one of the gifts i received for my birthday this year was a copy of Laurie Bestvater’s book The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason.  reviews that i had read made me interested in the book, but i was afraid there wouldn’t be any new ground covered.  i was wrong!  Bestvater’s elliptical, reflective, associative style drew me in immediately.  i choose to read the book straight through–without copying down or even marking quotes.  i wanted to just take it all in the first time.  i am only now beginning to re-read and have only made through the preface!  Bestvater (and Mason behind her) put names to ideas that have been percolating in me.  i’ve been seeing shadows and hints of Mason’s glorious large room.  listen:

Mason had shown me that the notebooks can be forms of vitality, literally the shape and outline, the liturgy of the attentive life.

They nurture the science of relations and the art of mindfulness.

They teach us to see the very brief beauty of now, to know the landscape of here, to be present in all our pleasures and pains.

Through them we, haltingly dwell in a world of ideas and connections with an ever-higher opinion of God and his works and as truer students of Divinity.

–from the Preface, xv.

more goodness can be found over at Dawn’s place…

a little poetry as the seasons shift…Robert Hass from “The Beginning of September.”

X.

Here are some things to pray to in San Francisco: the bay, the mountain, the goddess of the city; remembering, forgetting, sudden pleasure, loss; sunrise and sunset; salt; the tutelary gods of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Basque, French, Italian, and Mexican cooking; the solitude of coffeehouse and museums; the virgin, the mother, and widow moons; hilliness, vistas; John McLaren; Saint Francis; the Mother of Sorrows; the rhythm of any life still whole through three generations; wine, especially zinfandel because from that Hungarian wine-slip came first a native wne not resinous and sugar-heavy; the sourdough mother, true yeast and beginning; all fish and fisherman at the turning of the tide; the turning of the tide; eelgrass, oldest inhabitant; fog; seagulls; Joseph Worcester; plum blossoms; warm days in January.

you can read more of this long and lovely poem at the Library of Congress…though the line breaks of this prose poem are all messed up.  if you can get your hands on the slim volume called simply Praise, it would be worth your time.

more good things to read at ladydusk.

a few years ago i was talking to a friend about our Advent preparations.  i told him i felt like the novice master or abbot at a monastery.  it was my job, my obedience to educate these eager–but green–monks.  my job to create an atmosphere where prayer + work could live side by side.  as the years pass, this metaphor grows more and more apt!  so as we launch into a new homeschooling year, as the tide is rising + the moon coming full, here are two quote from Penelope Wilcock’s novel of monks and healers finding their work called The Breath of Peace.

“I think I may not have the stature of spirit for what I’ve taken on in this obedience.”

“Nay, neither you nor any man!” Tom responded stoutly.  “That’s why we pray.”

::

I had an irrational, unquenchable hope that I could find my way to something of blessing, something I could believe in.  And I had this vision of what a home could be, a hearth of loving kindness, a place of shelter, and affirmation…and peace.