Category Archives: time

The calendula lasts longer than this moment.

my garden, time, writing, , ,
hopbush may 2016 close
Hopbush – dodonaea purpurea – right now

 

What a strange day… starting with a strange night, during which I was awake for four hours. What? At first I tried to pray and go back to sleep at the same time, but after an hour or so of that I switched on the light and sat in bed writing in my journal. I didn’t turn on my phone – yay for me! But if I had I might have been able to talk with my dear cousin who was wishing from the East Coast that she could talk to me, as she wrote, “I wish you were not still asleep.” Little did she guess that I was not.

P1040490
Mexican Bush Sage

 

 

 

Eventually I slept a little more, and got up late. Today is sunnier than in a long time, and I noticed out the window the hopbushes that line the fences, also looking brighter than ever decked in their flowers. I took my lunch outside to eat under the umbrella, with my back out of the shady area and baking, but as in a very slow oven, so I remained in place.

I conversed with friends blog-style about moments and fleeting time and what happens to those moments: Are they like the picture Annie Dillard paints in words for us, “…a freely given canvas… constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream….” ? The violence of her image doesn’t set well with me now, but just a few months ago its tone would have matched what I was feeling, not about a moment but about the entire lifetime of my husband.

Now here I am, in a lovely moment, a warm and springy afternoon with birds and insects crossing paths in the  air around me. The bird bath has water in it and the towhees are taking advantage of that — or is it just one towhee who has a daily bath, and a long one at that? He splashes around for about five minutes while I watch and wait from the kitchen window, because I know that when he’s satisfied I will need to refill the bowl.

Near the birdbath is one of my two remaining Mexican Bush Sage plants. The old one at which I used to watch hummingbirds out my window for several months of the year was dug up and divided into six plants. The one we transplanted into the new garden died, and the others spent the winter in pots, three of which I gave away on Freecycle this week. I always forget until I get up close, how furry the flowers of this plant are.

Echinacea Cheyenne Spirit May 2016
echinacea – Cheyenne Spirit

And the echinacea are already blooming. At this time I have six of this variety, but no traditional purple ones. I was planning to buy a purple one to replace one that was eaten by snails, but didn’t find one anywhere.

As I bask in this moment of an hour or more I am writing, yes, because that is what I do with many of my moments and minutes and hours. It isn’t often that I am enjoying a space other than my computer corner while I write, but today I’ve written in two other places. Because I took the trouble to move myself out here to the spot in my garden where I have the wide view of everything from Margarita Manzanita to the bird feeders to the greenhouse, my moment seems to expand into deliciousness. And this isn’t the time to wonder where it has gone, poof!

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I was planning to sit out here and read this book that I haven’t given up on by any means, but have been neglecting. Then I looked aside and saw the first calendula flower, and this is what happened. But now I will get down to business.

 

 

Solar Flashback calendula May2016
calendula – Solar Flashback

We thirst for time’s transformation.

quotes, time, ,

I continue my alphabetical posts, from which I took a Holy Week hiatus after “S for squash.” That brings me to “T” for — what else? — time.

In my recent musings on the meaning of kairos vs. chronos, I found this passage from Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s journals:

This morning during Matins I had a jolt of happiness, of fullness of life, and at the same time the thought: I will have to die! But in such a fleeting breath of happiness, time usually schmemann close 16‘gathers itself.’ In an instant, not only are all such breaths of happiness remembered but they are present and alive — that Holy Saturday in Paris when I was a young man — and many such ‘breaks.’ It seems to me that eternity might not be the stopping of time, but precisely its resurrection and gathering. The fragmentation of time, its division, is the fall of eternity. Maybe the words of Christ are about time when He said, ‘…not to destroy anything but I will raise it all on the last day.’ The thirst for solitude, thirst for the transformation of time into what it should be — the receptacle, the chalice of eternity.

Offer this moment.

quotes, time,

Mother Alexandra was born Princess Ileana of Romania. She married and bore children, https://i2.wp.com/commons.orthodoxwiki.org/images/9/9a/MotherAlexandra.jpgestablished hospitals, and wrote books before joining a monastery later in life. A little later still she founded Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Pennsylvania. This year marks 25 years since her repose, and Frederica Mathewes-Green shared this quote from one of Mother Alexandra’s handwritten notebooks:

I sometimes think we give too much importance to our outward attitude of prayer. We expect too much emotionally of ourselves, much more than God is asking for.

God is only asking us to remember Him at all times, in good and bad periods to offer Him this moment of our time–this moment, not the following one. The present is what He asks; not in great gestures of surrender, but in a continual natural stream even as we breathe.

The great moments will then be vouchsafed us by Divine grace when we are reaching for them, when prayer quickens into a life of its own and carries us with it to unexpected heights, and above all peace and joys. Prayer carries us–not we our prayer.

A scheme for my springtime.

church, education, nature, time, writing, ,

alphaomegaEarly on in our 21 years of homeschooling I found that my style of learning and teaching was suited to doing unit studies. Someone has explained the concept like this: “Unit studies are collections of learning activities tied to a theme. They are popular with many homeschooling families because they provide a hands-on approach to learning that incorporates subjects such as math, science, language arts, and the social sciences.”

I think the first such curriculum we used was Konos, which centered the lessons on character qualities, starting with the quality of Attentiveness. The reasoning was that in order to learn anything, we must pay attention. One part of the nature/science study for this unit was Birds, because to notice them requires associated powers of patience and concentration. Pathfinder built a bird feeder on a post outside the dining room window and ever aftegl P1030454r, as long as we lived in that house, while we ate our meals we could watch the house finches enjoying theirs at the same time.

I thought of the word attentiveness when I was developing my idea for a series of blog posts to write over the next month or so. I wish I had some simple unifying theme that would tie together the recent myriad events and thoughts that seem to demand my reflective documentation. Ah, but I do – because my theology is also suited to Life as a big unit study, with one theme: Everything is a gift from God.

That still doesn’t help me to separate my material into short blog posts, especially at this season when I have less time to sit around thinking and writing. So I am going to use a kind of easy-reader (easy-writer!) system of The Alphabet. Every day or two I will try to write, going through the 26 letters in sequence. This post is my first, using the letter A, which does stand for Attentiveness.

And also for the Alpha and Omega, which is one of the names of God. He is the Beginning and the End, as those Greek letters are the first and last of that alphabet. He and his creation comprise the totalitygl candle from DH of what there is to study and know. All the rest has no substance.

Just last week we remembered the one-year anniversary of my husband’s falling asleep in the Lord. A dear friend gave me this candle as a memorial present, with the letters Alpha and Omega pressed into it.

I’ve still been thinking about kairos a lot. It is described as that time when everything happens at once, or as eternal time, when God gathers all time together. It’s the kind of time we experience in Divine Liturgy, and I think it is the reason for the idea that “Nothing is ever lost.”

I think that is a good beginning to my springtime storytelling. And with all of that material available, who can tell what each day, or post, might bring?