To love life

"To love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again." 

- Ellen Bass

"We're all angry"

This was so good I read it twice.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/03/anne_lamott_look_at_the_tea_party_some_of_the_angriest_most_hateful_people_on_earth_and_they%E2%80%99re_backed_by_what_they_think_is_scripture/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow


"...To forgive someone is the hardest work we do. I’ve had to be disciplined about it. I always say I’m so disciplined in my writing because very strict discipline is the only way I’ve found any freedom as an artist. Like meditation or in my spiritual journey, or exercise – hiking … you never want to do any hard work – you just want to watch MSNBC and eat miniature Kit-Kats. Believe me, that’s what I’d prefer to do. Or maybe try to catch up with old issues of the New Yorker.

But in my work, I hold an imaginary pop gun to my head, and I sit down and my butt stays in the chair no matter what.

Not forgiving makes you toxic. And then you really have very little to offer your family or the world or your audience, because you’re faking it.

...All wisdom traditions have at their root three basic ideas: To take care of the poor, to cultivate a sense of presence or union with a power much greater than ourselves, and to soften the heart. In the fullness of those traditions – as opposed to the fundamentalist version of those traditions – you don’t hit back. For me as a Christian, the two main things are you’re supposed to “let go and let God,” and you’re supposed to turn the other cheek. Those two things are like my two worst realms. People are always saying, “Let go and let God …” and I just want to stab them. People say, “We just need to forgive and forget.” As if they had.

...The other night I did a big event, and someone asked what I hope people there left with. And I said, I hope people realize that we’re infinitely more similar, more alike, than we are different — that we’re all angry, no matter how sweet or Buddhist or Christian or tender-hearted we appear. We’re all angry. And we’ve got to deal with it at some point. And dealing with the grief and the anger and the lack of forgiveness is the way home.

A tradition of that is something I’ve been able to pass on to my son. He’s grown up with a mother who’s willing to be contrite, to get to the bottom of things – and to see that sometime it’s me who I’ve been mad at. The tradition of letting your children watch you ask for forgiveness is beautiful."

I don't know how it happened

I don't know how it happened but when I moved to Prescott in August I was assigned a visiting teacher that I immediately liked. She is not perfect and she does not pretend to be. I can let out my true feelings and she nods or swears with me or gives me hugs or asks more questions. We exchange articles and parenting advice. She's still nursing her toddler and we laugh when our potty trained, speaking-in-full-sentences children interrupt our conversations to put their hand down our shirts. Both of our eldests are sensitive. She chose natural births (and a water birth with her last) and nods with a look of understanding when I say that I never ever ever ever want to be pregnant again. She babysits for me frequently and invited me over for pizza, cake, and ice cream on my birthday and we let the kids stay up too late running wild while we talked and talked.

A couple days ago I mentioned to said friend that I needed to go coat shopping because I'm being a crazy border girl and running around freezing my butt off wearing a sweatshirt jacket. Five minutes ago I heard a loud knock on the door and children giggling. When I opened the door I saw a gift bag on my doorstep and the backs of two little boys sprinting for a van yelling to each other, "HURRY! HURRY".

This is the note attached, and this is me crying like a baby in my new warm coat.

Oh my gosh, people are so funny!

http://www.deseretnews.com/user/comments/865606052/Saturdays-Warrior-returns-with-new-contemporized-40th-anniversary-show.html

Some reviews:

"The whitest musical I have ever seen."
--Brian Llewelyn, Scottsdale Courier

"The only non-high school musical playing in Gilbert this month."
--Sarah Evans, Gilbert Telegraph

"The 13/8 time signature of all the songs a perfect fit for the overall plot."
-- Martin Tinedale, Mexicali Messenger

A Sunday Sermon

from: http://bycommonconsent.com/2014/04/13/sunday-sermon-creation/

Author Lauren Winner writes in her book, Still:

My friend Ruth’s mother once told her, ‘Every ten years you have to remake everything.’ Reshape yourself. Reorient yourself. Remake everything. What struck Ruth about this was not just the insight, but the source: she had imagined that her mother, her steadfast, loving mother, was static, was always the same. She didn’t know that her mother had remade everything seven times, eight times. Sometimes the reshaping is not big, not audible; not a move, a marriage, a child, a heroic change of course. Sometimes it is only here inside, how you make sense of things. Sometimes it is only about who you know yourself to be. [6]

I don’t have any great insights on this rebuilding process. All I know is that it will require patience—with yourself, with others, even with God. Abraham 4:17-18 reads: “And the Gods set them [the lights] in the expanse of the heavens, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to cause to divide the light from the darkness. And the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed” (emphasis added). Sometimes after we start the process of rebuilding something, we have to be patient and watch and wait for things to play out. Maybe it doesn’t work, and we have to start the process over again.

Lauren Winner’s book is about her journey through an ebb of faith. Toward the end she writes:

From this place now—not in the midst of the marital maelstrom; not in the middle of discovering God’s abstraction, but a little while later—in this clearing, I can begin to see those people and stories and words that held me to something resembling the Christian faith; that hold me still, if sometimes with a loose stitch.

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the centre of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes—for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God. (Winner, 193-94)

The Björk song “Unravel” poignantly describes a process of recreating:

While you are away
My heart comes undone

Slowly unravels
In a ball of yarn

The devil collects it
With a grin

Our love
In a ball of yarn

He’ll never return it

So when you come back
We’ll have to make new love

What we rebuild will never be the same as what has been torn down. The materials we have at hand might be different, or we might have to reassemble them in a new way—the thimble we used here may have to fit somewhere else, and we may have lost the hub cap altogether. But we can rebuild. May we have the courage and the patience with ourselves to create of our lives what the Lord would have us build, and may we help others along the way.

—

pg. 48

Grades suck

A comment I liked on an unschooling post:

"That's what we've noticed about minecraft, too -the amount of online learning kids do together without grown ups.

Collaborative learning, instead of instruction.

Is the learning invalid just because it's driven by kids who want to play a game? What I mean is, shouldn't learning like that "count?" Collaborative learning is a life skill, not really a school skill. In some school situations, collaboration is "cheating".

If kids only get graded on what the teacher thinks is important, how much do the teachers miss?

An adult asked one of my kids the other day how his grades were. My son kind of looked at me, at a loss. His "grades" are fine, except nobody grades him. About every four months, we write up something detailing our kids' activities, major accomplishments, and interests.

And sometimes the accomplishment is … personal. Spent six months with the neighbors on scooters and skateboards having an ongoing nerf war… That's phys ed, leadership, construction, persuasion, problem solving, financial management, and first aid. We don't really grade it, just make note of it and talk it over with him.

For other activities, the only grade is 100%. Rosetta Stone doesn't advance until your answer is correct. The piano teacher doesn't pass you until the piece is correct. You don't get the part unless your audition is good. Your robot either works or it does not work, and you fix it. Your basketball team wins or loses. The dog learns the new skill, or the child keeps training and practicing.

I try to validate the art of deliberate practice so my kids see the connection between training and results.

I would worry if they spent a lot of time thinking about "grades". Learning is what matters.

Posted by mh on November 19, 2014 at 9:04 am | permalink | Reply