Blue-stockings and Red-herrings

While looking for a particular quote today, I came across the word "bluestocking" and in the process was drawn to the word, 'red-herring' which reminded me of a book I recently read, A Red Herring Without Mustard, a Flavia de Luce novel by Alan Bradley.   I liked how the words go together so had a go at pursuing this digression in my 'busy day' of yard work, family chatter, and preparations for our turkey dinner - where I'm sure there will be conversation, banter and yes, even some distracting comments... 

Here are a few thoughts I ferreted out on the internet ...

Bluestocking:  a woman having intellectual or literary interests / an educated woman who is interested in books and ideas.

Any group of ladies who in mid-18th century England held "conversations' to which they invited men of letters and members of the aristocracy with literary interests.  The word has come to be applied derisively to a woman who affects literary or learned interests.  The Bluestockings attempted to replace social evenings spent playing cards and idle chatter with something more intellectually.  The term probably originated when one of the ladies, Mrs. Vesey, invited the learned Benjamin Stillingfleet to one of her parties; he declined because he lacked appropriate dress, whereupon she told him to come "in his blue stockings' - the ordinary worsted stockings as opposed to the black silk stockings which were required for formal evening dress.


A Red herring is a clue which is intentionally or unintentionally misleading or distracting from the actual issue; used to divert attention from the real problem or matter at hand.  The term is mostly used to claim that the argument of another person is not relevant to the issue being discussed.  In mystery fiction, a clue or lead that turns out not to be relevant to the solution of the mystery would also be a red herring....

The term is generally believed to come from the sport of fox hunting in which a dried, smoked herring, which is red in color, is dragged across the trail of the fox to throw the hounds off the scent.  Thus, a "red herring" argument is one which distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some irrelevancy.  This frequently occurs during debates... by extension, it applies to any argument in which the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion.... [www.fallacyfiles.org]

Personally:  I like the idea of a group of women getting together to discuss, dialogue about what they have read.  But somehow the idea of a "Book Club" never quite drew me... I would never be able to confine my thoughts to one book at a time... somehow there needs to be a bit more pizazz, a bit more dialogue, a bit more pursuing of ideas and some reflection.

I like mysteries so red herrings somehow work into my thoughts constantly and in chatting with others I'm frequently drawing my mind back to the present topic.  I live with the tension of intently and single-mindedly pursuing the fox or following a more inviting path in the woodland. I always hope that the paths will somehow come together in the end.

Starting to ramble here but just putting it out there for all you book-minded, mystery loving ladies, who may or may not have had a longing to wear blue stockings and pursue dialogue where red-herrings are allowed .... I'm willing, how about you???

"Midwife to the birth of a Soul..."

This week a friend and fellow seeker after God passed away.  We seldom chatted at any great length during the 30 odd years we knew each other but he taught me to pay attention to my soul by giving my mind time to ponder and contemplate - to listen and gather the thoughts that meshed & clashed in my mind - to not be afraid of uncertainty - to face the questions and pursue them...knowing full well that this quest would continue until the day we die and we finally rest...body, soul and spirit.

As I read comments on Facebook and later heard comments read at the memorial service the one phrase which kept coming to mind was, "The greatest privilege of a human life is to become midwife to the birth of a soul."[John O'Donohue]  I was only one of many whom he helped birth... what a blessing to have those in our lives who coax our souls to life - who encourage us to find the "dreams that lie at the hearth of the soul."

In the days leading up to his passing I gave him the book, To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O'Donohue.  The last thing he said to me was, "I read the book."  As he agreed that he was now in that thin space between heaven and earth and held strongly to my hand as I sang over him a blessing... his soul was at peace, his mind at rest...

and so, Ken, as you enter heaven ...

"May your heart be speechless
At the sight of the truth
Of all belief had hoped,
Your heart breathless
In the light and lightness
Where each and everything
Is at last its true self
Within that serene belonging
That dwells beside us
On the other side
Of what we see."

Weathered into identity...

Wisdom through small steps and the ordinary...

a quote by Sue Bender,  Everyday Sacred, p.125

"What I am learning is not 'light-bulb joy,'" Helen said that same day. "Nothing really dramatic, but the experiences add up to the beginning of wisdom."  She thought again about the day of the fire. [in which they lost their home] "If I use the word 'searching,' someone might think I'm not content.  My searching is more like that of a monk.  I'm not driven in the search, but hope to keep learning things along the way."

"After my visits to the Amish," I told her, "I had expected to be transformed.  I expected to see big changes.  Instead. I found little changes, and a new appreciation of all the things I had taken for granted."

Helen smiled.  "Maybe that's the beginning of wisdom. There are no answers, there are just experiences."


Nora Gallagher in, Things Seen and Unseen, wrote, "The road to the sacred is paved with the ordinary." and quotes from Esther de Waal, an English historian who has written extensively about Celtic Christianity. "It was a practice in which ordinary people in their daily lives took the tasks that lay to hand but treated them sacramentally, as pointing to a greater reality which lay beyond them.  It is an approach to life which we have been in danger of losing, this sense of allowing the extraordinary to break in on the ordinary."

Further, Nora Gallagher writes... "This then, is a record of what it is like to live with the hand at my back, to live within a world that is mostly unknown outside its boundaries, to live in faith.  It's a long journey into experience and away from idealism.  One imagines religion as making one "good," and various ideal ways of behaving are often touted in pulpits.  But the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.  And none of it works without the weight of experience, knowing something as an experience rather than as an event that passes over the skin.  How this I experiences this event and folds it into flesh.  How a soul, as Margaret Drabble said, weathers into identity."

Kitchen complete...

Well, almost 3 months to the day we started, the kitchen is complete:)

Our freshly cleaned and cleaned out fridge was moved into place this morning and I keep wandering around with a rag in hand wiping off a speck here and a crumb there....  but to get to completion there were two major obstacles  we had to tackle this week - finish the tiles and one more coat of paint.  Doug did the painting, because that's what he mostly does and is fussy about it but never quite happy because of the minute imperfections:) I think it looks just fine.  Another thing - he say's the colour is green while I 'know' it is yellow with a green tinge to it.... interesting how we see things differently.

I finally decided I would tackle the tiles.  Laying them all out according to the two places they would go I found that I needed to cut 17 tiles!  How to do this was the question - did it really require at trip out of the city to use my sister's wet saw.  I decided to ask the stone mason working on the neighbour's fireplace.  He suggested I try scoring the cut line with an exacto knife and breaking it - if that didn't work he would come over later and cut them for me:)

Ingenuity and a strong hand conquered the tiles! I was thankful for the 'just do it' mantra I'd learned from my Yorkshire Granma and my 'anything can be done with a little ingenuity' attitude I inherited from my Scandinavian father.  Holding a putty knife along the cut line I scored it with the exacto knife - then with the putty knife held upright in the scored line I gave it a few gentle whacks with the hammer and then a harder whack and there you have it - a tile neatly cut into two pieces.

After cementing them in place and letting them set over night, yesterday, I stirred up the grout and messed with it for hours!!! but I think the tiles finally turned out okay.

While I finished wiping off the grit Doug painted and there you have it - after a good night's sleep we awoke this morning to a renovated kitchen!  It's not large but it is certainly adequate and pleasant - and so absolutely beautifully warm in colour, especially when the sun shines in, that I am loath to put up any type of window covering.

com·plete/kəmˈplēt/

Adjective:	Having all the necessary or appropriate parts.
Verb:	Finish making or doing.
Synonyms:	adjective.  perfect - entire - whole - total - absolute - full verb.  finish - end - terminate - conclude - accomplish

A Psalm of Waiting...

Psalm 62 was the passage shared in service today.

This "Psalm of Waiting" begins,  "For God alone my soul waits in silence;"

I've realized over the past four years how beneficial it has been for me to 'wait in silence' and have developed this ability by participating in several silent retreats.  Learning to wait in silence for God has taught me many things - one being, that after an extended time of silence I carry a sense of peace and calm with me through my days.  Anxiety, frustrations, etc are minimized because somehow there is within me a quiet spirit.  Uncertainty becomes 'okay' - I don't always need to know the answers, I don't always need to make things happen so that 'everything is taken care of.'

Still need to put up the mirror and towel ring:)

And so, the renovations, which move ever so slowly, are 'okay' - no matter that I'm surprised and somewhat dismayed when I realize that we need to repair little holes in the walls[sometimes more than once], sand, wipe down, prime, sand again, and paint at least twice... and then the tape that is supposed to protect a wall already painted removes the paint no matter how gently your pull it off and the process begins again.  But we are progressing inch by inch and yesterday the washroom looked a bit more complete as we put the curtains and the extra towel bar up. 

And it's 'okay' that it is taking longer than expected to repair the garage roof... which now sports a blue tarp because we need more roofing tiles...

In a life that is constantly busy, constantly full of noise, demands, and responsibilities we tend to ignore the call of our souls to silence.  And waiting and silence are important complements.  It is super difficult to sit quietly, in silence, to attend to God, to rest from telling God how he might answer my concerns or set the world straight!  It's super difficult for me to sit quietly without having a book, or a paint brush, or a pen in my hand... always ready to think or create.  Being privileged to be born into a family of 'creative doers' this is exceptionally difficult - because it seems so un-productive!

I was reminded of this today while reading my sister's blog where she comments on this tension when producing objects out of clay but not being able to fire them until the electrician can hook up the kiln in mid-September! Hence the feeling of an incomplete process of productivity.  All the same it seems she is enjoying the creative multi-step somewhat meditative process required in the forming of the clay...  You can check out her blog: "My Life in Clay"  http://perimichelle.blogspot.ca/

Perhaps the process is as, if not more, important than the final product... How often do we focus on God's Kingdom to come and lose focus on God's kingdom now? How often do we hurry and scurry around to get to our destination - but miss the quiet moments that can be experienced in the process of getting there?

Life is full of small moments and learning to be silent enables me to accept each as one more step in a process, one more bit of path in the journey, one more moment in learning to know someone a bit better.

In all of this I keep hoping to see more clearly the intertwining of the sacred with the 'here and now' [Henri Nouwen], to blend a measure of God's view from above and my view from below [Philip Yancey], to understand that 'what I experience in the world of faith must be measured against what I see, what is happening around me." [Nora Gallagher] and to quite simply understand that God is indeed part of my 'everydayness.'

Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book,  An Altar in the World,  "What is saving my life now... is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth.  My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. [I ignore distinctions between secular and sacred, physical and spiritual, the body and the soul]  What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world... In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life... Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it."

Yesterday evening I took my coffee out to sit quietly in the cool damp of the evening. It was silent and it was windy.  As I was looking at my sweet peas, which I am growing in a pot on the gazebo porch beside my 'relaxing chair', my eyes gradually focused in on a beautiful green and brown dragonfly which seemed to be 'hanging on for dear life' as the wind buffeted the vines on the rather flimsy climbing strings.  In a moment of silence, of wonder, I paused -  before running for my camera to capture this beautifully exquisite creature in a photo!

Autumn

I love autumn - until I look at my calendar and see days full of work and appointments!

My soul wants to shut out the busyness of September and perhaps it would if I were not able to get out and see the autumn leaves and feel the cool, settling air. There is stillness, decay, and death. But there is also a glimpse of hope - I gather perennial seeds and scatter them in new places hoping for the miracle of spring that will bring them to life.

Many years I have gathered autumn leaves - we all like to "gather" certain things in the hopes, perhaps, of somehow possessing them, or hanging on so we don't lose them.  Well, perhaps by painting these leaves I no longer need to gather.  I feel I am brushing and coaxing many colours and shapes into a memory of autumn.

A few quotes on autumn which cause me to ponder and which hold in them something truly profound about how we might experience this season:

Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.
Elizabeth Lawrence

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Autumn wins you best by this, its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Robert Browning

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.
Yoko Ono

A continuing exercise....

Renovations continue!!

 So it seems we are "almost done" our main floor renovations.  I say almost because the workers have come and gone and it's basically up to us now to finish it off!  Well, the fellow has not done the grout for the tiles but this is a job I will tackle with my sister's help next week.  Then there is the painting!  But we are moving along wall by wall and one of these days it will be complete.  

At least now we can feel like having people over for coffee or a barbeque as long as the weather is good and we can use the gazebo...[because the washroom is now useable]  and we are having a lovely summer and there is nothing more peaceful than sitting outside in a sheltered spot reading or chatting with a cup of coffee in hand. I'm really enjoying this summer!

our outdoor dining room

 

 Oh yes, must get the mirror up, the towel rack on and the curtains and pictures hung in the washroom!

And there are doors that have been taken off to paint that need to be put on... endless details it seems but we keep tackling them one at a time.  It has been a challenging and enlightening experience but overall I think we are ending up with a very harmonious and welcoming space that we hope to enjoy for the next 20 years!!