Happy Birthday Mom

Today is the birthday of my beautiful mother.  She chose an entirely different path from her own mother and decided to tend the inner fires of her husband and children instead of being outward focused, i.e. see the last post.)  I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't understand until I started having my own children and began to see their needs in a whole new light.  

When I was living at home, I saw endless tasks instead of protective instincts.  I saw piles of laundry instead of remembering her always available listening ear.  Her choice was brave in light of the feminist world she was living in.  She courageously chose to build a home instead of a business, a piece of the kingdom of God which my friends loved to immerse themselves into.  

I remember a Campus Crusade worker named Amy who became a friend when I was in high school and who said that she never wanted to leave our home.  With tears in her eyes, she said that she finally understood what a healthy family atmosphere looked like after spending the weekend with us four children having Saturday morning pancakes and watching the evident love my parents had for each other.

I am proud of you Mother and only hope I can grow up to be just like you.

I love this quote.

There is a particular danger in the modern attitude in which both people face the outer world, both spend their time in outer things.  This leaves the inner world unprotected and many dangers creep into the household through this unprotected quarter.  Children are particularly vulnerable to this unprotectedness.

From SHE by Dr. Robert Johnson

A quick hello and a poem

June disappeared and now almost half of June.  I've been in and out of Ohio for family weddings and an inner healing prayer training and now I'm determined to feel more in control over my little yellow cottage.  However, I'm working with less time than before (without preschool, etc.)  You know the summertime drill.  Blah.  Blah.  Blah.  I guess I just wasn't expecting it.  I never am.  

Until then, here's a poem I love about Sabbaths or why we need them.  I want to live in Wendell Berry land.  I guess I do, I just don't always see it:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's life may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~Wendell Berry