Read This Week . . .

"memory and hope are the deepest of currents" -- Morning Sun on a White Piano by Robin R. Meyers

“It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.” -- Neil Gaiman

"As a prerequisite to empathy, imagination makes kindness possible by allowing us to inhabit skins we weren't born in." -- Morning Sun on a White Piano by Robin R. Meyers

". . . but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing." -- A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor

"Words have always attached themselves to me. They get inside the machinery of my head." -- Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better." --Anne Lamott

"I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is prey to all sort of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church. I don't want to be a coward staying with You because I fear hell . . . It is a matter of the gift of grace." A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor

"Walking is hot I try to become more attached to these streets." -- Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley

"For every story you hear that's tragic, there's another that's equally tragic or more so. I think you come to look at it as part of life." -- Kelsey Grammar

"I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of the gift as to the spirit in which it is offered." -- Robert Louis Stevenson

". . . the only thing to do when your rights are being violated is to 'rise and say this shall cease'." -- Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley

"Give me the grace to adore you . . . Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated." -- A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor

"Anger and love. Twins maybe." -- Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley

Stuff

Did you all survive? Did you have fun? Eat too much? Are you happy to see calm again?

I like the holidays, but I like normal, everyday life more. Maybe it's an age thing. Or maybe it's just my personality.

I was grumpy on Christmas Day. Little things annoyed me, but I kept it under wraps until the family had gone. Then I let myself sit on the sofa in a funk, until I realized I was grumpy because I hadn't slept well Christmas Eve -- not anticipation -- I just got too hot because DH left the space heater on all night!

I shook it off and got a good night's sleep. Friday morning my alarm went off at 5:10 so I could take the boys (DH & DS) to the airport for a week of climbing at Red Rock and Joshua Tree. When I walked into the hallway, I knew something was amiss. DH met me and told the trip was off -- DS had been sick all night! 

There is so much crud floating around here! Is that true where you live too?

Anyway the good news is they were able to reschedule everything for a trip in March instead, and we didn't lose any money! The rest of Friday was filled with helping DS feel better physically and not feel guilty about being sick.

DH and I took a walk at Radnor Lake, and talked about how odd it felt to both be reconfiguring our plans for the week.

photo credit Alan Pennington (DH)

DS is feeling better, but I've got another cold. We need some sunshine around here! And snow would at least be prettier than all this rain. But enough complaining.

I've been working on my thought processes lately. Reminding myself that I can't read minds, and that people don't think about me as much as I worry they do. 

I got a new devotional book for Christmas -- Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community. I'm just learning the layout, but I like it very much and am happy to have something new to focus on in the coming year.

I've run across a few quotes in the past few days that I want to share with you.

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one...the being a Force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." 
-- George Bernard Shaw

"History, despite its wrenching pain,
cannot be unlived,
but if faced with courage,
need not be lived again."
--Maya Angelou

“One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.” 
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

If you want to live life free
take your time, go slowly.
Do few things, but do them well.
Simple joys are holy.
-- Celtic Daily Prayer

And a couple of articles as well.

The Disease of Being Busy

Anne Patricia Lamott Anti-Diet

So that's what's going on in my world this Monday morning (gray and drizzly still!). I hope you are getting back into your groove and looking forward to 2015 and the gift of future plans.

Blessings.

NaNoWriMo 2014

I am not a novelist.

I can't write fiction. I love to read fiction, but I can't write it.

Each year the month of November is devoted to writing your novel. The goal is to write 50,000 words in one month. There's a website and Facebook page to keep you motivated. You can log your word count each day. Heck, there are even prizes. 

I've consider doing it for 3 years. THREE YEARS. 

I signed up yesterday after reading their description of "novel" -- We define a novel as “a lengthy work of fiction.” Beyond that, we let you decide whether what you’re writing falls under the heading of “novel.” In short: If you believe you’re writing a novel, we believe you’re writing a novel, too. 

Okay, so basically I can write anything I want and call it a novel for the purposes of this event. 

I did the math. It's close to 1700 words a day. Uhm -- that's a lot of words to all come from my head.

So wish me luck. I'm starting my memoir as a novel this month. I'm changing names to protect the guilty -- for the time being.

I've got 677 words so far.