“At the moment when we hide a brother’s fault, God hides our own. At the moment when we reveal a brother’s fault, God reveals our own.”
–Abba Poemen
The reality is when I say, “This is how you hurt me” she replies, “That is how you hurt me, too.”
Holiness
“Holiness–or wholeness as people prefer to say today–requires a degree of inner and outer peace that respects the at times conflicting, though not contradictory, demands of body, mind, and spirit. The first requirement for this peace or harmony is order in human living and a right use of time.”
Note to self: The little things make a difference in the big picture.
Out of the Library
Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Cables to the Ace by Thomas Merton
What Is Sustaining Us?
Love, work, prayer, and suffering will sustain us in the future as they have in the past. All who are here now, all who will come after us, will have no other tools than these with which to build.
–Sister Mollie Rogers of the Maryknoll Movement
The 2011 Closet
As much as the bed is about comfort and readiness, the closet is about clarity and accessibility. Here are few thoughts:
- Organize by function and frequency. Put the basic layers in an easy to reach place. Mine are in the middle. When I grog out in the morning, I know I can begin right in front of me. My middle is tanks and t-shirts, then I move out to long-sleeves, button downs, sweaters, and dresses on one side with dress pants, jeans, and sweatshirts on the other side. Basically, the middle is the deepest layer of clothing and the sides are the outer layers. This is important because in Minnesota we wear a lot of layers. The only exception to this is vests and fly-aways. These are in the middle for a reason. See #2.
- Organize by weight, sleeve length, and fun. The fly-aways are light and have no sleeves, plus they are fun, so they have to be in the middle. Within each section of clothing, I put the lightest weights first (most toward the middle) and work out to the heavy items so that the heavy items don’t mess with the light weight ones. Sleeve length goes shortest to longest–purely for aesthetic purposes. Lastly, I organize fun to dull, so that I don’t forget to have take chances.
- As for shoes, do the same. Frequency first, then all the rest. I wear my menswear flats and the two boots to the side of them most often. They are always ready to go in a wink and they match almost all my outfits, including my dresses for Sundays.
- Other basics that are durable get put in boxes, bins, or drawers. I have a box for yoga pants and comfortable sleepwear, one for sweaters, one for the basics, one for scarfs (because I wear them ALL winter and most of the spring and fall), and one for work out clothes (which is basically all the activities’ t-shirts I’ve collected over the years and a few pairs of shorts). Tights also get their own bin and so do belts.
The goal here is to be able to get ready with comfort and ease and to try to reduce the time spent laying in bed wondering what to wear. Go ahead, walk out the house looking as beautiful on the outside as you are on the inside.
On a side note, yes, I did learn a bit of this from Buckle.
The Simplicity of Love
Love begins and lives in simplicity. When you make a phone call, when you send a text. When you write an e-mail or mail a card. When you say yes to the tire swing, yes to gelato, yes to tea time. When you smile with your eyes. Love, real, honest love, basks in simplicity, and yet is mysteriously the most weighty feeling we have.
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.”
William Shakespeare on Sorrow
“Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers o’er the fraught heart, and bids it break.”
-William Shakespeare
MacBeth
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
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.
Naphtalia 
