Monday, October 29, 2012

watching the storm


While reading Frankenstein!
Seemed to be a horror story , yes, Mary Shelley was given a dare.

Finished AMAZING GRACE by Eric Metaxas and yearning for a Clapham Circle.
DO you have one?

Reading Margie Haack's book for Book Club:



I do recommend her memoir.
I don't live in northern Minnesota but she has brought me to the land.
Margie has dug deep into her childhood and strikes my heart deeply as she yearns
for unconditional love. We who love Ransom Fellowship and Critique and Margie's 
TOAD HALL, have been waiting for her published book.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Autumn : giving thanks


It has been one of the most beautiful weeks with Autumn colors and the cool mornings 
changing to warm afternoons. Two of my days have been full. Up to the top. 
You know like drinking off the overflow before it spills over. Somehow joy  is brought
when we give out even when we feel like a day is pressed. Somehow the  sparkles seep through the cracks and light shows us the place we are in. I'm at the end of such a day and am surprised by timing. 

 I was told to look for an old book in a thrift store and I saw it Tuesday.  I didn't buy it.
But I thought yesterday  about who the author was. Wilberforce called her witty. He knew her.
She was one of the Clapham Society. Her name kept running through my mind and I 
wondered why I didn't buy her book for 12.00. Who would pass up a book by someone who knew Wilberforce and fought alongside against slavery? Was I stupid?!! Most paperbacks today are way over 12.00. This was a first edition. Old. Yellowed but readable. 

 So today , I ran into the shop while Emma was at piano lesson.The book was still on the shelf: Hints towards Forming Character or a Young Princess by Hannah More  ( 1818) and next to Caesar's Gallic Wars. ( which I also got for 3.00. Published in 1886). Then I looked around  to find a wide crinoline for 1.00! We went from piano to a Costume Check  for Little Women musical (next Feb) Emma is in. She   has  my sister's wedding dress crinoline but this one poofed out much larger to make her post Civil War ballroom dancing dress almost hooped!

I feel blessed. 


Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Autumn with two poets

Wish I lived closer to hear these two poets:
 ( you can hear two readings if you click on poets)

Billy Collins and Mary Oliver
Presented by Strathmore
Sunday, October 28, 2012 at 3:00 PM
Music Center at Strathmore

 I  lived near here 25 years ago!

What is Strathmore?
Located one-half mile outside the Capital Beltway in North Bethesda, Maryland, Strathmore provides affordable, accessible, multi-disciplinary arts programming in the Mansion at Strathmore, the Music Center at Strathmore, and on its scenic 11-acre site.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

early voting


I got to the library  this morning after trying to find out who the conservative judges 
are to vote for. THEN, a lady in the parking lot hands me a whole sheet with the same ones. I could have saved a dear friend time if I had known it. She texted me for about 30 mins with names!

 As I was in line outside , an older man was telling friends about his first vote for Adelaide Stevenson! ( against Eisenhower!) Then he said his mother told him he saw FDR 
when he was 4 ( 1930"s) in a carriage coming down Tryon Street in Charlotte! I wish I had been closer to hear more of history that he had seen!

As I turned the corner inside, there about 12 people ahead of me was my oldest son! 
( his lunch hour) His head towers above crowds! ( 6'5") 

Total time: 65 minutes.

Done. 
ON Election Day, I teach and then monitor the teen choir. 

Watched Makoto Fujimura tonight LIVE from NYC speak on Culture Care. 
The same principles of environmental care need to be applied to culture.
I love his questions: Why are we still looking at STARRY NIGHT? listening to Bach?



Mako ended with TS Eliot and The Four Quartets which guided him the dark 
winter of post 9/11 living near Ground Zero. Words to give hope. 

Needed these word after voting today.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

tuesday


I still like that gal on my headliner who is pondering while reading a book.
She  will stay awhile.

Today, my students did Poetry Presentations of poems they wrote of what we have lost in Modernity. I love how they knew to ask the Lord to help us. It was like hearing Psalms being read. It keeps me going. Fruit from their labors. 

Having Fall Break this week. Just one day off from teaching.  Sleeping in on Thursday!!

A former student who is in college came today to class.
What a welcome sight and she  is a hugger. She told us of her Arts & Letters class and her music class which sounded like Charlotte Mason on the college level. 

Blessings today.
How about you?

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Opera


The 25th Anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera at 
the Royal Albert Hall in London , last year, is on 
Netflix. Watching it now. I know this song will stick in
my head:



With 5 Phantoms:


thoughts today


Thinking and praying today after the week:

~ praising God for the beauty of the earth, mainly the skies here in NC. It is a blue that is clear and pristine. 
~ bad news: Jonathan Dailey's body found in the river in Boston. He is my daughter's choir director's nephew.
It has darkened the blue skies. God is good are the words
strengthening the family.
~thinking about FB during this election season. I read some words in unbelief that someone can believe the way they do. 
This is people I know. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, for without God , I would think that way. 
~ thanking God for my students this year. We are almost to Fall Break. This guy is back from Sabbatical and we have the most amazing lectures on Modernity.  What GKC said is most important: The most extraordinary thing is a ordinary man and his ordinary wife and his ordinary children. 
The way to change the world. 
~friends. SO thankful.
~ worship. Looking forward to that tomorrow. Heard this guy two weeks ago and this lady last week. Should be normal tomorrow!


Saturday, October 6, 2012

BOOK REVIEW: MIRACULOUS by Kevin Belmonte


 A new book by Kevin Belmonte tweaked my interest  to read for a review with Book Sneeze. Kevin has written wonderful books on Chesterton which  I have given  as gifts. This book is subtitled: A Fascinating History of Signs, Wonders, and Miracles. The first part of the book is on Scripture's miracles and Part Two is on God's People. Kevin starts the chapter on Corrie Ten Boom :
   
     When I was a boy, my first real sense of the miraculous came from stories my mother read to me of Corrie Ten Boom, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis along with her entire family for their work in the Dutch underground hiding Jewish refugees who sought to escape internment in the death camps Germany had established. 

The biographies range from Augustine  to George Washington to Joy Lewis ( not C.S,) to Cyde Kilby. I found several new and refreshing insights on their live. I didn't know Clyde Kilby ( who wrote on all the Inklings) had John Piper as a student. Piper wrote : 

     It was an unforgetable lecture. I went to hear him that night because I loved him. He had been one of my professors in English Literature at Wheaton College. He opened my eyes to more of life than I know could be seen. O , what eyes he had! He was like his hero, C.S. Lewis, in this regard. When he spoke of he tree he saw on the way to class....you wondered why you had been so blind all your life?

A good writer inspires you to imagine, think, and wonder.
I have some new authors to read from the book. 
This Kevin did in Miraculous: A Fascinting History of Signs, Wonders, and Miracles. 





Thomas Nelson Publisher
Book Sneeze review

Friday, October 5, 2012

hope .... by emily


Have a wonderful weekend!
My students are busy rewriting poems on what we have lost in Modernity. We need what Emily wrote in her poem.
Listen: 



Thursday, October 4, 2012

there is something about...............


Sitting here with my oldest while he downloads photos from a recent trip.
I am thinking about being blessed. 
 It is getting late.
Well, his wife is probably asleep. 
She is a teacher. Not the kind that I am.
One that gets up early , works all day with 80  seventh graders learning their native
language : English.  Funny how that can be hard. They speak the language, listen to the language, read in the language, but still it becomes hard to do all of those  in your native language.


Yea, the flashdrive is almost done, so he is going home. 
(Full of photos from South Dakota.)
She didn't go on this recent trip.
She had to teach.
She is up for Teacher of the Year at her school. ( Yea!)
He went with his dad to see where his dad grew up.
Down memory lane for my husband plus they went to a buffalo round up.
( real cowboys, real buffalo)

Photo from one of the many weddings this year.
Rehearsal dinner ~





Tuesday, October 2, 2012

back and listening to this



Inklings of Wonder:
This session explores the great British Christian tradition of defending the permanent things, and how this in turn has spawned God-honoring literature that explores and recovers wonder as the only appropriate response to His glory.

( George Grant , two weeks ago , at  Surprised by God: 2012 Fall Conference at Reformation Bible College ~~ Ligonier )

Excellent on the Inklings ~~  WHAT sparked those Inklings of wonder?  HOW did the Inklings become the Inklings?

where they met: