Kortney Garrison

Homeschooling With Ease

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How Do You Want Advent to Feel?

8 November 2017 by Kortney

Could we let this be the guiding question this year?

Could we imagine the way we want to feel and then try to add in practices that will help make that feeling come to life?  For me, I’d like this season to feel spacious, light-filled, and nourishing.

Spacious

The first thing this will me for me is cleaning and clearing our physical spaces.  There are clothes that have been out grown, the last of the cold season clothes that need to be washed and freshened, a growing collection of books and toys that are ready to be passed on.  I’m fairly good at gathering the piles, but not so good at actually moving them out.  I’m always surprised at how fresh and open things feel when I do.

I’ll also be turning again to the Apartment Therapy cleaning list.  For the most part, doing a little every day (while keeping meals simple and laundry under control) is a way for me to see progress over time.   It usually takes me 6 weeks to move through the 4 week list.  But I just keep moving forward–there’s no behind and no catch up.

Finally, it’s so helpful to create a staging area if you have space.  A place for wrapping presents, storing books that you’ll be reading, stashing presents.  We’ve got a cold but enclosed sun porch where I can keep the big Christmas box near to hand but out of our living space.  Maybe under your bed or in an unused closet?

Light-filled

With the time change, dark comes early this far North.  We’ve got twinkle lights strung up in the dark dining room and in my tiny office.   I might add a string in my bedroom to turn on just before bed.  I haven’t had lights in there since my youngest was born in that room 5 years ago.  Maybe it’s time.

They’ll be the lights on the tree and a house full of candles.  We’ll also be lighting a new candle each week on the Advent Wreath and counting the days with the Way of Light wreath.  (Would you believe that as I was looking up the wreath for you, the letter carrier knocked on the door with Ann Voskamp’s new pop up Advent book?  It’s so lovely!)  Watching the light actually grow stronger as we approach Christmas tunes our hearts and hones our attention.

Nourishing

The nourishment will start with simple meals–soup and bread, beans and rice, bones and broth.  These meals don’t take a lot of hands-on prep work and usually there are plenty of leftovers.

Each day we’ll unwrapped a new story book for the season.  All of Christmas books are kept with the decorations and tree stand.  Then they are brought out one by one, wrapped in a reusable cloth bag.  The unwrapping, greeting old friends, sharing stories year after year–this helps tame our acquisitive tendencies. Christmas is simple, but never a let down because we’ve been enjoying the entire season of Advent.

One way that we keep Advent each year is by coloring Jesse Tree ornaments.  We listen to the old stories, talk about the connections.  We linger over the stories because we’re all coloring together.  The coloring slows down time and creates space for contemplation.

How do you want Advent to feel?

And from the archives…

5 Days to a More Peaceful Advent  ::  Margin + Rest  ::  Advent is coming! Advent is coming!

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Poet as Citizen

28 September 2020 by Kortney

“Political” poetry by men remains stranded…the enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else. –Adrienne Rich

Open the body to grief, turning your face to your own life, absorbing the failures your parents and your country have suffered. –Robert Bly

The thing to do is grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. –Zora Neale Hurston

One of the most subversive things you can do is spend as much time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like. –Austin Kleon

Hard times are coming when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom–poets, visionaries–realists of a larger reality. –Ursula K. LeGuin

Be joyful
though you have considered all the options.
–Wendell Berry

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
–Theodore Roethke

{An accidental collection winnowed out of my journal from the last two months that feels like a reliable pattern to follow for the next two months.}

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Meal Planning for Peace

1 August 2020 by Kortney

Nothing can derail a day like not having a plan in place for dinner. Knowing what’s for dinner and reliably having ingredients stocked brings an outsized measure of peace. It means that I can spend my (limited!) mental energy on things like writing and homeschooling.

For a few years now I’ve been taking classes and learning from Jessica Fisher at Good Cheap Eats. Turns out meal planning is a skill, and you can learn how to do it. Here are a few helpful resources.

  • Grocery Savings Challenge this month is all about filling the freezer–just in time for the return to the school routine!
  • Jessica on Instagram so much good info here! Jessica goes live almost every weekday around 10 am. She is funny and smart and ready to help. Talking freezer meal tips all month.
  • Dinner Calendar I use these lovely free printable calendars from A Humble Place (excellent picture study resources too!) I write out our dinner plan and put it on the fridge. And then no one asks me, What’s for dinner?
  • Simplify what’s for dinner! We eat beans and rice every week. It’s good, humble food. Then I use the leftover beans in another meal–nachos, tacos, soup, tostadas. Two meals every week that are already more or less planned.
  • Have a few backups. Our days as home educators hardly ever go exactly as planned. And these exceptional days–that really aren’t the exception–can make it hard to stick to a meal plan. Always having a jar of sauce and some noodles on hand means that we can eat. Add in some meat from the freezer and some garlic bread and it’s a feast!

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Poetry Postcards + Publication

8 July 2020 by Kortney

The Thunder Moon came full and it’s not many days till my birthday.

In honor of the day, I’ve been working for the past weeks on sending out 46 postcards of original poetry.

Little hellos from my desk on the sunporch went out today to California, Nova Scotia, Pennsylvania, Texas, Oman, and North Portland!

In other poetry news, Better Than Starbucks published a few of my haiku. I am thrilled to be a part of the same issue that features poetry + an interview with A.M. Juster!

The three poems published are a part of a larger series about Julian of Norwich. I began working on these poems in Spring 2019 as a part of a class with Holly Cornfield Carr about the poetry of place. Julian’s cell–what a place! Then I took them to our Summer writing retreat. And now a few are being published during my birthday month! Pure gift.

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Every Ordinary Thing

28 May 2020 by Kortney

God is ever working on our behalf–St Ignatius

Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God’s love–Caryll Houselander

People laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on than we either know or care to know.

Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it anyway is that every once and so often we hear

a whisper from the wings that goes something like this,

“You’ve turned up at the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think you’ve been forgotten.”

Coincidences are God’s way of getting our attention–Fredrick Buechner

We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?–Wendell Berry

I have a blue notebook that I keep on my desk to record the tiny, reliable patterns that emerge from the tangle of days.

One more way to remember what went right.

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Kortney Garrison © 2021

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