” and found modern sightseeing problematic in that it is “not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.”

He hit that nail on the head as far as I am concerned. When Pippin and I were in England and Scotland I felt such an aversion to the museums, especially the ones with vast expanses of vertically-mounted text. Now GKC has explained what put me off: too much of the wrong food. I hunger for the monuments before which I can stand in awe, or the small discoveries, a few of which I wrote about and pictured here.

This photo shows one scene I expect to be enjoying very soon, not a monument, exactly, but evidence of and testimony to the Creator. I took the picture when on a solitary retreat two years ago, but it’s nice to know the spot will be essentially unchanged.

Sit down quietly.

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Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

–Nathaniel Hawthorne

You won’t find butterflies in this photo…it’s just that the sunlight shining through the lemon balm made me happy. Also yesterday’s gardening work at church made me happy, all six hours of it, re-planting containers and flowerbeds. I even took a few photos, but they only convey the chaos stage of a work-in-progress. Not to mention that my camera got dirty hanging out in the pocket of my gardening apron, and the great picture I thought I was getting of a giant snail wasn’t great, because the lens cover didn’t open. It was the middle of the day, so the sun was too bright.

I never sat down quietly, but the gardening happiness came to me anyway. In a few weeks, when the plants have filled out and my work of art is more ready for viewing, I’ll sit down earlier in the day and from a different vantage point take my pictures and joy.

Crude Classifications

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Friends of mine have had relatives who died leaving a house full of stuff, the junk all mixed in with the valuables. Someone has to put order into the mess and dispose of it. In one particular case, my friends were the only family members willing and able, so they spent two or three whole weeks working full-time to sort through the clutter.

One room in my house, plus several boxes and drawers, nooks and crannies elsewhere, are in need of similar treatment, but I am not dead. If I were dead, it would certainly be easier for someone else to sort through things and quickly figure out that a large part could go in the trash. After all, I don’t have money stashed between the pages of books or in amongst old newspapers, as my father did.

The things of value–well, I just know there is someone in the world who would want them, if I could only locate that person. I also know that I myself want some of the items, but I can’t find them right now, and I’ve forgotten what many of them are….

Faced with this kind of meandering mind, another friend found herself almost wishing (to actually wish it would be an outright sin, so I’m confident that her thoughts were more along the line of vain imaginations, as in counting the serendipitous blessings of something bad happening) that her house would burn down, and reduce the quantity of goods over which she was responsible.

“Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life,” said George Bernard Shaw. Whole housefuls classified as “Gone” would be too crude, I’m afraid. A more practical outworking of acquiescence to life thus cursed is the three-box system, by which one sifts one’s possessions into one of three boxes labeled “Toss,” “Give,” or “Keep.” If I could do that, it would at least be a step in the right direction. Later I could sort the “Give” things into about twenty sub-boxes–or maybe reconsider and start another “Toss” box. T.S. Eliot said that “Success is relative: it is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.” I know without a doubt he wasn’t talking about women’s work, but it is a comforting thought.

One large group of belongings is my collection of quotes, some of which you see popping out on this page. Quotes are small and tidy things which is why I have been able to keep them corralled in just four places in one room: a folder in a drawer, books on a shelf, favorites in a small notebook, and digitally on the computer. They are legion and yet not overwhelming in physical size, so I spend enough time with them to keep them disciplined and fairly at-the-ready. See here, I have put several of them to work helping me to tackle my mountains of clutter.

I even managed to cut this blog down from the unwieldy treatise on life that it was originally going to be, and am hopeful about boxing up more of my world into bite-sized chunks for more enjoyment in the future.

As Martha Stewart says, “Life is too complicated not to be orderly.”