Category Archives: writing

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!

P1040475

 

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

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?

A thousand lesser lights.

church, writing,

Last time I posted an article on my blog, WordPress exclaimed, “You’ve published your 999th blog post!” or something like that, so I know that today will be my 1,000th post. I did some calculating, and that works out to an average of 2-3 per week over almost seven years. Sounds about right.

The milestone calls for some recognition, so I am hearkening back to the beginning, or actually to my first commentary on the beginning, when I marked one year of blogging and explained the name “Gladsome Lights.” At every Vespers we Orthodox sing a hymn that is more often translated, “O Joyous Light,” but when I first came into the Church our choir was using the word “gladsome.” I am putting that blog post up again, after this little intro.

If no one were reading my posts, would they be as satisfying? I think not. So I thank you all again for being an audience and sounding board and for cheering me on. I know that some of you read rarely or never tell me that you do, and I invite you at this historic moment to write me a line. If you don’t want to go through the bother of leaving a comment, I always welcome e-mails and my address is on the About page.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? It’s hard to believe I’ve composed a thousand posts, and harder to imagine that I would do that many more in the future, if I live that long. I’m not the same person who started blogging back then. But in church tonight we sang a refrain that spoke to me encouragingly of the main thing I need to know about the future:

O God, Thou art my Helper;
Thy mercy shall go before me.

cross border yellow[February 2010] Today marks a year that I have been blogging, and that seems like an opportunity to tell the origin of my blog’s name. I only now looked on Wikipedia for the vesperal hymn “O Gladsome Light,” which, when I hear or sing it, always imparts something of the reality of the Holy Trinity of which it tells. When I first thought of writing a blog, there was no other name that ever came to mind, even though I feared it might be presumptuous, to put it mildly, to take that title for my own.

But just as we Christians are to be “little Christs,” so I see that all the gifts I write about come from Him, and anything good that comes from me is a lesser light emanating from God. So I post a candle picture in thanks to Him. I like the little dot at the bottom, a lesser, mirrored light. My tiny candle, or reflection of a candle.

As we are reminded in the first chapter of James: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

O Gladsome Light of the holy glory
Of the Immortal, heavenly, holy, blessed Father,
O Jesus Christ….

What I’m hungry for.

quotes, writing, , ,

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.  The chasm is never completely bridged.  We all have the conviction,
perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

Life has been good. I have been busy — not just to be busy and distracted, but busy with people I love, and taking care of household business. I assure you that doesn’t often mean housecleaning.

I’ve made trips, and hosted guests. I’ve worshiped in God’s temple and admired the butternut squashes ripening in my garden. I’ve cooked and pondered and and walked and read. Every day I think of what I want to write about the many facets of my life and thought, and every night I go to bed unsatisfied in that one desire.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.
The writer experiences everything twice.
Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
-Catherine Drinker Bowen

This dissatisfaction hasn’t been at the forefront of my consciousness until the last few days; I normally go to bed happy and thankful for the sweetness of my existence in the arms of God. But now I’m aware as never before that it’s a gnawing hunger I’ve got to attend to.

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know
till he takes up the pen and writes.
-William Makepeace Thackeray

Probably the next blog post I write after all this blather will consist of some pictures of flowers, or include an icon of the saint of the day, with hardly any words. But I have a new laptop! I can type upstairs or downstairs now, to put down all that’s swarming in my head. I hope it helps.

I do not like to write – I like to have written.
-Gloria Steinem