- joann10: Gorgeous flowers!!!! Keep enjoying those cool mornings!!!
- Laurajean: Oh, I read it all in one day! I could NOT stop! I, too, loved Juliet, and loved how she knew her own...
- Melissa Wiley: Ah, Hannah, I had to chuckle when I read your comment because I wrote that post in the morning, but by...
- sarah: Beautiful!
- Sheryl: I loved this list! A friend of mine has mentioned some of them but she doesn’t live here any longer. I...
Every day is complicated, messy, and full of friction. And every day has glorious or cozy moments worth celebrating. I seldom bother to chronicle the friction and the mess because writing time is fleeting and precious—and childhood even more so. I’d rather capture the small joys that I might forget—or take for granted—if I don’t take time to set them down in words.
(Excerpt from
this post about Real Life, quoted here because I don't want anyone to be under the impression that things are always perfect around here! Heaven knows we are anything but. Perfect, frictionless, orderly? Nope. Happy? Most of the time!)
Be like the bird
Who, pausing in flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way beneath her,
Yet sings,
Knowing she has wings.
—Victor Hugo
“Exploration,” says John Stilgoe, author of
Outside Lies Magic, “is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.” Yes: it is so, so much fun, and that is why I write these posts all chattery with excitement over this or that connection the kids made today. (Or that I made myself!) I know I get carried away, but that’s the point, isn’t it, that way leading on to way has carried me away? And yet—and yet—I think we are at once ‘carried away’ and made more fully present in the now, more rooted, by these relationships between ideas about things past and future. The joy of connection makes me want to celebrate this moment, this brief encounter with wild-haired child and broad-trunked tree, bus going by, sign on church wall, Scottish warlord creeping over the tower wall and startling the English soldier’s wife who has just put her babe in arms to sleep by crooning that the Black Douglas won’t get him. Child, laughing, shouting “Dinna ye be sae sure aboot that!” across the courtyard outside the library. How can I not celebrate this freedom?
(from a post called
Way Leads on to Way)
Fabulous, thank you. I’ve bookmarked this one in particular.
Posted on December 3rd, 2007 at 8:35 pmhey nice one.
Posted on March 12th, 2008 at 10:41 pmjames