boonzaaijers

We are in the rainy season here (such that we have in Colorado that is), which is perfect for morning bike rides, then lazy afternoons of reading and dozing! This morning one of the girls rode with me to Boonzaaijer's, a cute little Dutch bakery on the west side--they made the cake for Laura's wedding last year. If you are in the mood for delectable European pastries, check them out...you won't be disappointed!

satisfied and ready for the ride home.

Laura's cake (picture by Rachel Hope Photography)

summer spaces

best mini burger ever (at dbar)

(my birthday)

birthdays (Michael 22, Lydia 24)

beautiful vocal recital of my good friend, Linda.

the youngest just before her ballet recital

 

Some of our favorites of summer in Colorado

food

celebrations

flowers

reads

(coming up...more food, from farmer's markets to table, hikes, bikes, and books--still need to hang the hammock!)

hope you are enjoying your summer space.

Moms

For those of you who check here every once in a while, I didn't mean to take such a long break from blogging. These past few months have been particularly tumultuous. But summer is almost here and the sun is shining and it's finally warm in Colorado! I hope to share soon some of the things I've been learning about grace amidst chaos, especially about grace. For now, though, I'll point you to some of my favorite poems about mothers and I'll say that some of the most amazing graces in my life have been my four daughters and son-in-law. They are in many ways the most courageous people I've ever known, compassionate and interesting and just plain fun! I love you Laura, Michael, Lea, Lynnae, and Lydia!

And because he's brilliant and funny, a poem by Billy Collins, "The Lanyard," perhaps dedicated to his mother.

to care and not care...

With my fundamentalist/evangelical background (long ago and yet still somehow with me), I have always felt a bit wistful with the keepings of the church calendar, as if it is a bit of a family secret that I should know but really don't. I long to measure my days by these reminders and yet when I try, it feels awkward and foreign. But the following profound reflection on Ash Wednesday does resonate (thanks to Richard Beck for the link):

...lurking within this day’s penitential posture is a celebration of our mortal existence. It is a liturgical episode that takes our physical existence seriously. It is, perhaps surprisingly, an extraordinarily hopeful day. The superficial gloom of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, points to the paradoxical, deep truth of the Christian faith: those who lose their life will gain it. It is a day to be released from the deadliness of doing, which is to say released to live in the world.

Later in the article, the writer references and explains TS Eliot's lines in "Ash Wednesday," "Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still":

The merger of caring and not caring might be thought of as non-neurotic engagement with the world. It implies a “doing” that is not deadly. When we sit still, we are still sitting in this world, with our bodies – not longing for escape. What Eliot, later in that poem, calls “the time of tension between dying and birth” gestures at our temptation: to turn this tension, the fact of our status as beings-toward-death, into a lack of stillness, of too much caring, of heaping burdens upon ourselves. This stillness ultimately resides within ourselves, for the swirl of the world surely is never ending. The task is not to flee such a world, but to dwell gracefully within it. We can, as Eliot puts it in the first stanza of “Ash Wednesday,” “rejoice that things are as they are…” Acceptance, total acceptance, and not mastery and reform, is the message of Ash Wednesday.

I've been reminded before about being present in the world, about the relationship between paying attention, gratitude and joy in this "time of tension between dying and birth". I am reminded again of how to keep these days, by "inhabiting" the now, whatever it is, "gracefully and lovingly."

(Thanks to family and friends who "dwell gracefully" with me...not an easy task believe me!... and  to Anne, for the book that is embodying these ideas in real stories and fresh language).

vulnerability

A friend recently pointed me to Brene Brown's TED talk on vulnerability and its relationship to human connection. It's worth your time. What she says about transparency and courage is worth your time..."to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart". Even when it's messy--especially when it's messy. It reminds me of what some of my students said last year about brokenness and living a beautiful life. If you struggle with perfection and control or if you panic thinking about being vulnerable (as I do), maybe you will relate to her message.

what we did.

...this past week when it was windchill -30...

we stayed inside and baked, watched Lost (and old Disney movies), knit, read, and I managed to get started on the mounds of grading already piling up this semester.

knit these fingerless gloves (easy pattern) during a Lost marathon...

some of the reading...my college roomate's debut novel An Uncommon Crusade (review post coming soon!), Gladwell's Blink,The Sabbath World, Judith Shulevitz's interesting meditation on time.

something about a tea party

When the girls were little, they loved having tea parties. They had valentine teas, teddy bear teas, summer garden teas. They could (and did) attach almost any theme to tea, whip out the tiny tea cups, and Voila! a tea party. 

The girls are all grown (or almost), but they (we) still love a pretty tea table. Now it's a time and space to slow down, to talk, to laugh, to knit, to savor warm cranberry bread and chai latte (or a cafe au lait for me). -- Just what we needed this Sunday afternoon after a somewhat busy, stressful few weeks. 

 The tea set and tablecloth are from Austria, where I spent the early years of my life.

 This afternoon tea was her idea...

In Austria, with my sister, where we also spent many happy hours having tea parties.

one year

Our 2nd daughter, Laura, married Michael, one year ago today! In one year, they married, moved to London where Michael finished his Masters at London School of Economics, squeezed in a honeymoon trip to the Amalfi coast, and moved back to Denver where Laura is finishing her degree at DU. They've had quite a year! It's been lovely having them close these last few months. Happy year one, Laura and Michael! May you always "love the gaze of each other's mind." 

new

I spent yesterday putting away the Christmas decorations and dutifully dusting a few nooks and crannies that were desperately needing it. It was a different Christmas than I had expected, yet also sweet in the giving and receiving. We went to Angel Fire, NM to be with my parents and siblings. Christmas day, the cousins chose a tree from the cabin's lot and decorated it with handmade ornaments.

I was able to find some perfect gifts for the girls (thanks to a very generous jar from an anonymous giver). We were so surprised and thankful that we decided to keep a Christmas jar for someone next year. Here are a few that were fun to give and to open!

Lea wearing her cute glasses--a gift from her early morning stocking. 

Michael, reading Truman Capote

I found a great deal on Oxfords and owls (necklace)...isn't she pretty??

I love the striped top she found for me! Notice the buttons (I love buttons :-)!)

Michael and Laura are full of beautiful and exciting dreams, so I was elated to find the perfect bird teapot and cup for Laura (wish I had taken a picture!), with Aristotle's words, "Hope is a waking dream" inscribed inside the tea cup. Isn't that a lovely idea?

 Lynnae and I exchanged favorite books. Gilead for her (I love this book too) and a book of blessing for me.

Finally, for those of you who check here every now and then, thanks so much for stopping by and for your comments of love and support. Happiest 2011~

"...may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life."

-- To Bless the Space Between Us

traditions

--pictures at Old Colorado City (used to be with Santa)

before the lunar eclipse

 relaxing few hours with the four girls at Wisdom Tea House...one of our newer, but favorite traditions.

an evening of cookie decorating

 and reading by the fire

Wishing all of our friends peace and joy this season!

blessing and time

Because rituals remind, the experience of time during the holidays can be bittersweet for us. Maybe, because of what is lost, we have to "fight through," pretending to enjoy for the sake of those we love. 

As O'Donohue writes, the work of day-to-day living is precarious:  there can be danger or darkness anywhere. Habitual time can turn in a second, and suddenly some unforeseen suffering is taking up tenancy in one's life... 

Blessing, he says, calls the potentiality of the future into the present moment and into the loss of the past:

To live like this is to experience time as a constant invitation to growth--to become more than you have been, to transform loss into presence, and to allow what is false to fall away. At the gates of time, blessing waits to usher toward us the grace we need....A blessing awakens future wholeness...a blessing 'forebrightens' the way. When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.

One of my favorite poems by Wendy Cope evokes this achingly beautiful image of forebrightening, one I hope is present for all of us this year.

balance

"We're going to start with a headstand." I felt my shoulders tense and evidently every one else in the room felt tense too. The instructor commented on the sudden heaviness and fear in the room. So she told us to breathe and notice where that tension was settling. To detach and look at it. I immediately started thinking about the vertigo I was feeling in my life, like my world was upside down. How do I retain any sense of balance, of vision, when it just feels like I'm about to fall?

John O'Donohue writes, in his book of Celtic blessing, about how we encounter those tilted spaces between and within us: 

We never see the script of our lives; nor do we know what is coming toward us, or why our life takes on this particular shape or sequence. [But] a blessing...opens a different door in human encounter. One enters into the forecourt of the soul...Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of life's journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now....When you bless another, you first gather yourself; you reach below your surface mind and personality, down to the deeper source within you--namely, the soul. Blessing is from soul to soul.

Perhaps the way out of fear is through blessing, giving and receiving it. If you've ever tried a headstand you know that it helps to cultivate a strong inner core as well as to focus on something other, outside yourself. And the result just might be balance, even when, especially when, all around appears upside down.

advent

     Jan Richardson, over at The Advent Door, writes about the first readings (Matthew 24) of Advent:
It can be tempting to recoil from the imagery...: Christ as burglar, coworkers and companions left bereft, the anxiety of not knowing when or how the Word who became flesh for us will come again. Yet the season of Advent challenges us to resist recoiling and instead to press into the insecurity and unsettledness of this passage—and of our lives. Advent beckons us beyond the certainties that may not serve us—those sureties we have relied on that may have no substance to them after all. Advent is a season to look at what we have fashioned our lives around—beliefs, habits, convictions, prejudices—and to see whether these leave any room for the Christ who is so fond of slipping into our lives in guises we may not readily recognize.
     What an odd image. What an uncomfortable picture.  Isn't advent supposed to be about hope? about  joy and peace on earth? Yet the picture we get here, where advent begins, is one of pain, of freedom and salvation coming in disguise, more than that, in ways that we would not choose, that we may not recognize.
     And what do we do with it? I know my tendency is to hide in business, in taking care of others. Because it's scary to see Christ as a thief...and yet that is what he calls himself in this reading. And that's what he feels like sometimes. Have you ever felt like the one left in the field or left grinding the meal? Alone and with all the work?  Have you asked where is the Christ for that person? Where is freedom? Richardson says it's in the seeing, in being awake to uncertainties, to the unexpected. Perhaps it's in letting go of the expected.
     Read the rest of her poignant, yet encouraging writing here.

cranberries

We are not huge cranberry sauce fans around here, but discovered an amazing recipe this year. If you use cranberries for Christmas cooking...here are two delicious recipes:

    

Cranberry Sauce:      

1/2 cup  agave nectar

1 cup orange juice

1 cinnamon stick

12 oz. fresh cranberries

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, mix agave nectar and orange juice. Add the cinnamon stick. Stir in the cranberries, reduce heat to low and cover pan. Simmer until they start to pop (about 8-10 minutes). Remove from heat and let cool for about 5 minutes. The sauce will thicken as it cools. Transfer to bowl and remove cinnamon stick. Refrigerate any leftovers.

Christmas Cobbler (with pear and cranberries)

1/4-1/3 cup Agave nectar

1/3 cup sugar

1 T. cornstarch

1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries

2 medium pears, unpeeled and sliced

3/4 cup flour 

1/2 cup sugar

1/3 cup butter

1 cup uncooked oatmeal

1 egg, slightly beaten

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Spray 9 inch square or round baking pan. In medium saucepan, combine first 3 ingredients. Stir in cranberries. Heat to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 5 minutes or until cranberries pop open. Stir in pears. Pour into baking pan. Combine flour and 1/2 cup sugar. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in oats; mix well. Add egg, mixing until just moistened. Crumble evenly over fruit. Bake 30-35 minutes until top is golden brown. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream (we devoured this!).

aesthetic moments

The last few weeks have been a blur. So glad for some space to breathe again. This past weekend I finished Comprehensive Exams for my Masters--just have oral defense and a couple of elective credits left (my sister calls it the never-ending Masters!).

Our family is all together for Thanksgiving for the first time in a long time. I am thankful to crawl out of the philosophical cave I've been in to breathe, to cook, to laugh, to spend time loving with family and friends.

One of the authors I've been reading writes of the "aesthetic moment," those timeless, ephemeral instances when true connection occurs, when because of, rather than in spite of, all our differences we see  the Other and respect and create something new and beautiful. My wish for all of us  during this often stressful time of year is a season enchanted by aesthetic moments.

playing for change

I love this idea!! Have you seen?


(thanks to experimental theology for the introduction.)

Happy 21 Laura!