I don't know that I've ever provided much commentary on this blog's title. Mostly, "common rhythm" speaks for itself, but the phrase is taken from a poem, by Marge Piercy, a poem that I love:
To Be of Use
I don't know that I've ever provided much commentary on this blog's title. Mostly, "common rhythm" speaks for itself, but the phrase is taken from a poem, by Marge Piercy, a poem that I love:
To Be of Use
Posted at 15:14 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Oh goodness. Blogging, they say, is dead, and my blog, it's wholly comatose. Oops.
We welcomed a new baby this summer, a delightful little keeper of a thing, a third girl. She is already chubby, already somewhat acquainted with life here, already no longer quite a newborn. Already. The clock has started, time is passing. The summer was a real whirlwind, though a delightful one. The dying leaves and the calendar boxes, if not the temperatures, herald an end to the stifling mood, and I'm channeling autumn's exhilaration, the exhilaration of fresh starts, purposeful structure, chilly breezes. "Back to normal," if ever life is simply normal. Accordingly, I've felt inclined to return to writing. Writing here. I haven't much time to be on a computer (oh, the emails I'm behind on), and I'm not sure how it will pan out, but I want to try.
Posted at 15:54 | Permalink | Comments (2)
The shift, it's happened! That almost imperceptible shift, the change in consciousness, the assurance that spring really is coming. There were still five inch high piles of snow most everywhere, and it's awfully cloudy, but we spotted snowdrops Monday, amongst the snow drifts. And then crocuses. Today, those piles have crept back further, leaving luscious mud puddles everywhere. Ooh, this feels good!
Posted at 16:50 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Hello from March! You know, I do think we're going to make it: winter's end is, if not actually in sight, at least an observable reality on the calendar. Yesterday was set to be the warmest day yet, and I was so grateful for 46 degrees to coincide with a Forest School day, even if the remnants of three kinds of precipitation all lay mixed on the ground. We suited up, drove to our forest site, and parked on a vast sheet of ice. While we waited for our friends to get ready for a walk, the girls discovered a massive puddle atop snow and ice and mud, and they set out to explore and splash. Within two minutes, D had fallen in and was soaked through three layers of clothing. No change of clothing, no recourse. We waved goodbye, stripped off her pants, and as I buckled her in in her underwear, E fell in another frigid puddle, soaking through to the skin. I stripped her down, covered them in blankets and cranked up the heat, and we drove home, five minutes after our arrival.
Oh well. It was pretty hysterical. The late morning found me cheating at Bird Bingo so as to hurry up the girls' five-in-a-rows, and recommend that they "go do some somersaults off the couch." We all have this thwarted need to move. Still, the girls have been in unbelievably good sorts indoors, and wake rearing to have at another day of indoor play together.
Today, five inches of snow, tonight, we're back down to 10 degrees. And snow days! We tidied and read piles of books, moved around all the furniture in D's room as we prepare to move E in there with her, and then J took the girls out for loads of sledding while I continued puttering around and clearing out the house. Tomato soup, popcorn, cocoa, fires. Another snow day tomorrow!
I got through February with the hope of houseplants. Two separate trips to the plant nursery, and I spent an inordinate chunk of the month fussily moving pots around to optimize sunlight, misting and watering and gazing lovingly. Plants get you watching the light. Oh, the light of February! Now I'm plotting about gardening, even as we lack a proper plot.
My husband and I have been taking turns attending weeknight Lenten services at church. Off and on, back and forth between bedtime duty and service attendance. The services are late, and not well attended by children, but it's a real joy, especially as soon enough, I won't be able to get out after (or during) bedtime. Oh, Lent, we're here again!
I love spring cleaning. I'm not much of a housekeeper, but goodness, I'm trying to be, and I like to start spring cleaning early when I need to feel that something I'm doing inside is related in some way to the coming of spring. I set out a very ambitious cleaning plan to coincide thematically with the weeks of Lent, something every day. I printed it out and tacked it to the fridge. J, who knows me better than I care to know myself, saw it and groaned and said, "great, your Lenten observance can be struggling against despair and fury when you don't get any of this done." Some of it is getting done. Some ... not much. I'm trying to stay focused, and take joy and satisfaction in tiny, steady steps, cleaning and otherwise.
I came off the Bloomsbury sweater feeling fast and furious and wanting to finish lots of knitting with rapidity. Another realm in which I've felt thwarted - everything I've tried to finish has either been all wrong, or needed a different needle than I've had, or required more concentration than I could spare in the moment. But yesterday I finished a hat for myself, for this coming snow. I am not a hat person. I never wear them, I feel terribly ridiculous in them. But somehow, I kept returning to a Brooklyn Tweed pattern, Hickory, and thinking maaaaybe I could pull it off. I don't know. I probably can't. But I did finish it, using the first ever skein of yarn I purchased, when I was first setting out to learn to knit. It's been sitting around ever since, and I feel great having finally pulled it out and used it. And I did my first tubular bind off. Tiny, tiny, steady steps! I picked up H is for Hawk a few weeks ago, and good grief, stellar reviews for it have just been pouring in ever since. That's being alternated with the Lenten sermons of Saint John of Kronstadt, recently compiled here.
Posted at 22:31 | Permalink | Comments (1)
I've taken a break from baby knitting for something a bit more immediate. My darling D turns four in two weeks, and I'm trying to race through a pullover for her. Poor girl, she loves, loves, purple. She has asked for a bright purple sweater ... but she has bright red hair, and I just can't do it, I can't. I've settled on Bloomsbury, a lacy but utilitarian pullover in the rather less exciting (for her) but far more becoming "lichen." We'll find her something else that's purple, wearable or no. I love knitting with Lark, and it's moves quick -- hopefully quickly enough, because I have a bad track record with deadline knitting, and not so much time!
I'm close to finishing Remembering, still very much liking how it fits in Berry's wider oeuvre. Also still reading Matthew Crawford's book, and will be for some time.
Joining Ginny today.
Posted at 20:59 | Permalink | Comments (4)
After being absorbed in the holidays (which do drag on rather late for us, when Christmas and Theophany are celebrated thirteen days later than their Western dates, usually taking us all the way up to MLK Day), and then returning to "normal" after them, there's usually one day when I stop and remember spring. It stops me dead. What joy spring is! I'd been in the thick of winter, I'd let it distract me, I'd forced myself to forget ... And then, from that day on, winter feels pretty unbearable. This is the point at which I try to pull out ALL the stops, to embrace everything winter has to offer, distracting us from our longings, and making sure sure beyond all doubt that whenever spring comes, we have earned it. This embrace can be easy in a snowstorm, and harder when the weather is middling - which it often is in DC, where "wintry mix" rules the day, and it seems particularly unsnowy this year, with the temperature's frenzied careening just above and below freezing can feel more trying than it just being freezing and staying that way. A caveat for those of you in more Northerly climes: it may be harder to find one's way in winter, here, but it's not actually harder. No, I've done Real Winter, the can't-actually-go-out-the-door-with-anyone-under-seven winter, and I know we have it easy! I empathize so.
So we've been busy finding our winter rhythm, and it starts every morning with racing to the window to watch the sunrise. "A rainbow day!" the girls exclaim. And then, from there, we're pulling out all the stops:
Splurging at the plant nursery so as to bring some life indoors
Huge, unseemly piles of books from the library (winter booklist coming later this week!)
Trying out every possible "indoor play" or "open gym" time
A lot, a lot of removing the couch cushions and creating "open gym" conditions in our own playroom
Museum trips galore
Smoothies and cocoas and teas, often in rapid spirit-lifting succession
Board games and crafts (to this end, I try to use Christmas gifts strategically!)
Ice skating, indoors and out
Planning and dreaming for spring
Rethinking the piles of winter clothes and their organization
What winter survival stops do you pull?
Posted at 20:46 | Permalink | Comments (2)
After a rather too-long break from any substantial knitting, I am relieved to be back at it. I knit up a pair of ribbed baby boots from Lullaby Knits this week, and have cast on a little frontless newborn cardigan, knit quite loose, in linen. For a summer baby! Our summer baby. We're expecting a third baby!
As I mentioned earlier this week, I've been reading an advance copy of The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. All sorts of neural circuits are firing on this one. Somehow its an amalgam of everything interesting, ever, both in genre and in content-philosophy (in particular, discontent with post- Enlightenment philosophies of the self), design theory, politics, personal narratives of work, economics, hipsters, psychology, airports. I'm enthralled, as I was with his earlier book, Shop Class as Soul Craft. I've also been reading Wendell Berry's Remembering. You may recall that it was my plan to read every novel of his in 2014. Well, a few remain for 2015, but they're mostly slim ones, and anyways, there's no reason to rush with Wendell Berry. Remembering is the real outlier amongst his novels and stories; brooding and darker, structurally tight, and set in San Francisco. It's a successful counterpoint!
Joining Ginny today.
Posted at 22:15 in yarn along | Permalink | Comments (6)
January is passing quickly, and with it the window of relevancy for "resolution" talk. Last January, I spent much of the month taking stock of all the sectors and strata of my life, coming up with goals and hopes. It was pretty comprehensive. And way, way more than I could have accomplished in a year, even under ideal conditions. I'm letting that list stand, and I'm hoping it can see me through this coming year -- and maybe two or three more to boot! Have you heard that old trope about how we vastly overestimate what we can accomplish in a year but underestimate what we can do in five, or ten? That's what I'm banking on.
This January, in looking again at to-dos and hopes, plans and intentions, I've been struck - over and over again - by how perpetual distractedness burdens me. I don't suppose, in 2015, that I'm the only one? Playing the day like a game of whack-a-mole? Nostalgic for flow? Our life at home, as a family may be intentionally slow and pared down -- even radically so for the city in which we live -- but when it comes to my own person (the running to-do list in my head, the habitual glances at my iPhone, the projects and plans I multitask my way around), I am scattered and disorganized and never more than half-present.
The one unifying effort that binds all those items on last year's resolution list together is the effort to be less distracted. Collected. More of an agent in where and to what I give my attention. I want to be all in for building that castle out of blocks, without compulsively cataloguing the things that need tidying in the play room. When the girls are down for the night, I want to sit down and read the book that I've long had on my list -- without heeding pings from the phone in the other room that send me down a vast, suffocating network of rabbit holes. I want to bang out a few emails and then just close the computer for the night. To finish my sentences. To that end, there are some very basic principles of time management that I should have learned years ago. That's one issue. I'm also exploring - I'm always exploring - limitations. Limiting the things in our home, the projects I embrace, the data I consume, the choices we are making and the worlds we duck in and out of. And then there's the inner franticness. No small project, but I'm trying to make it coherent, and all-encompassing this year.
A few places I've been turning, all of them so very "January" -- a sort of mini-syllabus in overcoming distraction, if you will:
I adored Tonia's reflection on simplicity, temptation, and the internet. (She also references Killing the Internet at Home, something I've long wanted to make happen. Skype with grandparents abroad has been holding us back, but a rise in our internet bill to $55/month is making us explore some more creative options)
Into Mind: Personal Style, Minimalism, & The Perfect Wardrobe
Ronnie's "Making Over My Life" post on ending distraction
A classic, if overwhelming: Getting Things Done
Marilynne Robinson's mind, and her collectedness. From here, there's this gem: "We were positively encouraged to create for ourselves minds we would want to live with. I had teachers articulate that to me: ‘You have to live with your mind your whole life.’ You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with. Nobody has ever said anything more valuable to me.”
A series of reflections on limiations in craft: getting distracted by "the pretty" and by FOMO (for you non-maker-types, a "stash" is the arsenal of fabric and yarn that gets accumulated by crafters, often willy-nilly)
Manage Your Day-to-Day (I am never ever going to be this slick -- which, I think, means I'm safe taking from it what I can use?)
Most to the point, I'm ecstatically, engrossingly reading a review copy of The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming An Individual in the Age of Distraction. More to come!
Posted at 21:39 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
We had a lovely, laid back Christmas. On Christmas Eve, we woke to snow, and had a delightful day at home before the evening's Vigil. Our church fills up so tightly for Christmas Eve that the only way to even make it through the door is to push against the throngs in front of you. It's tight, but there's something heartwarming about being shoulder to shoulder with so, so many people; a silent, prayerful, mob. There were two Liturgies on Christmas morning, so we all had a bit more room to breathe. I wish I'd managed a few photos; it sure was beautiful. We had a big meal after the Liturgy and then went home for naps before gathering with several families from church in the evening. There were bonafide "adult" and "children's" tables, and for the first time this arrangement actually worked for our girls. Real conversation! At the adult's table, our attorney friend questioned J and I, pretty thoroughly, about how we came to be married. It's a long, improbable story that we're only just getting good at telling, and the telling of it set off a wave of questions in me, about who we now are, about who we were then, about the way our lives are progressing, the family we are making. Proper fodder for January, I suppose.
And now, life is cold, and wonderfully quiet. As a family we're digging down, into the barest-bone rhythms at home. Read-alouds, teatimes, chores, solid warm meals. Fires and walks, prompt dishwashing, stringent bedtimes. Watching woodpeckers out the windows, board games, Bird Bingo, putting things away. Decluttering, braindumping. I'm trying to walk clear on the side of too little, rather than decidedly too-much. And maybe, at last I'll be able to pull out my knitting this week.
Posted at 16:15 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Happy New Year! Everywhere on the interwebs, the tidy best-of-2014 wraps-ups have given way to the intentions-and-resolutions-for-2015. It is now solidly 2015, yes? And yet every year, the rapid cultural about-face from Christmas to New Year's leaves me feeling frantic and behind, before anything has even "begun". Since I've had children, we have traveled every single Christmas. And every single Christmas, we have gotten sick. Which means that this year, like most, the switch from 2014 to 2015 has felt untidy, brimming with unfinished business. The month of December was a blur of errands and today, with my husband back at work, suitcases still aren't entirely unpacked and put away, assorted flu medicines and cough syrups clutter the counter, texts and calls have gone unanswered. Thank you notes are yet unwritten, Christmas cards didn't get sent this year, and I jettisoned my annual three-day stollen baking project. Thoughts and hopes and lists (oh, the lists!) for the year ahead compete and intermingle with all that feels so unfinished from last year (er, last week).
I realize that it is borderline obligatory for mothers to feel spread thin around the holidays. Or maybe to feel spread too thin all of the time. This year, the first in which I've truly felt in touch with holiday-burn-out, makes me grateful for how slow and how close-to-home we're able to make much of the rest of our year. Because I don't do spread-thin very well!
Reading through our pile of beloved Christmas books over and over this past month, I was struck again and again by the diversity of ways in which the Nativity is celebrated across cultures, and yet, within each story, there's such total unanimity as to what Christmas means and what "keeping it" entails. Christmas stories are engines of nostalgia, to be sure, but there is such coherence in, say "Christmas in Noisy Village" or "The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree" or "The Miracle of Saint Nicholas" about what Christmas entails (in Sweden, or WWI era Appalachia, or Russia, respectively). Everyone makes a certain kind of cookie, sings a certain song, and everyone's happy - now it's Christmas!
My reality is a lot less coherent. I grew up with a rich set of time-intensive family traditions, a real hodgepodge of foodways and experiences, parties with friends, must-go broader-family gatherings. My siblings and I now span the west and east coasts, and the joy of our short overlapping vacation times is mixed with the disappointment of shorting all these little traditions. My husband's family celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with the unwavering customs of Catholic-steeped Poland, rounding Christmas afternoon out with a brimming British-American feast and the exchanging of gifts. His parents and his siblings' families are Anglican, Catholic and non-denominational Evangelical respectively. We are Orthodox, and therein lie the traditions we most want to keep. Four sets of services, traditions, dietary concerns, theological approaches and values (and weren't not even a real "interfaith" family!).. Try to honor all of this every year, and then squeeze in a little inspiration from Pinterest, or someone's blog, and it is no wonder one might hypothetically feel overextended in the tradition department, the stretch from late Novemeber to early January left an absolute blur. The downside of diversity. I long to tell my children a coherent story.
Amazingly though, we still have a stab at it! For this year! Or, this past year? Our Orthodox parish marks time according to the Julian Calendar ... and so the Nativity has yet to actually arrive! Two days from now, it will be Christmas actually, in all it's liturgical richness, all it's unfrenzied, peaceful significance. We haven't always celebrated on the Old Calendar (inescapable American diversity means four of the eight years that we have been Orthodox have been on one calendar, four on the other), and at times keeping Christmas in January can feel awkward, or, unfortunately, like an afterthought. Deeply observing Advent all the way to the end can be a real struggle. But the day itself! Devoid of consumerism, or cultural imperatives, or even a to-do list, is such, such a joy. And the discrepancy between the old and new calendars has helped to still this whole old-year-new-year waffling between past and future I experience -- in something of a time warp, on January 7th, I'm left to inhabit the present: Christmas, in real peace.
Posted at 22:19 | Permalink | Comments (2)