bearing blog

Treasure-hunting.

My eleven-year-old recently sat for his first set of fill-in-the-bubbles, comprehensive nationally standardized tests.  Till now we've fulfilled our legal obligations with an annual sitting of the PIAT-R or "Peabody" test, which is administered verbally; I like that format for younger children, but of course I'd prefer my older kids to get comfortable with the format they'll be using for college boards and the like.

I'm satisfied with his performance, but I had to point out to him something that amused me about his lowest score.  It was on the topic "Searching for Information" on the "Reference Materials" test.  

Let's just put it this way:  When was the last time you used an almanac?  When was the last time anyone used an almanac?    Isn't the answer to "Where would you find this sort of information?" always "Google it" now?

Don't get me wrong, I'll sit down with him and teach him about the various uses of an almanac, a multivolume alphabetical dead-tree encyclopedia, an atlas -- heck, I'll teach him about the Guinness Book of World Records if I have to.  But I'm afraid it's going to have to be a history lesson.

+ + +

The instant availability of searchable information has affected far more academic pursuits than those of schoolchildren writing reports about the annual rainfall in Colorado or the principal exports of Nicaragua.

I had this thought while reading over Melanie's latest installment in her "Blogging T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" series.  

The Waste Land is an exceptionally intricate poem, exceptionally difficult to analyze -- even to read and experience.  Advanced high school students can deal with something like The Hollow Men;  The Waste Land, by contrast, is packed full of so many allusions and references that the person who aspires to read it and understand it with any degree of ease must either possess

(1) a wide-ranging literary background including some facility in several languages  --OR--

(2)  a heavily annotated edition of the poem in which all the literary references are explained to you.

Number one is difficult, and renders the poem inaccessible to almost everyone.   Number two is not so hard to come by, but it is not very fun, and it also ruins the experience of sitting and reading.

That has been what it takes, for many years.

+ + +

But now, our information environment is so very different -- the experience of reading something like The Waste Land is more like a treasure hunt.  The reader reads along, comes upon a place that catches the eye:  Here is something intriguing; what can it mean?  

So, for example, in lines 31-34 of the poem, you come to this:

Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu/Mein Irisch Kind/Wo weilest du?

And hey,  I can recognize it as German, but I don't speak or read German.  I can guess at some of this (fresh is the wind? my Irish child?) but not much.  

But it's a simple matter to Google the whole mess and to discover that the passage is a quote from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. 

You could follow the links that are all about The Wasteland, of course, and other people's ideas about why Eliot quoted Tristan und Isolde just here, and why this passage.  That is, you could if you were in a hurry, or if you wanted to cheat, and if you were more interested in hearing what other people think than in thinking about the poem yourself.  (Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want.)

But if you are more interested in the treasure hunt, and coming up with your own ideas, you could instead turn to Googling Tristan und Isolde, in which case you'd discover that there is a British movie version released in 2006, and you'd also find the Wikipedia page with a synopsis, with a synopsis, plus other topics such as the influence of Schopenhauer on the plot of the opera.  

Maybe you would follow the Schopenhauer thread ("Hm, it says here 'The world-view of Schopenhauer dictates that the only way for man to achieve inner peace is to renounce his desires!' Could that be a theme of The Waste Land?") or maybe you would keep searching until you found a translation of just that bit of the passage.  That might lead you to compare different translations, as Melanie has in her latest post.  

We can meet the poem in a sort of middle ground now.  Even people who haven't had a really top-notch literary education can have all the references at their fingertips, and we can follow the rabbit trails of the poem as we will with relative ease.  We can do this now without having to passively listen to a lecturer explaining each line at a time, or passively checking the footnotes of our annotated edition.  Now we can read and enjoy it actively, individually, according to what strikes our fancy; exploring and discovering the poem on our own.  

Something like The Waste Land  is no longer a sealed message from one high-end mind to its fellows, accessible only to those privileged by a lavish education or the luxury of enough leisure time to become self-taught.  It is now almost like a puzzle carefully crafted by Eliot, a puzzle that the ordinary literate person can tease apart bit by bit, independently, or perhaps in a conversation among friends -- like the one unfolding in Melanie's combox.

If you enjoy that sort of thing, it's fun.  A lot more fun for me than it was before the Internet.   And if anyone ever asks me "In what source of information would you look to find out the analysis of a difficult piece of literature?" I'll be filling in the circle that goes with "the blogosphere."

Quiet reconstructions.

(This post was updated  at 5:10 pm to add links to the artwork mentioned)

 

Mark is off on his annual ski trip, leaving the children and me home for a rare weekend without him. We are quite used to being on our own on weekdays and weekday nights, because his job takes him out of town frequently, but weekend trips are unusual. We shook it up a little: I took the kids to Saturday evening Mass, so that there would not be a morning rush, and (here is a first for me) hired a babysitter for Sunday afternoon so I could slip out and get a little breathing space.

With no one to tell me to turn off the light, and no place to go early in the morning, I stayed up late Saturday reading. Long after the two-year-old had nursed to sleep, his jaws going slack and releasing me, I glanced at the clock and put my book aside, and then slid carefully out of bed, thirsty. The light from the bedroom cast my shadow on the stairwell wall as I descended to the kitchen in my pajamas and bare feet.

I had left a dim light on -- I always do when Mark is gone -- so I could see for the trip to the faucet with my glass. After I drank a long draught and set the empty glass on the counter, I paused to look around me. I had swept the kitchen thoroughly and wiped the counters before herding the children up to bed, and though the floor was probably not very clean, in the dim light no smudges were visible and the dark wood gleamed softly. The books were put away and the area rug was swept. The dishwasher hummed and swished. My rocking chair by the bookshelf looked suddenly inviting, and instead of climbing back up the stairs I went over and sat down, drawing my legs up under myself in the perch to which I, whose feet rarely extend to the floor from an easy chair, am accustomed.

Everyone else was asleep or absent. I looked around me and felt a sudden welling-up of pleasure in the ownership of my home. It is funny, of course I own this home with Mark -- we literally "made" this home together, designed it for our family. I rarely think of the "mine-ness" of it. Being home in it is so ordinary, and it is usually the source of so many things I must get and do and fix and clean and prepare -- I do not often stop and center myself in it. And yet, here it is, always all around me, sheltering us all together.

I kind of like it empty and clean-looking. I don't get to see it that way very often. That pleasure would not be so potent if I did not get to enjoy it noisy, full, and messy almost every day, I suppose.

I am not home now. I am at a local modern art museum (the Walker, for those who know Minneapolis). The kids are home with the babysitter. I will have to get up and go back in just a few minutes.

One of the exhibits that is here right now is called "Lifelike." It is a collection of pieces that look like ordinary objects, or really are ordinary objects. Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes are there, and Chuck Close's "Big Self-Portrait", as well as some photorealist paintings, and a charming painted wooden sculpture called "Weeds" of lifelike little plants that appear to be growing from the crack between wall and floor. There was a short film which at first glance appeared to be images of New York City street scenes, dumpsters and signage and the like, but on closer examination had been shot on a working sound stage that is used for city street scenes in movies. Things like that: either the truly ordinary brought into close focus, or illusions of ordinariness. One of the installations that attracted me most was "Bremen Towne," a room that had been carefully assembled to be an exact replica of the kitchen of the artist's midcentury childhood home. That artist, Keith Edmier, had obtained the correct model of refrigerator, vintage cabinetry, and so on. Where he could not obtain the right type of item, he had manufactured them: the linoleum tiles had been laser-etched using a single original tile as a pattern, and the dinette set had been sculpted.

I could not help but feel a certain link between the gleaming vintage kitchen and dinette, nostalgia for the past executed in Formica and harvest-gold Amana finish, and my feeling of nostalgia-for-the-present-moment of being in my own quiet kitchen late at night. The artist had created a clean, perfect kitchen after his own memories, and it was pleasant to stand in the cheery, midcentury (so retro!) space. His memories, though, must contain more noise and mess than this, just as my life usually does. At the same time, there is something real and really peaceful, not artificial, about the quiet of my late-night kitchen. The children are real, and really sleeping upstairs. Maybe it is just a little message to myself that I need to take the time to enjoy the space I live in on my own terms, a little more often than I do.

Perceived deficits in the homeschool.

There are some good conversations going on in the comments on the recent post about the "one-room" schooling techniques and in the post about deficits in the homeschool.

I want to talk a little bit about perceived deficits in the homeschool.

What are you comparing your homeschool to, anyway?

If you think you are comparing it to an institutional school, do you have a realistic idea of what goes on in your average institutional school?  Sure, many high school students have access to excellent teachers and a great peer group, but even in the good schools there are often mediocre teachers and bad classes.  I went to a pretty good high school, and I encountered some really excellent teachers there -- my French teacher was absolutely top-of-the-line, my English literature teacher was memorable and engaging, my chemistry teacher could have taught Bill Nye how not to bore people.  I learned a lot in those classes.  But I also had some really bad teachers -- substandard ones, or mean ones, or incompetent ones, or lazy ones, or possibly-mentally-ill ones -- whose classes were a waste of time or worse.  A lot of it is hit-or-miss.  Few schools of any kind excel at everything.

Is the problem that you cannot give enough one-on-one time to each student?  How much one-on-one time do you think students get in an institutional school?  It is not the equivalent of a full-time tutor every day of the week.  

Certainly there are efficiencies in an institutional school that a large-family homeschool cannot match.  When one teacher teaches all the English classes and the curriculum is always the same, he just does not have to spend as much time on preparing and planning as we parents do when we are designing our curriculum and schedule to fit a family which forms a new configuration basically every year.   When there is a fully stocked chemistry lab available all the time, laboratory prep time is minimized.  It's easy to put together group learning experiences, like discussing literature or putting on plays or holding debates or setting up games, when there are many other students at the same level.  

But there are different kinds of institutional schools with different strengths -- set up purposely! -- and that's often something we celebrate.  Magnet schools!  There's a performing-arts K-8 public school up the street from me, and within close walking distance is a small public high school specially organized for students who speak Spanish in their homes.  There are language immersion schools and schools designed as interventions for students at risk of dropping out.  There are vocational schools which specialize in turning out students who are already prepared to enter the skilled-labor workforce at age eighteen.  And yes, there are college-preparatory schools.   They all serve different purposes, promise a different educational experience, and turn out young people who are prepared for life in different ways.  Even within those broad categories there are wide variations in style.

And this is a good thing.   People don't typically complain that their child graduated from a college-prep program without also learning in school how to rebuild an engine (though maybe they ought to).  It's not the college placement rate, but the job placement rate and job performance, that we're interested in when we measure whether a vocational-technical high school program is adequately preparing its students.  

The homeschool, too, has its own essence, its own reason for being, its own niche in the educational ecosystem.

 The essence of homeschooling is not academic excellence (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not preparation for a job (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not "special" education for students with particular challenges that make institutional schools a poor fit or a toxic environment (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not that it can set its own schedule rather than being tied to external ones (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not its freedom from externally imposed ideological structures (although homeschools can provide that).

The essence of homeschooling is simply that it happens within the family.

That schooling happens as an outgrowth of family life and family work.  

That the young person is surrounded by people with whom he has meaningful and permanent relationships:  parents, siblings, perhaps grandparents and cousins, friends who are connected to him through a web of relationships between families rather than a single point.  

That the "curriculum" and schoolday is designed neither exactly to suit him as an individual with the perfect environment for his own personal success, nor to shove him along in a faceless crowd that on average receives an education adequate enough to keep trouble away... but for the best interests of the family as a whole, the innate natural grouping of the human organism, the grouping in which we can truly be known as human persons and in which we can learn the art of balancing needs and wants of the self and others.

That is the essence of homeschooling.  That is its specialty.  That is where it shines.

+ + +

H. said to me yesterday, "My standard answer, when someone asks me, 'So, how is the homeschooling going for you?' is "Great.  I love having my kids with me all day.'  It's true, and it's the reason I do it."  Even though H. is confident that she is providing a really excellent education to her three children, she said, it isn't the academic excellence that she chooses to emphasize.  Because that isn't the primary reason she does it.

I laughed and said, "I could never get away with saying that I love having my kids with me all day.   Especially if it had been one of those days.  You know I have no poker face."  But I went on:  "My standard answer doesn't have anything to do with academics either.  I mean, if they press me I say so, and sometimes I tell them  that I enjoy the work of planning the curriculum and things, which is true.  

"But most of the time I tell people, 'What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend all day surrounded by their siblings, and that they have wonderful relationships with each other.'  Which is also true.

"Sometimes I get the response, 'Oh, my kids drive each other crazy if they have to spend ten minutes in the same room.'  But it isn't hard for people to understand that if their kids spent lots of time together, they would probably understand each other better.  Most people get that."

+ + +

Why do homeschoolers judge themselves so poorly, so often?  I really think it's because we are constantly  judging ourselves based on external standards, sometimes imaginary ones, and often ones in which the homeschooling paradigm doesn't make sense.  

We shouldn't judge ourselves against the standards of the urban vo-tech high school, or against the wonderful parish school, or the impressive classical charter school out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood public school.  

We definitely shouldn't judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard of an imaginary school that somehow provides the best of all those worlds:  immersion in a foreign language, and valuable real-world hands-on job skills, and a broad liberal-arts education, and time to go deep into the subjects that are most loved, and an opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, and connections with other young people who live in the same neighborhood, and education centered within the family's own system of values and philosophies, and preparation for the best colleges, all at once.  

Nor should we judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard made up of all the best things we read on the blogs of other homeschools, and none of their drawbacks, because who wants to write at length about those?  (Face it, homeschoolbloggers, we like to brag about our good ideas, not our bad ones, unless we can do it while sounding really Witty and Gritty and Real.)  So, please, let's not fret because we are not able to keep nature notebooks from age four through eighteen, and have all of our children in Suzuki lessons, and have a working wood shop, and collect and use all the official Montessori-method practical-life learning materials, and read the entire Ambleside book lists to the children, and co-school twice a week with another family, and have a field trip three times a month to a local museum/theater/zoo, and operate a working family business wherein the children will learn the Real Meaning of Money, and send them all to the National Spelling Bee...  because nobody else is doing all that either.  We can pick one or two things and do them really well and create massively cool experiences out of them.  We can't do it with everything.

We are families.  Families!  As different as families can be.  

We need to set our own standards for ourselves, and meet those.

That's all.

"My Life as a Prison Wife."

Fascinating.  Inspiring.  Perspective-producing.  This short guest piece by Nicki Stapleton on the "Dear Wendy" advice column is worth a read.

We got married on April 4th and just over a month later, on May 13th, my husband was arrested for armed robbery of two pharmacies. He didn’t take any money — just pills (and he didn’t actually have a weapon). I knew that he had a prescription drug problem but had been clean for over three years (he got clean about six months before we started dating) and I thought he was still clean. I was livid that he broke the law. I was livid that he didn’t come to me for help, but he said he was worried I would leave him because three things I don’t tolerate are abuse, cheating, and drugs.

I was a criminal justice professional (I lost my job because of my husband’s arrest and conviction) and have a Master’s degree in criminal behavior. In four years of working with offenders, I have seen relationships survive prison but I have seen many more fall apart. If I had known that he was going to be arrested a month after our wedding (or at any point), I wouldn’t have married him. I love him, but love isn’t always enough. Less than nine months after he was arrested, and eleven months after we were married, my husband was sentenced to prison….

The main question I get all of the time is “How do you remain faithful?” I used to take offense to this question, but I realize people are just curious. The answer is simple for me: I meant my vows. 

Read the whole thing.

An interesting clarification about her job loss from the comments:  

I worked in a halfway house for sex offenders and had worked there for over 4 years. After he was convicted, I filed a fraternization exemption request (one of our policies was no one was allowed to be in a relationship with/live with/be involved with anyone who was under the supervision of the Department of Corrections) and they basically told me that they refuse to make any exception to the rule and told me either I had to not live with or speak to my husband or I had to leave. Thankfully I was already working elsewhere full time and was only working there on weekends.

The rest of the comments are worth reading too.  I wish her and her husband well.

The Wasteland.

Melanie Bettinelli of The Wine-Dark Sea has started an ambitious project of explaining to the blogosphere why T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" is her favorite poem.  

After I mentioned The Waste Land in my Make your House Fair post, I found myself pondering it in the shower (All my best ideas come to me in the shower). I was recalling my youthful zeal to enlighten the masses about how wonderful Eliot is. I have found that even among people who love The Waste Land it is often misunderstood....

When I first encountered it, I was told that The Waste Land is a poem about the bleakness and despair of the modern world—which is true to a point; but if it is a poem about doubt it is also a poem about hope. In the Judeo-Christian tradition the desert has often been a place of renewal, in the Bible new life is always springing up in places that were thought to be barren. I prefer to read The Waste Land as a great Christian epic that asserts that the problem of faith in the modern of world is not really a new problem but that people in every age need to seek again for the source of life.

...I believe The Waste Land is the poem par excellence that grapples with the problem of faith in a post-Christian world. True, the poem doesn’t mention Christ by name nor is it explicitly Christian in its imagery. But it is, to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, Christ-haunted. I believe that one must enter into the world of the poem and to accept it on its own terms but that it does help to have a tour guide. I propose to become that guide, to offer my own insights and experiences of it. 

Four posts in, and she's barely cracked the first stanza:

part 1 
part 2 
part 3 
part 4 

 

I am fond of the poem, which I encountered in high school English class; but have not had anywhere near Melanie's passion for it, and am looking forward to learning more about it.  Maybe she can communicate that passion -- one cannot have too many of those, literarily speaking.

 

Mathematics, music, and hearing: Vi Hart does it again.

This, one of the videos from the remarkable Vi Hart, is absolutely brilliant.  It's twelve minutes long and worth every minute.  Watch with your kids.

(Incidentally, Vi Hart has recently been hired by Salman Khan to make videos for the Khan Academy.  Hard to imagine a better match.)

Beauty and luxury, through a child's eyes.

Hallie Lord has a guest post at Elizabeth Foss's blog that is worth looking at. She has long argued on her own blog, Betty Beguiles, for a proper understanding of the pursuit of feminine beauty or prettiness, as part of the vocation of mother and wife. Generally there she takes the "pretty is good" side, since so many women have a sort of fear of pretty -- either because they worry it smacks of vanity and materialism, or because they don't have enough self-esteem to think they can pull it off.  

Here she argues for the enjoyment of, shall we say, "girl stuff" (bubble bath, shoes, lipstick) for its own sake, for the sake of the pleasures we find in it.

(To the extent that we like that kind of thing, of course. I'm not veryinto lipstick, for example. But to each girl their own girl stuff.

I was reminded of just how much joy there is to be found in these things as I watched my three sweet small girls celebrate Christmas. I was struck by the glee with which they sought out their most beautiful dresses for Mass on Christmas Eve, the quiet delight they found in brushing one another’s hair with the new hairbrushes that they found tucked into their stockings, and the long hot bubble baths they insisted upon on Christmas afternoon.

My daughters aren’t yet old enough to recognize that there might be value in doing any of these things for the benefit of others; they do them simply because they realize that which is easy for us busy Moms toforget: God created them (and us) for joy and the enjoyment of simple pleasures is their (and our) right.

So often the love that many little girls have for "pretty stuff" is brushed off and even condemned: as evidence of cultural sexism or materialism or vanity or premature sexualization. But it's so nearly universal that I think there must be something naturally good in there too.

I like the conceptof recapturing a little-child-like love for beautiful and luxurious things, as a way of guarding against vanity, by enjoying them as simple pleasures.  So much better than  raising them to more importance than they have,  or else erring in the other direction by thinking of them as worthless or even dangerous. All beauties have their proper place.

 

Don't tell anyone else how to grieve.

Katie Granju has an excellent piece about respecting grief, after the media buzzed for weeks with nasty comments about a grand multipara who had the temerity to hold a memorial service for a child miscarried in the second trimester and to have photographs taken of the child (which were then leaked to the public via a tweet).

 I’ve blogged before about how hypocritical I find it that so many other women who would go to the mat to defend my right NOT to have children are so nasty in their criticisms of another woman’s choice to have lots of children.

... But when it comes to pregnancy loss near or after the time of viability, which is where Michelle Duggar lost her baby, I don’t know anyone who’s been through that particular hell who didn’t see it as losing a baby. Nasty online critics can demean losing a child five months into pregnancy, as the Duggars did, by referring to this family’s dead child with the technical and cold terminology of “miscarried fetus,” but that doesn’t reflect how the mother who birthed that tiny child, held her and laid her to rest feels. To parents who lose a baby in the second or third trimester, they just HAD A CHILD DIE. It’s as simple as that.

If those photos of Michelle Duggar’s dead baby’s foot offend you in some way, why not take that negative emotional energy and turn it into something good. Why not grab your own camera, and go take a photo of your own healthy, beautiful, living child. I’ll bet that as you look through that viewfinder at your own good fortune, manifest in every breath your beloved son or daughter, grandchild, niece or nephew takes, you’ll have a new perspective on this whole thing.

I can understand people (particularly the childless) not understanding the grief that comes from a miscarriage.  You would think that people would not, at least, need to be told that it takes a very small, mean kind of person to mock grief of any kind, but apparently this is not the case.

+ + +

A note:  

The Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Foundation exists to provide, free of charge, remembrance photography to parents who have suffered the loss of a child or who expect their child to die soon after birth.

From their site: “For families overcome by grief and pain, the idea of photographing their baby may not immediately occur to them. Offering gentle and beautiful photography services in a compassionate and sensitive manner is the heart of this organization. The soft, gentle heirloom photographs of these beautiful babies are an important part of the healing process. They allow families to honor and cherish their babies, and share the spirits of their lives. The NILMDTS mission statement is to introduce remembrance photography to parents suffering the loss of a baby with the gift of professional portraiture. We believe these images serve as an important step in the family’s healing process by honoring their child’s legacy.”

The link goes to the “about” page, but be aware that the rest of the site contains beautiful but sensitive photos.

Choosing peace, or something like peace, anyway.

ChristyP sent me a link at just the right time for me yesterday.  The post, from a blog I'd not seen before (Steady Mom:  On the Journey toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood) is short enough that I'm just going to repost it.  Here you go (permalink here):

A few days ago I sat down in the morning, per my usual routine, to make my daily to-do list. As often happens, there were more items to do that day than there was time for the doing. 

Anxiety and overwhelm began to threaten me, though I tried to ignore their taunts.

Still the nagging thought kept creeping back, "How exactly am I going to get all this done?"

Suddenly God whispered to my heart. What He said surprised me, changed my outlook, and altered the entire direction of my day--of all my days. He said,

"Choose peace over productivity."

Peace is the goal of our days.

Peace is THE goal of our days.

At the top of your to-do list, write it - Peace.

If anything tries to threaten your goal, it gets crossed off immediately. Don't worship at the altar of busyness and allow the very heartbeat of your family to suffer.

Let me spell it out as a reminder for us all:

Laundry isn't more important than peace.

Cleaning isn't more important than peace.

Homeschooling isn't more important than peace.

The family budget isn't more important than peace.

We're better off getting only one thing done in an atmosphere of peace than crossing off multiple tasks weighing fretfully on our shoulders. I know, because just this morning I forgot the lesson already, and paid the price by handing over the mood of our home. It wasn't worth it.

What will our children remember when they leave our homes--how busy Mom was or how joyful she made them feel?

Choose peace over productivity.

Yes, this is nothing new.  Yes, this is absolutely a message I've heard before in one form or another and attempted to assimilate.  Something about the way it's put, though, makes me want to tape it to my bathroom mirror.  Well, I'll do the next best thing and stick the blog in my RSS reader for a probationary period to see if she says anything else I like!

She has a followup post, on What Choosing Peace Does NOT Mean:

Here's what choosing peace does NOT mean:

- staying in your pajamas all day

- reading blogs when you should be playing with your kids

- feeding your children chicken nuggets every night

- spreading piles of laundry around the house

- leaving dishes to pile up in the sink all day

- ignoring your children because you just can't take the bickering anymore

[cough, erm, yeah]

- letting mess accumulate while you chant "I'm peaceful, I'm peaceful."

...

Choosing peace does mean:

- That people are more important than tasks

- That you have adequate expectations of yourself, depending on what season of life you're in

- That you try to stop what you're doing to look your children in the eye when they interrupt you...

We will not find peace at the end of our to-do list. That effort has a name: striving. It promises peace, but in the effort required it steals the very promise away.

This is one of those things that I, personally, need to be reminded of again and again and again.  

Once for a friend's wedding shower I gave her a little hanging tile, made up of mosaic bits that spelled out, "Peace begins at home."  I was thinking mainly of raising children "peacefully" at the time -- I think my oldest couldn't have been more than two -- I was still developing my style of discipline (aw heck, aren't I still?) and I'm sure that's what I was thinking about, about raising kids nonviolently in an atmosphere of love so that they wouldn't grow up to perpetuate senseless violence.  I wasn't at all thinking about serenity in the home in the moment.  Only about somehow engendering "peace" there and sending it out into the world to do its work.

Even at the time, I'm not sure that "peace" is the word I would have used, precisely, to mean what I sought then and what I still wish I had.  (I thought it was a good choice of word for what my friend would want, though.)  It is too worn from overuse, especially in world affairs; connotes too much the relationships between and among large groups of people, and not quite enough the relationships between individuals.  Connotes for me, too much, the state of avoiding conflict rather than the state of dealing productively with conflict or even the state of living blissfully without conflict.

"Peace" isn't, I think, the name of the thing that is the goal of my days.  However, either Steady Mom and I are both longing for the same thing, to which we choose to give different names, or else her reminders are bound to produce both peace and the thing that I want.

I'm still not sure what word would be better.  Maybe I am just looking for "love" in its active sense.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this blog and read more.

UPDATE:  Melanie responds with a very insightful post.  Go read!

It's definitely autumn now.

Thoughts:

(1) Sometimes a boy just HAS to have his sister's hat.

(2) And a stick.

(3) Dang.  Time flies.