Dappled Things

 My sweet friend Esther started a blog and named it after the same Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that my blog's title comes from. Check it out!

On creativity

One day when I only had five children, my friend Michelle dropped in for lunch when I was feeling especially low. My mom, my husband, and all my kids are so creative—we have artists and musicians and storytellers—and in comparison I felt so very uncreative.

As I was complaining, I was making soup out of leftovers, pulling odds and ends out of the freezer to fill it out, absentmindedly dumping in spices, and tasting it every once in a while. When we sat down to eat, Michelle said that when she was watching me make it she was kind of horrified because I wasn’t really even paying attention to what I was doing, but she called it the best soup she’d ever eaten, and told me to stop thinking of myself as lacking in creativity.

Don’t think of “creativity” as something that’s limited to the fine or performing arts, or to writing poetry and stories.

You are made in God’s image, so you are creative! You just need to learn to recognize all the creative things you’re already doing.

Making soup without a recipe is creative. Building a chicken coop is creative. Keeping the lawn tidy and attractive is creative. Working puzzles is creative. Seeing connections between seemingly unrelated things is creative. Making your bed and placing the pillows “just so” is creative. Deciding which books out of all the possibilities your children should read next is creative. Having your spices or tools or pencils arranged so that you can find exactly what you want when you want it is creative.

Do you see the common thread here?

In all of these activities, you are imitating God’s creative work in the beginning: Bringing order out of chaos.

Take Michelle’s advice: Stop thinking of yourself as lacking in creativity. Look for the ways you are already bringing order out of chaos, and build from there.

The communion of the saints

[First posted on this date in 2003.  We're still friends with all these dear people.]

It is such a blessing to meet people for the first time and to feel so close to them right away, like they are close friends or family members you haven't seen in a long time.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young woman in Oklahoma, who happened across my blog and noticed that we live in the same town where her father lives. Since he does not go to church, she asked me if she could come with us the next time she visited her dad, so of course I said, "Yes."

This Sunday morning, Kelly and three of her friends (Kelly M, Lisa, and Robert, brother of Kelly M) came to the base chapel with us. We all ate lunch at the fellowship hall after the service, then they came home with us and we spent the rest of the afternoon talking and getting to know each other, and what a delight it was!

Easing back into school

Our formal studies always kind of peter out in the spring when life starts getting busy.  This spring and summer we had Mike out of work for several weeks, seven kids born (and one mama died), several animals sold, lots of repairs done around the house, out of town guests on at least three occasions, one music recital, two concerts, two auditions, traveling. . . . .  Lots of traveling.  Three of the children and I spent almost the entire month of July out town between the CiRCE conference in Houston and visiting [nearly] all our friends and relations along the way.  Oh, and my 15 year old daughter, the violinist, had her first paying gig -- playing in the pit orchestra for a local production of The Music Man.

Writing it out like that makes me feel less bad about not doing "school" for so many weeks.  Do y'all struggle with that kind of guilt, too?

Also we joined the Y and Mike and #1Son have been taking the kids swimming nearly every day for the past few weeks.  I wish we done this years ago!

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Pictorial Interlude

I traveled half-way across the country, saw practically everyone I love,
and this is the best picture I took.
There's a reason I'm not a photoblogger.

Memphis

Oh, and this one.  It's the radiator hose in my van, which ruptured on the first day of the journey.

Thankfully it happened just before we pulled into Kelly Rose's driveway where we were spending the night.  (I mean, spend the night with them at their house, not in the driveway.)

Her husband took care of the repairs for me -- such wonderful friends!

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

So this morning we had our first official school day in about twelve weeks, if my notes are correct, opening with Morning Prayers and our Bible reading (picking up where we left off in Luke and the Psalms), followed by a poem by Tennyson ("Crossing the Bar," which was the last one in this collection, so now I need to pick a new poet to begin reading tomorrow), and the next chapter in Rosemary Sutcliff's The Wanderings of Odysseus. That took an hour and half because we had to stop and find the calamine lotion to put one one child who got into the poison ivy, and then we had to stop and find out why the dog was barking -- it was the Blackhawks.  He hates helicopters. Never a dull moment.

This time last year we were starting Black Ships Before Troy, so it's taken us an awful long time to get to this point, but we were interrupted by reading The Ballad of the White Horse, and then Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, followed by Mary Macleod's Stories from the Faerie Queene (which I highly recommend).  I'd intended to pick up there, but my Kindle was dead this morning.  It's had so many near-death experiences that I expect it'll revive presently, but I suppose one of these it'll be the real thing.  It's a first generation Kindle so it's had a good long life -- it's seven years old, which is, like 105 in technology years. ;-)