in quietness

"... in quietness and trust is your strength ..."  Isaiah 30:15

The children are at Grandma's this weekend.

My Farmer and I are rediscovering some elemental luxuries.  We've completed whole sentences.  We've stayed out after bedtime.  We've been noisy and turned lights on after bedtime!  Slept till the sun & the birds woke us up.  Ate meals in the livingroom.  We've sat in the sun and let time tick by ... 

It's been grand.  I'm remembering, again, the importance of rest, and thought I'd share with you a post from the archives, called "de-throning the Protestant work ethic":

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The past few days should have been restful ones.  Outside of basic homemaking (cooking, laundry, overseeing chores and schoolwork) and a very small handful of "special projects", I have had a good bit of free time.  And, feeling I needed a rest (July was one scheduling crisis after another for this homebody), I spent most of that free time divided between my laptop and my Lazy Boy recliner.

When I occasionally surfaced from my books and my blog, I felt guilty.  I should be spring deep cleaning.  I should be weeding flowerbeds.  I should be taking my children on fun, educational day trips.  I should be freezing corn.  I should be canning peaches.  I should .....

I've been undermining my free time by underestimating its value.

Work is good.  If you never work, you can't truly enjoy leisure.  But leisure is good, too.  If you never rest, you can never truly enjoy your work.

I want to be able to enjoy both, so now that I'm fully rested (after a mind-clearing evening at the pottery studio last night, where I figured all this out), I think I'll go find some work to do.  Seems to me I saw some cobwebs somewhere recently ....

(and when I've finished with that, Frederick Beuchner's sermons beckon....)


[first posted August 2011]

morning in the sun

This morning I tackled my flowerbeds.

They've been there, waiting for me, for weeks, and it was only last night's firm decision to venture out that stirred me from the stupor of an overcast sleepy morning.

Lil' Snip kept me company, wandering around in his inadequate Crocs through still-dewy grass while I pulled henbit and chickweed from the scanty irises and emerging hosta.  I uncovered a spiderwort that I'd forgotten about.  Divided and transplanted a primrose in full flower.  Made a pile of sticks for our bonfire pile.

My winter-stiff gardening gloves grew slick and supple from the moist soil and lush weeds, and before I knew it, all that was left in the flowerbed was flowers, and it was time for Lil' Snip's morning crib-time.

I lounged with my laptop while he played in his crib, Sugar and Spice playing Legos in the next room.

My Farmer and Nice came home from the dentist and he & I drank coffee and sampled the truffles he'd found at the dent-n-bent store, while Nice busied herself opening all the packages of toothbrushes and toothpaste.

When he could delay it no longer, my Farmer headed in to work, and Lil' Snip and I headed back out to the next flowerbed, beckoning the Lego Ladies (a.k.a. Sugar and Spice) to come join us.  Nice finished watering the plants in the sunporch and came out to join her sisters in fort-building.

Lil' Snip found a [child-sized] hoe and told me he would "shovel" with me.  I found a spot near me where he could do no harm, and he "shoveled" away while I attacked the rosebed.  Wild strawberries flourished here with henbit and creeping charlie and virginia creepers - apparently all the leaf litter makes that bed a vine paradise.  I pulled and pulled, uprooting all manner of trespassers with abandon, starting from the edges and ruthlessly working my way back.  Lil' Snip called encouragement from time to time:  "We're doing good, Mommy!  Good!"

I filled a wheelbarrow with my weeds.

Finally you could see clearly the daffodils I'd put in last year, the tolerant ferns that refused to die despite my neglect, even some columbine that had braved the jungle.  The chrysanthemum had mysteriously disappeared (not the first one in my care to do so), and some feverfew that had been there apparently accompanied the henbit to the rubbish heap in the wheelbarrow.  Humph, well, it shouldn't look so much like a weed!

Next I approached my eight-year-old Don Juan rose, pruners in gloved hand.  No time to read up on rose-pruning.  I knew myself:  it was now or never.  I cut off obviously dead bits, snipped off crossed or inward-growing branches, and topped the ones that towered above my head.  It was an experiment in horticulture that I could only hope worked out.

About then Sugar called over to me:  "It's time to go in!!"  Where had the time gone?  Lunchtime already?!

Lil' Snip and I dumped the weeds behind the shop while his sisters went inside to make lunch.  He showed me where our Polish crested chicken has hidden a nest; I had to make myself as small as he is to see her!

We went in, glowing, to put away our tools and wash up.  Nothing like a little sunshine and dirt to make you feel pleasantly virtuous.

a curious rest

Today it is quiet in my house.

After my Farmer laced up his work boots and drove off in the Box (our Scion xB), I sat a bit and thought about my day.

I could run errands.

I could lie on the hammock.

I could read.

Or, I could give that door to the garage another coat of paint.

Which I did, my paintbrush stilling my mind to give ear to a sermon on renewing the mind by Bill Johnson.  I wanted to hear more (and don't listen well without activity), so I painted the doorposts around another door, listening to the next sermon in the series.

I scrubbed the sink mats and the kitchen sink while listening to part three.  I washed the dishes to part four.

I drove out for more paint - red, this time, working up my courage for bold color.

Home, I contemplated.  Red - really?  What if I was wrong?  What if it was too much?

[what would my Farmer say?  I asked myself.  He would say - you can always paint over it.]

I dipped my brush into the red ("Wow, that's a lot of red!" the man at the hardware store had said, admiringly, as he added pigment to the can) and ran it along the window frame.  Bright!  I brushed down the side to the sound of Bill Johnson's voice:  part five.

I finished the frame and moved on to paint a door red.  Then doorposts to another door (we have a LOT of doors in our kitchen - nine, if you count empty doorways, too).  Part six.

I took a break to grill a sandwich.  I scraped a screen door (but need outdoor paint for that one) and looked at a new-to-me budget website.  Retired to the hammock to call my Farmer about supper plans.

My day is nearly over, now.

Somehow, despite the work I did, despite the listening, and listening, and listening ... I had a day of rest.  I am still inside - "I have stilled & quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me."  Psalm 131:2

Curious.  My mind feels renewed ...

today

The rain poured down, this morning.  I rescued a bucket of brand-new sidewalk chalk from the driveway after pondering the "natural consequences" theory of discipline and rejecting it in favor of not having wasted the five bucks I paid ... and because I like to use the chalk, too.

My tiny kitchen "sideboard" overflows with fruit from the grocery store and my Farmer's fields - peaches, asian pears, yellow & purple plums:  evidence of abundance.

A bouquet that Spice picked for me last night graces the table:  a handful of foxtails, and a spike of fiery red gladiola blossoms - her signature careless beauty.

Caterpillars in a glass gallon jar change slowly, unknowingly, into winged creatures.

A boy demands, insists, and learns to say "May I please?"  His hands know how to be gentle even as his feet clomp about in big sister's sneakers, his current preferred footwear.

Sugar french-knots her doll's name into fleece, making a pillow, proud of her artistry, her skill.

Paint-with-water pages litter the table, the counter, the fridge, like rabbits overbreeding.

The lights are on; the sky outside still dim.

Chores are done - schoolwork, too - early this time.  A new dry-erase board makes it mysteriously more fun.

The task in front of me, making out a list of food to buy, scatters with interruptions from children and from facebook.  I am permanently halfway done.  My own to-do list cowers by the fridge, intimidated by my lethargy.  Bake bread, it exhorts.  Make ice cream cake for Spice's birthday.  (I write a blog post instead.)

To be disciplined & do what needs to be done .... to know how to rest ... what is the agenda for today?

I try to listen.

de-throning the Protestant work ethic

The past few days should have been restful ones.  Outside of basic homemaking (cooking, laundry, overseeing chores and schoolwork) and a very small handful of "special projects", I have had a good bit of free time.  And, feeling I needed a rest (July was one scheduling crisis after another for this homebody), I spent most of that free time divided between my laptop and my Lazy Boy recliner.

When I occasionally surfaced from my books and my blog, I felt guilty.  I should be spring deep cleaning.  I should be weeding flowerbeds.  I should be taking my children on fun, educational day trips.  I should be freezing corn.  I should be canning peaches.  I should .....

I've been undermining my free time by underestimating its value.

Work is good.  If you never work, you can't truly enjoy leisure.  But leisure is good, too.  If you never rest, you can never truly enjoy your work.

I want to be able to enjoy both, so now that I'm fully rested (after a mind-clearing evening at the pottery studio last night, where I figured all this out), I think I'll go find some work to do.  Seems to me I saw some cobwebs somewhere recently ....

(and when I've finished with that, Frederick Beuchner's sermons beckon....)

in praise of boredom

Ahhh, boredom!  That delicious restlessness that comes upon a body and mind so fully rested as to absolutely demand fresh activity!!

(To this mother of four, such a sensation has been entirely novel for years).

A child who is privileged to experience boredom (and who has learned through experience that nothing interesting happens when she whines about it), is ushered into that most exciting and satisfying realm of childhood:  invention.

The world lies at her feet.  What shall she do?

Read a book?  Lie in the sunshine with a kitten?  Ride her bike?  Look for flowers?  Pick raspberries for extra spending money?  Rummage through the recycling bin for "building" materials?  Swing on a hammock?  Shoot baskets?  Draw with chalk wherever chalk will "stick"?

Or make something inside .... a Lego house, say, or a fort with sofa cushions?  Maybe write a letter, or sew something from her own personal stash of fabrics?  Bead a necklace?  Set up a tea party with her sister?

Or, hmmmm .... swing?  Do a little imaginary "cooking" with grasses, leaves, and dried flower bits in her recycling-bin pots and pans?  Explore the barn?  Lie in the cool shade and invent kinder worlds than this one?  Maybe make a "treehouse" in the Japanese maple tree, or fashion crosses from sticks tied with grass, or build a village of wigwams with whatever nature can supply.  Or make "gardens" in the dirt between the ancient roots of the pecan tree.

How could I ever deprive my children of the opportunity to create such intriguing play?  How could I ever come up with such interesting things on my own for them to do?  And even if I could, how dull it would seem to them to do "Mommy's play."

No, the TV will remain high up out of reach.  The videos will be limited to rainy days in such succession as to exhaust the supply of indoor play.  The computer?  It has not yet occurred to them to find it interesting (I can only accept blame for this, as I must appear pitiable to them as I sit slouched in front of it).

And the only ideas I will have when mine are requested will be for patios swept, little brother watched, beds made up, trash taken out, laundry folded, flowerbeds weeded, sinks scrubbed, rugs shaken out........

I think that will be sufficient to keep from being asked too often, don't you?