The arbutus is now open everywhere in the woods and groves. How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year ! If the blossoms were liable to change — if they were to become capricious and irregular — they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less; they…
Walk is an interesting word for the year because it is ubiquitous. The idea of travel by foot is everywhere – both implied and spelled out – in the scriptures. It is also very both a metaphor as well as an action. As I’ve been reading, I’ve noticed so many ways we refer to the…
I was really excited to be making all of these connections early in the year and thinking through them – how the body should and should not be used. I was also excited to be “getting my steps” more regularly again. I felt like things were getting back on track.
This past week several of us from the Homeschool Better Together team took a planning course. It is for women entrepreneurs and is definitely from a secular perspective. We were reviewing it on several different levels and there were good things we liked and things we didn’t all mixed up together. One of the first…
I told someone this week that we are busier post 2020 than we were before and I wonder if that busy-ness was in reaction to the lack of activity in 2020. It could also be just because my kids are older, too. I was spoiled by that time of being able to plan a menu…
Dr Gamble’s The Great Tradition is still influencing my reading. This year I read Great Pedagogical Essays by FVN Painter which is the anthology that inspired Dr. Gamble to his work. It was surprising to me how much overlap there was between the two; the first half (or so) was largely the same writers, starting…
On my morning walk through our little woods, I was reminded of one of the … annoyances? hazards? … to walking, particularly as we get into late summer and early fall. Spiderwebs. The spiders have no idea that they’re building their homes by crossing the path in front of me, and yet they seem to…
Sinch March 2020, we’ve walked nearly daily through our neighborhood path. Less in 2023, but still relatively often. That’s 2020, 2021, 2022, and now 2023 – so four years worth of walking in the path. When I say path, I really mean it. On the north edge, there’s a creek ravine and a row of…
The Psalmist here tells us that we become like that which we make and then worship. “Those who make idols become like them …” If the idol is oneself – where we stare into a mirror and gaze at ourselves – we become flat and constrained. If we’re focused on the “what we do,” it’s…
As I read Norms and Nobility by David Hicks, one of the ways he defines things is by prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive ideas are the “thou shalt” (or “thou shalt not”). They’re prescribing a certain way, a specific activity, like a doctor prescribes a medicine. Descriptive ideas are describing (tautology? Perhaps). They describe how things…