Tag Archives: Simone Weil

A batch of cookies and summer loves.

books, friends, my garden, summer, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Crape Myrtles are in full bloom in my neighborhood, including on my own property. Mine is not more than five years old, and in the last year it seems to have doubled in size.

I’ve been walking down to the creek bridge and beyond several times a week, and all the trees and plants growing in and on the banks of that stream also seem to have mushroomed, so that I can barely see the water below the bridge.

I love the summer, because it’s only in the occasional heat waves of the season that I can feel fully at home and in sync with the earth. In this climate with marine influence, where the evenings get cold and breezy even in the summer, it’s a treat to fully sink into the warmth and stay there all evening; even when I climb into bed I am relaxed, and don’t have to pull several layers up to my chin against the chill. Of course, this sounds crazy to those of you who live in high-humidity summer zones!

Even when it was over 100 degrees last week, I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden morning and evening, and then work on other projects in the middle of the day. I have plenty of paperwork and sorting yet to accomplish. If I ever finish that — Please God, help me! — I could sew, or read, or get back into writing book reviews …

When I read on my phone, I’ve started taking screen shots of quotes that I don’t want to lose. And I often look up words I don’t know — On Substack there are so many good writers with vast vocabularies — and take screenshots of the definitions.

Spider in the plum tree.

One morning as I set out on my usual walking route, I passed by the house down on the corner, where a vegetable garden has been carved out of the lawn, next to the sidewalk. For months I have been admiring the health and size of the plants, and that morning I spied a dozen beautiful yellow summer squashes peeking out from under the leaves, several of which should have been picked days earlier; on my way back I debated about whether to inquire about them. If the owners didn’t want them for some reason, I would take them… and if the gardeners had suddenly been incapacitated and couldn’t pick their own squash, I could offer to do that for them….

It sounded reasonable… and one hates to see beautiful vegetables going to waste… but what if I got involved with people I found disagreeable? Or who were needy beyond my abilities to help? I stood on the sidewalk and thought a while, then walked up to the door and knocked. The result: I made a new gardening friend.

Dee gave me three overgrown squashes, though none of the size I’d have preferred, and she invited me to come back for more. She enjoyed talking about her garden, and told me about her family that she lives with, including her recently widowed mother, who she said is the cook of the household. I wondered if that cook prefers overgrown zucchinis…. On one of the less sweltering days I did cook the squashes into a spicy, satisfying stew, which I was glad to have..

That’s my own chard and collards in the picture above, the leaves that were not eaten by insects or mollusks; I picked almost all of my greens and now my own little squash plants are spreading out in the planter boxes. Recently I transplanted the tarragon out of a pot into one of those boxes where it will get more regular watering, and it is thriving.

I used several sprigs of it to make Anytime Apricot and Tarragon Cookies from the Dorie’s Cookies book. They were in the chapter called “Cocktail Cookies,” and the recipe includes no sweetening beyond the dried apricots and tarragon.

I baked those savory shortbread cookies to take to friends who’d invited me for lunch, who I knew didn’t care for sweets very much. But they are winemakers, so I thought they might like the kind of savory cookies one could nibble on while sipping a glass of wine. We all thought they were really nice; it was amazing how much subtle sweetness we tasted in them; I think the level of saltiness helped bring it out.

I got together with several women who are collaborating to share homemaking skills; for our first meeting we focused on knitting. I had two cotton dishcloths I’d knitted a while back, which I decided to join together. I tried crocheting them together but I couldn’t figure out how to do that while at the same time chatting with everyone, so I just sewed them together with a blanket stitch.

I don’t have hopes of becoming an expert knitter, but I like to be with these women. And their babies! (At church there is a new family with a little guy just turned one, and he is the friendliest love bug. He loves me! And I never tire of holding him.)

Our host had an awe-inspring jar of kombucha scoby on her kitchen counter, and two of our group were happy to take home a quart of it to get their own kombucha production up and running again. My own fermenting experiments stalled decades ago with yogurt-making, and a succession of three yogurt makers that never satisfied. I never tried making sauerkraut, because that was a food I have been prejudiced against ever since it made a regular appearance on our table when I was a child; I did somehow manage to enjoy kimchi when my son “Soldier” brought it into the family’s already international culinary repertoire.

But I have made Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste!  Lemon verbena is one of my garden treasures, but I haven’t pruned my plant often enough or used its leaves much, and it has gotten very leggy. So when I saw a young and well-shaped specimen in the grocery store, I brought it home and now have two such treasures. When I pruned the older plant, I took all the leaves to make Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste. There were more or less potent recipes online; I used the one with the highest ratio of herb to sugar, 2 cups to 1/2 cup.

I stuck the paste in the freezer and hope I will remember to bring it out to add to tea, sprinkle on desserts, use as a glaze, etc. Maybe I’ll also remember to tell you here if I do.

After I asked my friend Cori what were her summer reading plans, naturally she asked me back. I should have anticipated that and not asked her to begin with — because I have no real plans, and feel like an imposter. I have been reading less than usual. I see that of the nineteen books I pictured here five months ago, I have read just two. Only one of those I got to the end of was from the stack I was going to “try extra hard” to read this year. Well, the year is half over, so it doesn’t look promising for those selections. I took new pictures of the “summer books” to show Cori, because it was easier than typing out the titles.

Four of those I have at least started reading, and the Undset book is my current reading-while-falling-asleep choice. I have, typically, read several books that I didn’t anticpate back in February, and some of them were not worth talking about, or even reading to the end.

But let me just mention a young adult novel I did read to the end and liked a lot, What the Night Sings. Written by Vesper Stamper, who was one of the speakers at the Symbolic World Summit I attended earlier in the year in Florida, this is a coming-of-age-in-the-Holocaust story, illustrated by the author. First I listened to the novel, and then I borrowed the hard copy from the library, because I wanted to see the illustrations, which are many, and are very well done, as is the whole story. Stamper’s Berliners, is at hand, too, waiting for me.

If you have read — or even scrolled — this far in my ramble, I’m impressed! There is some reason you stayed so long, though there were doubtless some topics along the way that didn’t interest you. Whoever you are, I appreciate you very much.

The caged bird learns from the silent lily.

books, current events, nature, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Let us now look more closely at the lily and the bird from whom we are to learn. The bird keeps silent and waits: it knows, or rather it fully and firmly believes, that everything takes place at its appointed time. Therefore the bird waits, but it knows that it is not granted to it to know the hour or the day; therefore it keeps silent. ‘It will surely take place at the appointed time,’ the bird says. Oh no, the bird does not say this, but keeps silent. But its silence speaks, and its silence says that it believes it, and because it believes it, it keeps silent and waits.” -Søren Kierkegaard

I worked very hard last week to compose a second post on Kierkegaard’s The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, which I am reading along with Mags. No good fruit seemed to come from my effort, though I wrote many words in a draft and searched for appropriately themed photos. When earlier this week I heard from Simone Weil through her anthologist Laurie Gagne, who was interviewed on Mars Hill Audio, that a writer must often wait patiently for the right word, it made me think more hopefully about the outcome.

I had begun at least two weeks ago, writing about the new bird community just on the other side of my fence, a few feet away from me when I garden. They are tropical birds in several large cages, temporary residents while their owners are between houses, and they are noisily chirping and even screeching from dawn to dusk. That long time ago, as it seems now, I was focused on their being jungle birds, surely not the sort that inspired Kierkegaard’s contemplations. I cleverly speculated that if Kierkegaard had lived in the jungle he wouldn’t have been likely to write the book he did.

But more pertinent to my present situation, only days later, is the fact that they are caged birds. And right now, many of us the world over feel like caged birds, in our efforts to slow the spread of a quickly spreading virus. Some are less restricted than others because they are in a type of helping role, but they also are at more risk. I, who am healthy and feeling in some ways younger than ever, have been grouped with The Elderly; I am trying to submit meekly, in my mind as well as my body, to my classification and assigned task: to stay home. In this regard, what Kierkegaard writes about seeking God’s kingdom first is something to take to heart:

“But then, in a certain sense is there in fact nothing I shall do? Yes, quite true, in a certain sense there is nothing. You shall in the deepest sense make yourself nothing, become nothing before God, learn to keep silent. In this silence is the beginning, which is first to seek God’s kingdom.”

He does talk about how humans often enter into this silence when they are praying: “…as he became more and more fervent in prayer, he had less and less to say, and finally he became entirely silent…. indeed, he became what is, if possible, even more the opposite of talking than silence: he became a listener.”

Currently, the whole world is waiting. The necessity of waiting is a gift given to us, an opportunity, but if I only wait on the decisions of authorities and on the latest statistics, my waiting is of little value.

“This is also how it is with the lily, it keeps silence and waits. It does not ask impatiently, ‘When is the spring coming?’ [see Pippin’s daffodils at right] because it knows that it will come at the appointed time; it knows that it would not benefit in any way whatever if it were permitted to determine the seasons of the year. It does not say, ‘When will we get rain?’ or ‘When will we have sunshine?’ or ‘Now we have had too much rain,’ or ‘Now it is too hot.’ …. Then the moment comes, and when the moment comes, the silent lily understands that now is the moment, and makes use of it.”

Obviously I myself know little of this subject experientially, but Søren Kierkegaard and the birds and flowers and all of nature have a lot to share, which I love to pass on! Glory to God, that He somehow arranged for me to find this particular book, chosen for its brevity. Ha! Every paragraph seems to have a world of meaning that one could meditate on for a year. The author must have known how to wait for the right word, as Simone Weil talks about.

Suffering. Are we not all suffering right now? Suffering at the most superficial level by our own movements being curtailed, or because we can’t find our favorite food in the stores, all the way to those who are suffering in a holy and productive way, deeply in their souls, expressing coinherence with the healthcare workers of Italy or with the helplessly panic-stricken of any place. When I think of all the monastics and even my priest, who are accustomed to self-containment and waiting on God, who are praying for all the rest of us who pray little, I feel both grateful and ashamed. When I pray with them at all, via their live-streamed services, it strengthens my ability to wait.

Simone Weil

Charles Williams coined that word coinherence that I used above, but I don’t think he invented the truth that each of us is mysteriously and mystically united to the other. Simone Weil knew about this, too, and not in a theoretical way, but in the compassion and solidarity that emanated from her heart. When she was only five, she heard that soldiers (in the first World War) had no ration of sugar, so she refused to eat sugar. And much later, when she was at the Sorbonne, we learn more from fellow student Simone de Beauvoir’s writings. When Weil heard about a famine in China, she burst into tears; de Beauvoir envied her for having a “heart that could beat across the world.”

Christ suffered on the Cross in taking on Himself all the death and suffering of mankind, and He calls us to do it for each other, to be little Christs, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s a mystery to me, for sure, but I hope that praying with my fellow creatures everywhere will help me to acquire more of this grace.

Regarding our own personal pain and death, Kierkegaard says that when we are silent, it makes our suffering less. This runs counter to modern culture in which we all want to talk in an effort to relieve suffering.

“The bird keeps silent and suffers. However much heartache it has, it keeps silent. Even the melancholic mourning dove of the desert or of solitude keeps silent. It sighs three times and then keeps silent, sighs again three times, but is essentially silent. For what it is it does not say; it does not complain; it accuses no one; it sighs only to fall silent again. Indeed, it is as if the silence would cause it to burst; therefore it must sigh in order to keep silent.”

And by that silence under suffering, Kierkegaard lists several ways suffering is eased; the bird – and potentially we humans! – are freed (I put these points into list form):

“1) From what makes the suffering more burdensome: from the misunderstood sympathy of others;
2) From what makes the suffering last longer: from all the talk of suffering;
3) From what makes the suffering into something worse than suffering: from the sin of impatience and sadness.”

Oh my, I’m afraid I have tempted you to the sin of impatience by my long post, so I am going to stop for now, though I still haven’t come to the end of my meditations on Kierkegaard’s First Discourse. Let me say, in closing, that I am praying with and for people everywhere who are distressed, joining my sighings with yours. I pray that our afflictions may be turned into the sighings of the mourning dove, who after all may be understandably melancholic about the true and sorry state of mankind. Her heartache and sighings become silence, and that is her prayer.