good mail day

- letter from England via this handwriting letter challenge in the UK 

- update on one child at Dohnavur Fellowships in India who I have been praying for 
for many years

- registration check for my class next year

- 3 free teabags from Twinings which you can do here

- a  used book I ordered 

- boots I ordered






from the murmuring cottage 

almost in Paris

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for teachers

The object of children's literary studies is not to give them precise information as to who wrote what in the reign of whom?––but to give them a sense of the spaciousness of the days, not only of great Elizabeth, but of all those times of which poets, historians and the makers of tales, have left us living pictures. 

Charlotte Mason, Vol. 6

** my heart leaped today when I saw the Bleeding Heart I planted last year in blossom

to memorize for wee ones

THE PICKETY FENCE
by David McCord


The pickety fence
The pickety fence
Give it a lick it's
The pickety fence
Give it a lick it's
A clickety fence
Give it a lick it's
A lickety fence
Give it a lick
Give it a lick
Give it a lick
With a rickety stick
Pickety
Pickety
Pickety
Pick

the last two words...

I read a reference to the last two words on Tonia's facebook so I gave the poem to my students on Thursday. These words also  which struck the ears of  these wonderful high school students who want have everything on their transcripts to win scholarships and get in to the college of their choice and also to love the Lord: 

  every day do something

that won’t compute

I asked: 
What do you think "Practice Resurrection" looks like?

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

By Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Berry's sheep on his Kentucky Farm: 

a well-ordered soul

Here is a poem to think about and hear. 
Wiman refers to  this line by Eliot's East Coker from The Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still....

Listen to the poet read this poem here.

"AND I SAID TO MY SOUL, BE LOUD"







by Christian Wiman







Madden me back to an afternoon 

I carry in me

 not like a wound

 but like a will against a wound

Give me again enough man 

to be the child

 choosing my own annihilations

To make of this severed limb

 a wand to conjure 

a weapon to shatter

 dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests

 galaxies of glass

Whacking glints

 bash-dancing on the cellar's fire 

I am the sound the sun would make

 if the sun could make a sound

and the gasp of rot 

stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death 

is me

O my life my war in a jar

 I shake you and shake you

and may the best ant win

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things

 and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my fluorescent self

my grief–nibbling, unbewildered, wall–to–wall self

 withers in me like a salted slug