Tag Archives: quotes

Admire the Hand of God’s Providence

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photo by brother Dan
“I frequently sat down to my meat with thankfulness, and admired the hand of God’s providence, which had thus spread my table in the wilderness. 

I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed, rather than what I wanted, and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them;

and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something He has not given them. 

All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”
                               ~ Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe

Macro Thanksgivings

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Yesterday, the girl I’m tutoring was restless and excited.
She had one day of school this week before a trip home.
We needed an absorbing subject.
We explored the rudiments of macro (closeup) photography.

The tulip is a universal icon of the close-focus mode.
Sure enough I found a tulip on our camera.

These pix are still not close enough to be considered macro.

It was fun
… to look at the back yard differently.
… to find strawberries that had been hiding
… to see fall colors yesterday which are blanketed with white snow today
… to learn something completely new
… to begin the learning process with my camera
(if I learn one new trick a week, I’ll know 18 tricks before Scotland)

Does your digital camera have a tiny tulip icon on it?
(Mine was on the LCD display, after I pressed a “focus” button.)

“Gratitude unlocks
the fullness of life. 
It turns what we
have into enough, and more. 
It turns
denial into acceptance,
chaos to order,
confusion to clarity. 
It can turn a meal into a feast,
a house into
a home,
a stranger into a friend. 

Gratitude makes sense of our past,
brings peace for today,
and creates a
vision for tomorrow.” 
Melody
Beattie

(thanks to my SIL Kathie for that quote
…and for the box of 25 (!) travel/guide books
which arrived yesterday.  Woot!)

Home

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Home

Some books are read simply for pleasure.  Let’s call them Baby Bear books.  Some books are read primarily for education or information.  These would be Papa Bear books.  But some books are a pleasure to read while they instruct.  Home is a perfectly just-right Mama Bear book. 

I had great expectations for this book, recommended as it was by George Grant.  The first chapter was disappointing, focusing on Ralph Lauren, nostalgia and invented tradition.  Beyond chapter one, however, the book was an absorbing and satisfying read.

Home is a culture history of comfort. 

The idea of comfort has developed historically.  It is an idea that has meant different things at different times.  In the seventeenth century, comfort meant privacy, which led to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity.  The eighteenth century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the nineteenth to mechanically aided comforts – light, heat, and ventilation.  The twentieth-century domestic engineers stressed efficiency and convenience.  p. 231

As a confirmed word-bird, I particularly enjoyed all the little etymological notes, some of which I cannot resist sharing with you:

~ comfort originally meant to strengthen or console » comforter meant someone who aided or abetted a crime » ample, but not luxurious » physical well-being and enjoyment, a word used often in Jane Austen’s novels

Take a word like “weekend,” which originated at the end of the nineteenth century.  Unlike the medieval “weekday” that distinguished the days that one worked from the Lord’s Day, the profane “weekend” – which originally described the period when shops and businesses were closed – came to reflect a way of life organized around the active pursuit of leisure. p.21

~ Saturday (Lørdag)  only day of week in Scandinavian countries not named after deity; “a day for bathing”

Differences in posture, like differences in eating utensils (knife and fork, chopsticks or fingers, for example), divide the world as profoundly as political boundaries.  Regarding posture there are two camps: the sitters-up (the so-called western world) and the squatters (everyone else). p.78

If you have someone in your life interested in architecture, interior design, or just in a comfortable home, this would make a wonderful gift. 

More quotes from Home from previous blog entries: Interior Space and Privacy.

My Mother Read To Me

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Mrs. Leopoldine Masari with Her daughters at the Artist’s Studio
Hans Tichy, 1896

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. 

She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story.  She’d read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with “Cuckoo” and at night when I’d got in my own bed. 

I must have given her no peace.  Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story.”         ~ Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings

Fetch the Heavenly Fire

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I am reading The Reformed Pastor aloud to my husband and discussing Pilgrim’s Progress with my son.  Although Baxter (1615-1691) and Bunyan (1628-1688) were contemporaries, I haven’t read anything that connected the two.   Time seems to be less available to me these days; I haven’t found the leisure to follow fun little rabbit trails lately. 

Baxter wrote The Reformed Pastor when he was too ill to speak at a ministerial conference.  Reading the Puritans is like climbing upward through thick bramble bushes into a clearing with a fantastic vista.  After reading through thick and creeping prose you come upon a clear and radiant sentence that rewards the effort.  In truth, after reading a few pages, you find your feet and make your way with greater ease.

The Puritans were much closer to our tidy medieval fathers; they are fond of enumerations and list-making.  There are handwritten notes in my copy which are sobering to read.  My brother-in-law bought an entire library from a pastor who left his pastorate and his faith.  His personal Ex Libris label is still in the flyleaf.  Sigh… 

I wanted to share some quotes about teaching that you might appreciate.

Theology must lay the foundation, and lead the way of all our studies.  If God must be searched after, in our search of the creature, (and we must affect no separated knowledge of them) then tutors must read God to their pupils in all; and divinity must be the beginning, the middle, the end, the life, the all, of their studies. p.58

Be much at home, and be much with God.  If it be not your daily business to study your own hearts, and to subdue corruption, and to walk with God–if you make not this a work to which you constantly attend, all will go wrong, and you will starve your hearers; or, if you have an affected fervency, you cannot expect a blessing to attend it from on high.  Above all, be much in secret prayer and meditation.  Thence you must fetch the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifices.  p.62

A Search, A Challenge, An Adventure

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The exercise of reading and thinking
is an extremely mental-visual psychological process,
difficult to learn,
impossible to a degree of efficiency
without continued conscientious effort,
but capable of improvement
throughout one’s lifetime.

Reading is thinking,
it is a search,
it is a challenge;
and when done successfully,
it is an adventure which involves two persons–
the reader and the author.

The reader must carry on a silent conversation with the author,
asking what is being said,
questioning reasons,
and approving or disapproving
of the manner in which the material is presented.

Reading is never passive acceptance.

It is an energy-absorbing activity,
requiring movement of the mind,
and sometimes heart,
out to meet the mind of the author
and to grasp the meaning of another’s thoughts.

“It is,” says A.B. Herr, “a two-way process;
the reader must give in order to receive.“

~  William H. Armstrong in
Study Is Hard Work

I can’t say enough wonderful things about this little book.  My niece and I are working our way through the book together.  It takes me a while to read it, because I stop so often to copy quotes into my commonplace book.

It was dear Janie, who turned me on to Study Is Hard Work.  I think of Janie in her classroom now and would sooooo love to observe the learning process with such a master teacher at the helm.  Thanks, friend.  Even though your blogging voice is quiet,  the gifts you’ve given in the past keep paying dividends.

Snoring = Sleeping With Enthusiasm

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“My grandma always said that people who snored
were sleeping with enthusiasm.”

       ~ Jenna Boller in Rules of the Road by Joan Bauer.

I’ve been immersed in a genre that I rarely read: Young Adult Fiction. 
This book is one of the best of that bunch. 
Joan Bauer is a new favorite author of mine.

Jenna Boller is five-foot-eleven-inch, sixteen-year girl.  Living with an alchoholic father has made Jenna, the oldest daughter, strong and resilient.  “I was always cleaning up after him.”  The combination of a flourishing work ethic and good training has made her a valued sales associate at Gladstone’s Shoe Store.  Mrs. Gladstone, the opinionated seventy-three year old owner of a well-respected chain of shoe stores, hires Jenna to drive her from Chicago to Dallas.  Along the way they visit shoe stores, Mrs. Gladstone upfront as the owner and Jenna as a secret shopper/spy.

The Shoe Warehouse wants to buy Gladstone’s stores, substituting plastic for leather, inflating the bottom line but decreasing quality, omitting service, and changing the mission from “great shoes at fair prices” to “decent shoes at warehouse prices.” 

There is a buoyancy in Bauer’s writing, an innate but subtle humor which saturates every chapter.  That’s why I’ll be hunting more of her books.

“And now, young woman, how much experience have you had driving in storms?”  ~ “Not much, ma’am.”  I opened the back door for her and watched her get in. “Unless you’re talking metaphorically,” I added, “and then I’m a total ace.” p. 47

Two Golden Sales Rules:
1) Care about people more than what you’re selling.
2) Never miss a good opportunity to shut up. p. 150

You know you’ve been with old people too long
when you can pick out the subtle differences between
Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s piano playing. p.115

For too long we just let Dad’s drinking go by without anyone
saying anything much about it, calling it a little problem.
You’ve got to call a thing by its full name and that’s what
lets the truth out where it can get some fresh air. p.84

“You just remember, never go punching
a man who’s chewing tobacco.” p.95

 

Today’s Lesson: Attendance

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photo by brother Dan

Now to learn to think while being taught presupposes the other difficult art of paying attention.

Nothing is more rare: listening seems to be the hardest thing in the world and misunderstanding the easiest, for we tend to hear what we think we are going to hear, and too often we make it so.  In a lifetime one is lucky to meet six or seven people who know how to attend: the rest, some of whom believe themselves well-bred and highly educated, have for the most part fidgety ears; their span of attention if as short as the mating of a fly.

~  Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America as quoted in Study is Hard Work by William H. Armstrong

A Foretaste of Winter

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The snow level is dropping,
threatening to swoop down to the ground.
The biting air today feels like snow.
Hats, gloves, scarves are coming out of storage.
Life has moved indoors for a while.

but…

Every season does this little tease.
She runs on stage and waves to us,
we point and titter and giggle,
and then she quickly scampers behind the curtains
until her appointed appearance in the act.

That’s a good thing.
Because autumn is my favorite season.
I’m not quite ready for her to take her leaf.

~   ~   ~

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;

Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream