Author: naphtalia

I am an artist, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a creator.

The Year I Began With Rest

2011, I greet you with a deep breath, but before I speak to you another word, I must thank 2010 for five most beautiful musical moments, music being such a huge part of my heart and all, and then I must speak with my friends.

5. Thursday night singing with Paul, Carlie, Seth, Meggie, Margie, Dolores, Joe, Jean, Abbie, Sarah, Luke, Phil, Blake, and all the others at Rome Baptist.  Thank you.
4. Giselle with Carlie and Laura.  (Yes, I was gasping at the beauty.)  Thank you.
3. My niece singing me “Happy Birthday” while putting flowers in my hair.  Thank you.
2. Falling asleep to Norah Jones’ “The Nearness of You” on a boat in Ibiza, Spain with a few Italians and the smell of cigarettes and wine lingering on the docks.  Thank you.
1. Singing to my sister the cleansing, tearful words “hard times come again no more.”  Thank you.

Very honorable mention: Singing hymns spontaneously with Kayla.  Thank you.

And now I will rest. For one week, I will gather my thoughts and straighten my plans.  In the next week, I’m sure they will change.

In the meantime, my friends, please do look around the site a bit and share your thoughts with me and other friends.  Do notice the new, handy and fun “search” feature.  It is located at the bottom center of the front page.  This is fun because you can actually type any word into it and see if Naphtalia has written that word in the past 120 posts.  Do also notice the fun “tag” feature I am now employing.  Also located at the bottom center of the front page.  This will hopefully help to organize the thoughts contained within the site.  Also, I want to be sure you know that clicking the “Naphtalia” banner at the top of the page will return you to the front page and clicking any red words in a post will take you to a reference link so that you can learn more about my line of thought and the subject at hand.

In other news, here are some things to watch for in 2011:

  • events like Pie, Piano and Poetry parties in Minneapolis and shows in Fargo, ND (Can we say, “Celebration of Women and Their Music?”)
  • He Leadeth Me score-writing project
  • short stories like “Winter”
  • songs about living in Minnesota (really, that’s a deep subject; I’ll try to explain more when the time comes)
  • pie recipes
  • maybe some other fun recipes
  • “Dream A Little Dream” project updates (hm, what’s that?)
  • poetry
  • photos
  • thoughts or ideas you have left in the comment box below

With all my heart, I offer my love and thanks.
Naphtalia

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Watch Night Service

“Watch Night Service”
This is a liturgical service for those seeking freedom.  It is an adaptation of liturgy compiled by Shane Clairborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro in their book “Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.”   Zondervan (c) 2010

adapted by Naphtalia in an effort to close the year with a fresh start in freedom.

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Advice of the Year

At those moments, when all my most passionate players are up in arms, when my team is shouting for a foul, I have learned to breathe.  I have learned to let the moment slow down so that turning my head becomes a soft wind of color and blinking my eyes takes a new picture of the faces around me.  So that my hands hold onto my bat.  So that my ears rest in sound advice.  So that my feet settle in the soft dirt of decision.

2010 was a moment and here is the advice I heard in its long, unhurried sigh.  It was, without a doubt, the best advice I received this year and it was from my sister.  She said, “Be there.  Be where you are and that will keep you safe.”

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The Year I Made My Bed

Most of my New Years have gone unmarked by New Year’s resolutions.  Although resolution is not a far jump from a simple, announced-to-self decision, for me combining it with “New Year’s” makes me feel like an inexperienced batter starting any professional ball game.  “You mean, I’m supposed to just hit the ball?  I don’t have that much power over my resolve.”

I will never know, then, why on January 1, 2009, I resolved to make my bed every day for the rest of the year.  I guess I thought, after 26 years of non-bed making, “I’ll give it a try.” I will tell you right now, from somewhere deep within me, faithful resolve started bubbling up as soon as the thought came to mind.  (I know it’s an odd thing to resolve and so  I repeat, “I don’t know why I chose this over all my other weaknesses.”)

January 1.  January 2.  January 3.  And the days went on.  Each morning, somewhere in the midst of my tired haze came a real Nike attitude.  My bed got made and I started hitting more base hits than ever before.  This started my head to tilt.

My mother used to tell me that making the bed sets the tone for the day.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered just how right she had been.  (This is the head tilt.  The “hmm” moment, if you will.)  As I worked my way through February, I noticed that the usual malaise of a Minnesota winter was actually less than normal.  Making my bed every day really did help me prepare better for work and my after school activities.  I gradually become more organized and more happy with myself.  Simply seeing a flat, neat surface that I knew would be ready for my collapse at midnight, reassured me that I could do the rest of the day.  In fact, making my bed became a source of great comfort to me.

In my resolve came more resolve.  In my steadfastness of action came a steadfastness of heart and spirit.

I upheld my end (the only end) of the bargain through most of the year.  I took a hiatus in July when my busy summer theater production schedule overwhelmed even my pillows.  I also took a couple weeks off in November, again when the theater took control.  Okay, yes, there were some random days of un-madeness sprinkled through May and December.  But overall, I made my bed every day of 2009.  I count that as a home run.

(At this point my sister would tell me that I’m just trying to be a winner while not actually winning.  But I would say that 300/365 is pretty darn awesome for a girl that was previously about 100/9490.)

At the end of the year, I felt like life didn’t hit me so hard, like my head was finally starting to level out after years of imbalance issues.  Then life pulled back and let out a backdoor slider.

I made contact and found myself with a base hit, once more.  But I entered 2010 a battered player.  Love, honesty, despair, and deceit all stood up at the bench edging for a moment of play.

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Office Makes A Difference

I finally set up a naphtalia.wordpress office: perfect for late-night posting.

In other news: I have been under the weather since Friday and have had a questionable singing voice.  This has resulted in a photo post instead of a song post today.  Perhaps I’ll simply finish the year with two songs in a row.  That would be like me, wouldn’t it?

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Goethe on Art

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

-Goethe

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The Incarnation According to Kathleen Norris

“For me, the Incarnation is the place, if you will, where hope contends with fear.  Not an antique doctrine at all, but reality–as ordinary as my everyday struggles with fears great and small, as exalted as the hope that allows me some measure of peace when I soldier on in the daily round.

When a place or time seems touched by God, it is an overshadowing, a sudden eclipsing of my priorities and plans.  But even in terrible circumstances and calamities, in matters of life and death, if I sense that I am in the shadow of God, I find light, so much light that my vision improves dramatically.  I know that holiness is near.

And it is not robed in majesty.  It does not assert itself with the raw power of empire (not even the little empire of me in which I all too often reside), but it waits in puzzlement, it hesitates.  Coming from Galilee, as it were, from a place of little hope, it revels the ordinary circumstances of my life to be full of mystery, and gospel, with means ‘good news.’ “

Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Riverhead Books, The Berkley Publishing Group
1998

This is where I am today, reveling in the ordinary circumstances that are llena de misterio precisely because God has eclipsed darkness with light.

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Clog #1: A Christmas Card of Squirrels

My sister and I keep a blog in her kitchen cupboard for two simple reasons: 1. Our trains of thought derail constantly due to a herd of small squirrels living in the house, and 2. She’s not online.

Installation of: The Clog (the cupboard blog).

In some moment of great societal aptitude, I piled a bunch of 3 by 5 cards, pens, and push pins into her cupboard.  Now, when we have a thought, we jot it down and tack it to a piece of cork board pasted on the inside of the cupboard door.

These notes include bits of encouragement, questions we forget to ask each other, random thoughts we want to remember so that one day they’ll be deep, and of course, the occasional precious moment of the day clog.

Here’s what I found yesterday:

 

I laughed at the irony.  We tried so hard for the last month to get a cute picture of those squirrels.  We finally thought we had a winner, finally got them printed, and then finally realized the unfortunate, comical, perfect error.

We re-took pictures this morning just before mailing her cards.  That was a close one.  At least it was a good, clog-able moment.

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