I took this picture on my phone
when I was walking in sunshine
on a beautiful day
one of those days that you wish would
be all the days
a day you think
this is summer to me
and I went to the local yarn shop.
*
It's funny,
after being sick and relapsing many times
just walking places like this
doing new things
is a huge achievement instead of just a normal
what you do when you are still new in a city/place.
*
I loved very much reading of
this miracle.
*
This
video from
Ira's blog
is beautiful:
Kinfolk Magazine: Issue 4 (An Ode to Summer) from
Kinfolk on
Vimeo.
*
I have known this beauty.
The one thing I can say about the video is that I have had
a lot of the beginning of it ~ the alone-ness but also the beauty.
But there is more to it,
at the same time.
It hints of what one is looking for,
but does not capture it,
though it does show culture and beauty and all in one
the wish for community, roots and the door to summer
that they write of opening everything.
I understand it, it is beautiful.
*
This video I watched many times from
Mat. Anna:
I showed it to Mr. Husband...
*
So I finally got my computer-typed journal that I began over 8 years ago.
When my last computer died
I could not find my Windows MS CD to install MS Word
and thus did not have access to my files,
including the journal there.
This morning I found it and found my journal and wrote.
*
I am reading Flannery O'Connor's
letters.
She writes in a time when it was still more common to be
Christian.
She has a steadiness and a determination that I really like.
*
I began reading
Elder Paisios' Book
and now I understand more of why this priest finds it a
living book.
It is actually one of those books that makes me think
my goodness! Elder Paisios is a poet!
He captures our lives!
He sees what we struggle with!
He understands! He gets it!
Oh, he sees! he really sees!
and yet
he gives hope!
*
Really,
Mr. Husband grabbed the
book to read,
took the plastic off it,
as we had just gotten it at the
local Greek monastery
a few weeks ago and had not yet begun reading it
and so it was that I began reading it and there it was ~
the feelings of stress that we experience,
the lost-ness, the sense of isolation, abandonment,
the things I have seen in my friends, in myself,
the stress of it all.
But at the same time he writes giving us hope,
a way forward,
as if suddenly we are given something under out feet
and while we still feel like we are floundering lots of the time,
yet there is this memory that there is something
stable and with God somehow things are still possible,
endurable,
even blessed.
*
As I was looking over my journal that I have kept all these years,
before I even had this blog at all,
I can see how in the last years,
with all the transitions and then marriage,
moving, sickness and life as we
have it,
that I am still in this tumbler that I have yet to see how it will
settle into and what that means for what
my life is now.
*
But somehow,
when I think of Elder Paisios' book
it's all OK again,
in the sense that
Jesus is the same today, yesterday and forever.
*
I read to Mr. Husband about a miracle in Russia in
our times in the
Everyday Saints book
and that it is because Christ is always the same
that miracles still occur.
This church we go to
often as not
as it is nearer to us.
It is a vast beautiful church,
one that when I first entered
and saw the gleaming candle stands and the beauty
of the green carpet and unity of it all,
I immediately thought of
Elizabeth Goudge books and that
it is one of her churches.
You know that before the crazy times of the 1960's
this church was standing room only?!
Must of been over 1000 worshipers here!
*
Something that I did not understand
in my undergraduate years
and that somehow everyone failed to tell me
was what had happened in the past century or so.
I had a good inkling of it,
saw how the likes of writers such as
Virginia Woolf,
whose command of language I liked at the time,
was really messed up and lost.
But back then I was really distracted by
earnest feminist questions
that once I discovered the Orthodox church
just fell away.
Simply are not there.
Not questions that are suddenly
denied, repressed or ignored,
literally just not questions I have any longer.
They were answered and yet not there.
Back then,
I was also really taken by
post-modern literary criticism
but did not realize that this often meant that
novels and literature itself were not the thing studied.
Or they were studied in a way that was never discussed
on what the text was saying or what it may be missing
or the intellectual history and what had changed
and was this change for the better?
I loved reading philosophy;
it made me feel alive somehow, back then.
Yet I knew then that some of the literary criticism
was absolute nonsense.
How one can not understand any words or
signification of anything
yet the very words saying
it's all meaningless were understood and sadly believed.
*
But it was never said ~
how Christ was being hated, denied.
Or how humans were being abused by the very
philosophies of the times.
Or how things would be more and more strung out,
with broken families,
and families moving to various parts of the world
and mothers struggling to raise kids without
the help of their Aunts and Uncles or Mothers & Fathers near by.
Or that we have lost a lot of traditions and what
the world is looking at now as spirituality or traditions
is not an equal replacement.
*
Back to the video ~
When I showed it to Mr. Husband
he understood it immediately and said
early Christians did the same thing,
taking children in Roman times that were abandoned
in the dumps and Christians would go and find them
and raise them and teach them of the
life in Christ
and how the Christians cared for the poor.
*
Christ is the same today, yesterday and forever.
*
“Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths, where the good way is,
And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
~
Jeremiah 6:16
*
*
God
is with us.
