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"timeless contemplation of the ordinary"
I read that line this morning. A beautiful phrase that speaks so much. Originally a critique of Vermeer's work, I want to claim is as my approach to life.
I was a history major in college. My interest sprang, not from a desire to understand the big picture, but rather a desire to know about the realities of life for day to day people at a given time from the past. I came to understand my interest as more "social" history. I wanted to understand how real people felt and lived through those great moments that perhaps they never really knew about.
I read . . . a lot. I want so much to share the insights and gifts I find in my reading, but I am hampered by not knowing how best to share. The ability to put into words the feelings that develop eludes me at times.
This morning I read a story from Morning Sun on a White Piano, and I was nearly overcome with emotion. The writer's words speaking so eloquently of his young son's deep need for all to remain safe, secure, and predictable. "No wolf. No wolf," the young boy cried when his father attempted to introduce an element of danger and suspense into a story. The boy didn't want his "bunny story" infiltrated by evil, and who can blame him. None of us wants our world to include a ravenous wolf. And yet they all do in one form or another.
And so I choose again to see the ordinary as sacred. To find pleasure in small things. A cup of tea. Clean laundry to be folded. The sound of rain on the roof. As Flannery O'Connor wrote --
I am afraid of pain and I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.
"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
