Spring is here?
Evening in the Yard
the girl
Fourth Sunday of Lent 2013
The Girl was off for the weekend, the house was quiet, and it was tempting to be lazy.
But.
The sun was out, the day warm, and the swing beckoned.
Third Sunday of Lent 2013
With the Boy, schedules and perspectives on them change. It was the same with with L, but you forget over time. The Boy reminded us quickly, and the reminders continue daily. Among the things that change of course is the notion of what it means to sleep in. That has changed gradually as we've left behind the carelessness of childhood and adolescence.
These days, sleeping in until half past seven is a luxury indeed, especially for for K. Sunday mornings.
From there, the rituals, old and new, take over. Sundays are days filled with ritual, both sacred and recreational.
Mornings lean toward the former; afternoons edge toward the latter.
#16 — Imagination and Fiction
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. Rare indeed are the true contacts with good and evil.
Weil's words read like a quote out of The Matrix or Inception, and it's easy to brush them off as metaphorical theorizing:
And it's easy to pass it onto the "madding crowd" and insist that we ourselves are not imagining things, not asleep. We are fully aware of the reality around us and can separate it from wish and fantasy, but the materialistic hordes around us can't. It's easy to think that way.
Surely, with rarefied reality all around us -- the screams of delight of children at play, the hard crack of a helmet against plexiglass, a blast of cold air when we get out of the car -- we are awake.
Of course Weil doesn't mean anything so cinematic. She's simply pointing out our uncanny ability to deceive ourselves and fall for the farce completely, to create worlds out of our irrational fears and project them on everyone and everything, to believe that the way we see the world is the way everyone sees it and indeed the only true way to perceive it. I see the effects of this every day at school: some students have mastered already the art of fully deceiving themselves, convinced that they can do no wrong and that all the trouble they find themselves in can easily be laid at the doorstep of others (read: adults; read: teachers).
I'm not sure what the kick (to borrow a term from Inception) for this dream might be, especially when we're not even sure we can kick ourselves awake. Perhaps awareness is the first and, paradoxically, last step. An afternoon spent with the Girl at a birthday party followed by a bit of first-time exposure to live hockey should be enough to separate fiction from good, imagination from evil.
That's the secular answer.
I think Weil might not entirely agree, though. Like Inception, we need someone who doesn't share that same reality, someone who's at a level higher (literally in the film and in Catholicism too, I suppose) to help jar us out of the fictions we create for ourselves.
Second Sunday of Lent 2013
Sun. It's always there, they say. While living in Poland, I could go weeks, it seemed, without actually seeing it. Hidden behind layers upon layers of clouds, the sun's light was defused throughout the whole sky, a dully gray that made it impossible to tell the time of day. There were two modes: darkness and less darkness.
Lately, it's seemed like that around here. Gray skies. Rainy days. Cold and damp. Damp and cold.
And then, this morning.
Cloudless. Bright sky. Rich blue. And the temperature soars into the fifties, touches the sixties.
Everyone it seems is out. The neighbors' dog, an ever-thrilled, always-excited Spaniel, is out making its rounds. I would say "Everyone loves him," but I can speak only for my family: everyone loves him.
Everyone is out and about, including our dear little friend from up the street. The bare Crape Myrtles in the front beckon, and soon the kids are climbing, laughing, playing.
The promise of spring, the promise of afternoons outside, the promise of long evenings with golden skies.
It's all coming.
Singalong
New Year’s Eve Performance
I've been catching up on old videos I never compiled...
Independence
Independence comes in small developments: gripping a bottle.
Riding a bike.
Evening Rituals
Climbing, scooting, homework, making friends with the cat -- it's all part of the evening ritual. And with an infant, that ritual paradoxically includes the unexpected.
And a little boy who goes from silly and giggling to sick and crying in a matter of a few evening hours is one such exception, which trumps everything else -- especially a silly blog.
February Sunday
The Nexus has become a favorite of L's: she is consistently aware of the battery status and always willing to give a friendly reminder when it's getting low, which would be daily if we let her use it as often as she would really like to. She learned quickly how to install new games, uninstall boring apps, and customize various aspects of the desktop -- for lack of a better term. Promoting interest in all things tablet, in other words, is not a problem.
What is a problem is fostering interest in all things spiritual. Well, in anything spiritual. Perhaps it's a function of her age as well as her super-hyper personality. Still, we try. We have nightly prayers, but that often turns into something of a spiritual/mental wrestling match. We go to Mass regularly, but she's always more interested in the playground afterward than anything happening during Mass.
It occurred to me the other day that perhaps joining the two might be fruitful. I installed Laudate, a Catholic missal/prayer/encyclopedia/everything app on both her and my account, and showed her a couple of our nightly prayers this morning after breakfast.
"What's this?" I asked.
She began to read, "G-l-o-r -- Glory be!" She was eager to continue reading: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen." And then, without prompting, without a word from me, she crossed herself: "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." (She can't seem to remember to add the proper "of's" in that prayer...)
We read another, and it was the same. Odd, how ritual forms without us really realizing it. Odd and hopeful.
As for the rest of the day, it was a fairly typical Sunday. Some posing for pictures in her new church clothes, a gift from her godmother in Poland.
And some play time with an ever-dearer friend up the street, W. K and L introduced W to "Super Farmer," a Polish game that really requires no Polish language skills at all -- just a bit of forbearance when an unlucky throw of the dice wipes out all of one's livestock.
That in itself took a bit of acclimation for the Girl. The first time she tossed "wolf" and lost everything, there was a complete breakdown -- crying, shouting, pouting, stomping. Tonight's final game, the loss of everything brought a calm, "Oh well," and a gentle passing of the dice.
And where was the Boy throughout all of this, the prayers, the games, the chaos? It all happened during his two naps, leaving him inconveniently out of all the photos. He didn't seem to mind.