Sunday, March 14, 2010

Daily 5 - Day 214

Today's Daily 5:
  1. House Church gathering this afternoon
  2. Cuddled a baby for quite a while during the gathering - kind of fun to cuddle him, feed him a bottle in the middle of worship.
  3. Got a lot done this morning, including some more unpacking stuff, and all the laundry.
  4. Clean sheets and pajamas for crawling into bed tonight.
  5. Got a hug from a friend at the house church gathering
  6. pizza for supper
  7. chocolate and coconut
  8. beautifully scented candles
  9. Got through a very detailed budget update
  10. heading for bed earlyish

The Journey

 Both Renee and Anne Jackson have posted this poem in recent days.  I'd never read it before, but it struck me deeply both times it appeared, and I wanted to share it here as well.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do,
and began
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations -
though their melancholy
was terrible.

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -

determined to save
the only life you could save.

*(Mary Oliver – Dream Work)

Lazy, Productive

Sunday mornings at Grandma's house are turning out to be both lazy and productive, especially these days when I don't have a car.

They start lazily, mostly because I tend to stay downstairs, in bed, until I know that Grandma's left for church.  It's easier to sleep a bit later than usually for me now that I'm living in the basement, too, since it's dark down here.

And then they get productive, because once she's left, I tend to dive into the necessary housekeeping tasks that I'd rather she not be looking over my shoulder while I accomplish them.  Things like my laundry, taking the garbage and recycling out, those sort of things.  The kind of things you perhaps do differently at age 80 than at 26.

Later this afternoon I'm attending a gathering of all of the house churches in the network that my house church is a part of.  There are speakers from Rwanda today. 

But in the meantime, I'm doing laundry, and taking the garbage out, and still working on unpacking the last few boxes.  The boxes that are left are ones that need to be sorted through, things eliminated, the rest likely stored.  That, and I need to put my scrapbooking supplies onto their shelves, and set up my table with a place to sit and work on those projects.