Category: Musings on Life and Beauty

Hello again!

Musings on Life and Beauty


orangetulips
It’s been so long since I posted that I hardly know what to write.  I never intended to allow my blogging to taper off so much in 2013, and then halt altogether for nearly three months.  Life just floods the hours, then the days and suddenly the months are gone and I’m left wondering at it all.  My mind and heart have traveled so many directions it’s difficult to choose just one to capture, and then capturing so many escapes me altogether and I’m left, empty handed but strangely full at the same time.

I never really reported on my goals for 2013, which has nagged at me, but now we’re so far into 2014 that I wonder how much value there would be in going back to dissect.  The start of this new year has been such a whirlwind that I’m not really sure I’ve even got a handle on it yet, let alone a capstone for the year that’s gone.  Tonight none of it matters.  My heart is shouting, “WRITE!!!”

I wasn’t a great mother today.  Every time I got a child on task and turned my attention to another one, everyone else scattered.   There are days it feels like the only thing they work at is escaping my notice while they quietly do whatever they feel like doing INSTEAD of the chore/assignment they’re avoiding.  Today was certainly one of those days and I didn’t rise to the occasion like I should have.  By mid-afternoon I felt up to my eyeballs in everything that isn’t what I wish it was within our home and family, leaving me frustrated and discouraged.

Then I walked past a mirror in our home and was reminded of something I read recently about how a baby, when placed before a mirror, reaches for its reflection in joy and fascination at the life it reveals.  When was the last time I looked at myself with joy and amazement at the life that is in me?  I made myself pause and look into my own eyes until I could really see myself in them, until I saw enough good that I smiled back at my reflection.  In spite of the ups and downs of motherhood and life, I have found myself lately in an ongoing experience of revelation, understanding and learning.  I’ll be sitting in a chair, or driving, and suddenly I’m filled with warmth as new (to me) ideas and understanding literally fill my mind.  I’m hungry, so very hungry, for the word of God, wanting to devour it all right now and yet feasting abundantly on a single sentence is equally enjoyable.  With it has come enhanced and distinct understanding of who I am, not just here, but before I came here – one experience bringing so much clarity and understanding that I still can’t get over it.  I am finally learning that although I am flawed in countless ways, God did not make a mistake when he made me.   He knows me, understands what makes me tick,  and loves me.  It’s a miracle and I’m amazed by it.

Alongside and woven with this golden thread of learning is the laboratory of life – life with a lot of children, in a busy household with clutter, fingerprints on every wall, dirty socks hidden in stranger places than I can predict and more meals to prepare than I have interest in cooking.   I often feel irritated with myself at the gap between my conceptual understanding of principles and my inability to actually put them into action in our family.  Too often I “get it” but struggle to really “live it.”  It’s occurred to me lately that perhaps never before has so much been expected of a generation of parents in so short a time as there is now.  Technology and media have completely changed the game in raising teenagers and in all our bumbling around trying to find the right balance we also make a lot of mistakes.   Tonight I’m grateful that my bumbling efforts also allow me to bump up against the reality and power of Christ’s Atonement.  I need it more every day, not less, and the need generates a lovely, prayerful dialogue in my days.

So I guess I’m back.  Back because I want my attention span to be longer than the fraction of a second it takes me to scroll past an instagram picture (fun as it is!), because I miss this layer in my life, because if I don’t do this I’m afraid I’ll turn around a few years from now unable to remember anything specific because it’s been such a blur.  Back because life is good and because it is hard and because I’m so blessed and because I struggle.    Because motherhood matters.  So does hope.  And family.   (And because I can’t get enough of quilting.)

Hello again!
Jennifer

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Effort and Mercy

Musings on Life and Beauty, Simple. Quality.

I sit on the couch at the moment, something I don’t usually do during school hours, but today is different.  It’s day three of sick children home from school, day three of life in two worlds as we keep the healthy ones moving and nurse the sick ones on the couch.  This means, of course, more time sitting, holding, reading than I usually do.  It’s also provided time to think and for that I am grateful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog lately, about why it is that I seem to have lost my voice, why so often I sit down to write a post and never publish it.  I’ve been writing here for 4.5 years now and it’s been such a blessing in my life.  One of those blessings has been the process of “finding my voice.”  Yet as this calendar year has progressed, I find myself sharing less of life and mostly posting pictures of my sewing.  While I love quilting and it makes me giddy to be part of that online community, there is a part of my heart that weeps a little at the clamps that seem to be on my heart when it’s time to type.  I have always felt a desire to use my blog to encourage myself and others and I feel I’m failing in this goal.

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Yesterday I had a telephone conversation with someone who helped resolve a problem facing one of my children and as I hung up the phone I was amazed by the outcome.  I wondered how it was that things could be so simply solved, aware that a more difficult solution would have been just, wondering if perhaps a dis-service was being done my child through an easy resolution.  Until I remembered reading this quote last week:

“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.  All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
”
– John Ruskin (emphasis added) I walked through my kitchen as that last word struck me profoundly.  Mercy.  The power of it and a sense of what a gift it is rushed through me and all my wondering was replaced with profound gratitude for mercy expended in my child’s direction.  A heartfelt desire to have that gift for me, as well, followed closely on its heels.

I’ve always known that our family is full of imperfections, but somehow believed that by the time they were grown we would have managed to overcome the worst of them.  This week my oldest son started a new job and not seeing him for 12 or more hours each day has been strange.  It has also helped me identify something I’ve been struggling with, something which has contributed greatly to the clamps that have silenced me so much.  It’s sobering, humbling, and a little bit frightening to be so near the point of sending a child out into the world, an “adult”, realizing that you probably won’t overcome or fix everything you wanted to master while they are still at home and under your influence.  The continued struggle and ongoing battles have made me quiet.  I question myself more, not because my values or beliefs are at risk, but because I don’t know how to make someone different of myself when all I have is me to work with.  This year my imperfections have felt like my enemies rather than things that make life better, lovelier or more beloved.  I have felt discouraged when my efforts seem to bring no material change.  I have recognized I’m in the middle of an ongoing but largely imperceptible transformation and the slowness of it has made me almost desperate with frustration.  I feel like I have little to add to life’s conversation because all I really know is “get up and try again tomorrow and try to believe that in another 20 years you will see a difference.”  And this, while my children grow at warp speed.

These words keep playing in my heart:

“that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
I am good at effort.  I can do that.   I will work at mercy, as the tiny taste I had yesterday was so delicious to me.  I think of this blog, of my relative silence, and consider that perhaps I can contribute to the conversation of EFFORT as one of life’s blessings and goals.

I noticed the above leaf this week and was so intrigued by it that I paused to study it.  The dry and crumpled edges such a contrast to the supple center, the red and yellow with a white vein in the center.  Such an imperfect leaf, and yet I preferred it to the more “beautiful” leaves nearby.  As I studied it I was reminded that imperfection is beautiful in its own way, and resolved to live my imperfect live with eyes open to its beauty, and with faith in my Heavenly Father’s mercy.  Maybe that will help unlock my heart…

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Laundry

Musings on Life and Beauty

Today I am racing around trying to get things done around the house.  I wrote on Sunday about how it feels for me to be out of the house more lately and I feel like if I run a little faster I might be able to fix it?

I was talking to a friend and she mentioned laundry.  It made me laugh, because at our house the first sign that we are out of balance is the laundry.    Not that it doesn’t get washed; I don’t have that option.  But the concept of laundry as a beautiful process that contributes to order and tidiness goes right out the window while the clothes land on the floor.

laundry
I’ve said before that 15 minutes can work wonders, and I got a lot of folding done in 15 minutes… just in time to walk out the door for 2.5 hours of carpool driving.  I have a feeling it took my 4 year old much less than 15 minutes to undo the neatly folded stacks of clothing I had waiting for several children to carry to their rooms and put away.  Sigh.

I’ve worked so hard on routines since school started, trying to help my children improve their habits, and many days I’ve felt good about what I’m accomplishing, but sometimes sights like this make me wonder who I was kidding.  The past few days are making me humble and sending me back to the drawing board (my knees).

Another tell-tale sign?  My kitchen counter… the end of it, where the papers stack up if I don’t deal with them right away.   That hot spot needs attention as well.

Do you have a spot that always goes first when life spins out of control?

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