medial // caesura

Day 1 is 3 gifts I love :  water, adventure, my boys Knox is petting a brown-banded bamboo shark Day 2 is 3 gifts I've read:       1.  the power of language and beauty from Crow by Ted Hughes the poem  "Crow Goes Hunting" Crow Decided to try words. He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack-- Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained, With strong teeth. You could not find a better bred lot. He pointed out the hare and away went the words Resounding. Crow is Crow without fail, but what is a hare? It converted itself to a concrete bunker. The words circled protesting, resounding, Crow turned the words into bombs--they blasted the bunker. The bits of bunker flew up--a flock of starlings Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings. The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst. Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water. The water turned into an earthquak...

Joy Dare Day 23:  3 gifts found around the table Today as D and I sat around the table at breakfast, we planned our week alone.  Knox and Ben are at Camp Mawmaw-Daddyghee's, where they will have at least one fun activity daily.  So gift #1 is D's excitement over our relatively mundane plans:   playing the guitar, giving him a daily piano lesson, painting furniture, cleaning out the attic, swimming, and shopping.  Not very exciting and certainly not expensive especially since shopping is just the regular grocery trip, but he was happy to hear what we would do together.  To be fair, I had really not considered the painting to be a "together" activity.  I had thought I would paint, and he would watch.  Well, that's not exactly how it happened.  When I was on the phone with Mawmaw to say, "No, Knox and Ben are right.  They are not allowed to have Coca-Cola yet."  D took to painting on his own. I added a little to what he had s...

Funny how yesterday morning everything seemed golden, blessings everywhere I looked.  Then the afternoon. . .nothing especially bad, nothing really good, just the quotidian, the ordinary stuff.  But it was too much.  My eyes glazed over--I lost the ability to see the joys, the God-gifts. All I could see was a house that needed cleaning, clothes that needed washing, food that needed cooking, and children that needed attention.  D was lethargic, rubbing his head like he does when he is in pain.  He didn't eat much after-school snack either.  His balance was off--several times when he did get up he nearly fell down the stairs, or in the garage, or walking in the yard.  He couldn't tell me what was wrong.  I took him to get his haircut (one of his MOST favorite things in the whole world to do) to get ready for inspection Thursday and that cheered him momentarily. After supper, I bathed him because he had had an accident.  I was heading toward...

"Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere," writes the Psalmist (Psalm 84:10). One day better than one thousand? That's something to think about. . . and that's what this blogging experience is going to be about. . .all those things I want to think about someday. . . one day . . .when I have the time. One thousand brings to mind a book I was introduced to last night by a friend's exuberant Facebook statuses. Her gratitude was contagious and so I had to check out for myself one thousand gifts -- a book by poet/mystic/homeschooling mother/pig farmer's wife, Ann Voskamp. I've only read the first chapter, but what a fascinating, provocative challenge, a dare really, to live a life of gratitude. Voskamp's take on "original sin" is not that it's a misogynist slam against knowledge-seeking, but that really what it was all about was that our first parents were not content . They knew everything, saw everything, h...