Welsh Daybook (a.m.)

April 12, Feast of Pope St. Julius I, a staunch defender of the Faith against the Arian heresy.

7:55 am  //  wake, morning offering

8:00 am  //  dress, wash face

8:10 am  //  start laundry

8:20 am  //  breakfast

8:40 am  //  reply to Facebook messages and emails

9:05 am  //  brush teeth, apply makeup

9:15 am  //  meditation

9:40 am  //  study Welsh

10:10 am  //  Afon wakes--feed, dress, tend to Afon

10:45 am  //  wash dishes, tidy up, chores, laundry

12:00 noon  //  lunch

------------

This is just a basic outline.  Some days start later, and the time slots are rounded off.  Some days I don't get a good start at all; others, I give up halfway through, or have some errand calling me away from the house.  This is an ideal morning.

Some things I've learned:

• If at all possible, I ought to dress first thing in the morning.  It gives me a sense of something already accomplished and a demeanor prepared to face the day.  I tend to want to put it off because I take a long time choosing outfits.  I suppose I could lay out something the night before, but that's a bit too proactive for my personality. 
• Clean as you go.  It saves you from having to do one big clean later on and reduces anxiety.  (It really helps if you can teach this nifty trick to your husband!  I'm still working on that one.) 
• If I'm feeling a bit under the weather or depressed, for any reason, give myself a free pass for the day and rest or do something emotionally fortifying, like reading a good book or going for a meandering walk.  If I feel renewed afterward, I can pick up where I left off.  If not, the tasks and tidying will still be there tomorrow! 
• Try to have something special planned for every day.  It breaks up the monotony and gives a sense of purpose.  So far, I've had: Welsh class, writing session at the library, Mama-toddler playgroup, planting seeds with Afon. 
• Laundry is the alchemical key to eternity.  (Note to self: put this in a book some day.)

Liturgical Living: the Domestic Monastery

Feb. 24, Feast of St. Matthias, apostle.

The old home place--get this--architecture style called "the Florida cracker."  No joke!

I don't think it's coincidental that the beauty of the rhythm of Waldorf education and the success and effectiveness of the rhythm of monastic life both attract me.  After all, both draw from nature and the natural world; the sun, with variation, follows a strict schedule, and doesn't come out to dance at midnight (excepting a few special occasions, feast days, miracles, and the like. . .).  Fall follows summer, which follows spring, which follows winter.  And never is it the other way round or chopped up winter-fall-summer-spring, except maybe in a poem by e.e. cummings.

I like that both philosophies are intimate with and dependent upon the environment; that they emphasize making, and work with the hands, and traditions.  After reading Jen Fulwiler's post about learning to rise early and adhere to a more-or-less rigorous schedule via monastic hospitality, I tried to do the same myself for a while, with happy results.  I even made Mass a couple of times a week!

I want to attempt that mild success again, and this time attack it with vigor, with full hopes of finding the rhythm that works for us; to integrate education as a part of living, and to integrate living as a part of the great mystery of our Faith.  Or, to put it as Mark Twain did, to "never let schooling interfere with your education."

Education started in the home and did well in the home.  The beloved quote from which I take the title of this blog, in its specific application on mothers and children, works both ways.  It is often looked at to support the mother's special role in mothering--that being a mother means being a teacher, a queen, a task-master, a cook, and a priestess--and that choosing to be one of these things cannot, in any logical sense, be a greater, more encompassing and more prolific role.  But in its other sense, it means that, as the mother is everything to her child in the home, so the home is the primary and first school of the child.  It is not only where he ought to learn how to make his bed, play well with his siblings, brush his teeth, and say his prayers; it is also where he ought to learn his times tables, how to spell pneumonic, and about the succession of the kings of England and the Declaration of Independence.

As always, my tracks of thought turn to the Church-dominated Middle Ages and find the Ideal and the Blueprint, all in one.  In the Dark Ages, the monasteries were tiny pricks of light in the darkness, fostering and holding close the flame of truth until that time when it was safe to spread it like wildfire.  So too in our times, the home is more than ever a monastery, a fortress of goodness, beauty, and knowledge in a world of growing ignorance and darkness.

To bring my spiraling daydreams to a rough landing, and attempt to keep them grounded, I researched a monastery schedule.  In medieval times, the monk's day started at 2:30 am in the morning, which is a little impractical for people who depend on grocery store's opening hours.  Still more modern versions have the abbey dwellers rising early and in bed by eight--a little more doable.  But I've sketched out a rough idea of what a possible day of monastic home schooling might look like in our future:

7:00am--Wake
7:05am--Morning Prayer and Meditation
7:30am--Dress
8:00am--Breakfast
9:00am--Mass
10:00am--Work*
12 noon--Dinner
1:00pm--Nap
3:00pm--Work*
5:30pm--Supper
6:00pm--Leisure
7:00pm--Exercise
8:00pm--Shower
9:00pm--Bed 

*Home schooling curriculum, writing goals, blogging, crocheting, spinning, crafts, and other projects, as determined by day and season.

Obviously, I've no idea of the actual practicality of such a schedule.  But I aim to try it.

What does your day look like?  How do you go about perfecting your domestic monastery?

Twenty Hobbies

Feb. 16, Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time.

I stole this quote from Sarah of Little Progress Notes, and even though I have read it before, it stuck in my flesh like a thorn, sharp, sweet, and chastising, as it did the very first time I read it.  Someone close to me was very upset by this quote at the time, and I couldn't understand why.  Not intellectually.  Intellectually, I could understand how someone, a woman, who aimed for a profession or the perfection of a trade would balk that Chesterton thinks she oughtn't.  But my heart cannot fathom it.

When I read this quote, it's like if someone handed me a translation guide to the language of my soul.  People talk about wanting to be stay-at-home moms, and the majority of that talk revolves around the raising and education of children--which is, obviously, the most important aspect of homemaking if you're blessed to have them.  But there's more to it than that, and I see the fruits of the domestic woman in those who are not able to have children.  They're free to perfect their skills and passions.  They're broadly educated, not necessarily formally.

My own mother is extremely well-informed about current world events; her relatives in high political places talk down to her "narrow" point-of-view and are abruptly put in their place by a southern housewife.  I have a friend university-bound after seventeen years of graduating high school; she speaks with more lucidity and grace than most of my college professors.  My godmother has helped her husband raise the children from his first marriage, run three successful businesses, and start a grassroots ministry addressing the sorely ignored crisis of human sex trafficking.  My favorite women bloggers are, by a landslide majority, homemakers; more than gifted writers, they are photographers, crafters, architects, chemists, seamstresses, artists, philosophers, poets, botanists, activists, farmers, chauffeurs, and cooks.  They're quite literally everything to someone (their families).  And it just wouldn't be possible for them to be that astonishingly versatile in a career.

It's very telling that after a century of liberation, women are choosing to go back to the professions (oppression?) of their great-great-grandmothers.  Instead of being taught in an unbroken chain of mother-to-daughter lore, they're having to re-learn many of those skills that made suppressed Woman so dangerously skillful.  I suppose the feminist movement was necessary because it helped us understand.  For now we have the double benefit of having the freedom to choose and choosing not to be "free."

As for myself, being a Catholic, I have no problem being told what I ought to do and what is good for me.  But then, I believe that the so-called restraints of the patriarchy are not man-made at all, but transcend the world.

I don't think that a woman can't be focused on a single aim to forge a career.  Or that some women are best suited to that lifestyle.  I just know that in my first-hand experience with competent, thoughtful women, and for me personally, that would be sad.  It would be a kind of compromise.

I have so much to offer, so much that I'm passionate about.  God has generously equipped me.  I don't care that my ability to make a dwelling a comfortable home, or the home a place of spiritual peace and healthful stimulation, will go unappreciated by society.  And I grow weary of rationalizing my "career" preferences to that same society.  Like if I don't chose something concrete to achieve and then run it down like a fox, I'm irresponsible or somehow mis-made.  I feel, when I tell the world that I wish not to work formally for a living, a reaction akin to sexism.  If I can chose a lifestyle, God willing--and not without knowledge and acceptance of the sacrifices, as well as the blessings--in which I need not be distracted by the minutiae of the outside world, then that is what I want.  Because this is not a useless, fruitless aim.

Chesterton's logic gives me permission to embrace the scattered person I am; and he gives me comfort by telling me my efforts are not vain, nor shameful.  The domestic woman is unimpressed by the limp equality offered by a world that seeks excellence at the expense of freedom, that considers seclusion oppression and liberality narrow.  Our role model for Womanhood is a virgin and a mother--a handmaid and a queen.  And the domestic woman is the original Renaissance Man.

Thanks to Sarah of Amongst Lovely Things for hosting Weekends with Chesterton.

Getting Back into Rhythm

Jan. 18, Feast of St. Prisca, a child martyr captured by the emperor Claudius and tortured.  She glowed with light like a star, so the emperor ordered her thrown into an amphitheater with a lion.  The lion licked her bare feet.  In the end, Claudius had her beheaded.

It's kumquat season.  These oblong citrus fruits populate a tiny area in an only slightly less tiny town.  So tiny that it doesn't even have its own zip code, and its mailing address adopts the name of a nearby town.  It's neat to see how identity and location is wrapped up in something so . . . little.  But something quite distinct.  It's not an orange, and if the orange was the primary crop of this little hamlet, it would not be what it is, but a different place altogether.  As different as if the French had won the war to keep North America or electricity had never been invented.  Identity, and significance, is tied up in specifics.  In the being of one thing and the not being of another.  The town is the town it is because kumquats are not oranges.

The biggest local event (held in the nearby town) is upon us in a week.  The Kumquat Festival draws impressive crowds for our area, and the people who travel, sometimes for hours, to attend want their fill of kumquat: kumquat ice cream, kumquat soda, kumquat jam, kumquat salads, and, of course, a slice of kumquat pie.  So the childcare center has been making pies like mad this past week, to sell at the festival.  That means more working hours for me (good) and less time to recoup and recharge and rest (not as good).

I feel guilty that this steady, nine-to-five (technically, 8:30 to 5:30) working pace drains me so and leaves me frazzled and strained.  I tend to torture myself with mental lectures about how so many people do this, and do it gratefully, and don't feel sorry for themselves.  But the reality is that I'm not one of those people.  For better or worse, my limits are what they are.  And beating myself up about not having a larger stress capacity is useless in the the most final and unalterable way.  The best I can do is to manage as best I can, and let myself be for what I'm not capable of.

So I'm looking forward to the slow-down (a week?  two at most?  I hope!).  To getting back into rhythm, which is as nourishing as a healthful, home-cooked meal.  I ordered one of Mama's Notebooks and am looking forward to using it.  I'll try to remember and find time to share how I like it.  I'm sure I will; it covers everything, from meal planning to spiritual growth.  And if I'm not the poster child for clearly setting things out and referring back to the guidebook to accomplish the simplest of everyday tasks, I don't know what is!

I've enjoyed reading everyone's hesitant-but-hopeful aims for this year.  And of course I've incubated a few of my own, even when I didn't realize I was doing so.  So I might as well punch them down here.  Changes and/or continuances I want to execute in 2014:

• I'm anticipating being a place where I can Mass other than on Sundays.  I don't feel brave enough to say daily Mass yet.  If I aim for just one daily Mass and then manage (through the grace of God, always!) six, I'll feel very happy with the situation!
• Join some close friends in praying daily the Divine Mercy chaplet.
• Adding regular exercise back into my life.  Walking briskly with Afon in stroller or else by myself when I get the chance; maybe even adding running.  But that's a big maybe and will take a tall can of energy drink beforehand.
• Go back to frequent grocery shopping; this will tie in with meal planning, for which I intend to utilize my new notebook of power!
• Pray first thing in the morning.
• Continue my self-education in cloth-making, and close the gaps in the process by familiarizing myself with all the steps, from spinning to finished crochet/knit project.  Maybe, if I'm feeling up for it, learn to sew patterns with a machine.
• Write daily.
• Attempt a daily schedule.  Something like: prayer, exercise, dress, breakfast, Mass, writing period, lunch, grocery shopping, park time/play time/play group with my son, dinner, leisure for internet, crochet, reading, etc.  (As I type this out, I find it very intimidating!)
• Five first Saturdays--will this be the year for a plenary indulgence?  I hope so!

It's a bit overwhelming, but I draw armfuls of comfort from this little online blogging community, and the prayers I know that get irretrievably tangled with each complex and overlapping electronic relationship, and the graces cast down from heaven as a result.  Thanks for your friendship.  Thanks for being a presence on the internet for hurting, weary women to find the Body of Christ.  Thanks for writing your blogs, and updating them, and remembering them again after a half a year.  Thank you for reading mine.

Seven Quick Takes: Volume 28

Dec. 21, Feast of St. Peter Canisius, priest and doctor.  This remarkable Jesuit almost single-handedly re-evangelized Central Europe, founded dozens of colleges, revitalized Catholicism with his prodigious writings, and laid the groundwork for the Catholic Reformation north of the Alps.  Declared a Doctor of the Church in 1925, he is patron of Germany, the Catholic press, and catechism writers.  Also, east of St. Thomas the Apostle in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.

I've got out of 7 Quick Takes lately, mostly because I'm really bad at them (ask an absentminded bookworm professor type to do anything "quick," I dare you!), but there are some days that I just have a lot of little things to say, and this is one of them.  So, without further ado:

-- 1 --

I waffle between under- and over-exaggerating my struggles.  What one day seems to be a true-to-life, honest examination of what's-happening seems on other days like a drama queen performance; what is judicial silence and determination of irrelevance on good days seems like prideful denial on bad ones.

I hope I didn't upset anyone too much by my "confessions" yesterday.  It's hard to know how to say it.  I've been put into place by dear ones who remind me to be a reverse Pharisee by denying need when need is real is not the Christian way.  Especially if I'm not at the place spiritually where I really don't care about my own suffering (pray that I get better at that, won't you?).  But it's all relative.  When I see what others are going through--a mother of two under two who just found out this Christmastime that she has cancer; a dear friend whose husband is dying; a coworker who admits she has never felt happy in her entire life; a relative who spends Christmas alone because her only son died years ago--I realize my issues are drops in an ocean of suffering.

So somewhere between everything-is-fine and the-world-is-ending, there's me.  I just wanted to share my thoughts as an exercise in reflection, in hopes it could help others the way it helped me.  And you needn't worry: I've come to the conclusion about a year back that I would not be too proud to ask for help--but I would only ask for that help if it's truly needed.

-- 2 --

And how the Lord provides!  I should have mentioned during the mild ranting that at the company Christmas party I got a gift card to Subway and a Christmas bonus; my EBT card was spontaneously renewed when I went to fill out the forms online this week; the Saint Vincent de Paul Society at my parish got wind of things and insisted on sending three bags of groceries home with me last weekend; my grandmother wrote a generous check for my Christmas present; and my folks, though out of work for two years and struggling themselves, are still in a place where they are able to and do provide anything I might need.  The Squirt will have no lack of presents from Grandmama and Grandaddy, that's for sure!

My poverty over this Advent has truly been a spiritual one.  But even in this, there is cause for rejoicing!  For how can we merit God's graces if we don't first find the gaping lack of them?

-- 3 --

I have to say, too, that not having spare money during Advent is liberating, a gift in itself (which follows on the heels of what I concluded yesterday).  Since I don't have the resources, I can't buy gifts.  Since I don't have the time, I can't make them.  Or if I do find myself with a little extra spending money, it's going to get spent on something that really wants to be given, and not just a it's-Christmas-and-it's-what-we-do-so-I-bought-you-something-even-though-I-wasn't-sure-it's-what-you-wanted.  You know?  It's a pure philosophy of gifting, in which gifting is better for the giver than the one who receives.

I might have to write more on that later.

-- 4 --

What I'm crocheting lately:

It's sweet, isn't it?  Eventually--eventually as in when Christmas is over and I'm not rushed for time-and-money economical presents--I'm going to venture into learning how to make garments like baby hats and sweaters.  My true dream, though?  Doilies.  Lace, delicate doilies, with iron hook crochets, like what Sarah makes.  Love it.

-- 5 --

(The one my husband might not want to read!)

(Hi, cariad!)

Speaking of clothing, learning how to sew has been on my radar for a while, at first as just a fun "what-if" hobby, then as a "cool people are doing it" scenario, and finally as a "I really want to make my own clothes someday" resolution.  And I don't mean in the fashion-y sense, though it'd be fun to experiment and make things inspired by otherwise obsolete fashions or considered un-cool by today's standards.  But also because things have been developing over the last two years in a direction of greater self-sufficiency and homemakery--or at least, my attraction to them has.  And certain shifts in income and lifestyle seem to support a change in that direction.

I've always had an inexplicable attraction (one of many) to spinning; and as I've picked up my crochet hook again this past autumn, I've let my mind wander along the story of production.  Even yarn from Walmart can rack up unnecessary expenses, if you're talking about really making things to supplement what you would ordinarily buy from a store.  With the handsome spindle given to me by a friend, I can spin my own yarn.  But I still have to buy the wool, and that's not something that's easily accessible either.  So get a sheep, I say to myself--or at least a cat or a dog or something, and use their fur to make your own thread, to crochet your own things.  But while we're at it, why not keep chickens, so we can have our own eggs, and maybe poultry.  In fact, why not throw in a farm?

-- 6 --

I know it seems incompatible with the prim, preppily dress girl in these photos, but my interest in semi-self-sufficiency--via either farming, urban homesteading, or community gardening--has steadily grown.  It started with an affection for rural life and peaked my interest as distributism when reading Chesterton.  Now I've come to know, on varying degrees of intimacy, families and individuals who are learned in, striving toward, or who actively maintain this alternative lifestyle.  The best part is that it's lock-in-key complimentary to the liturgical lifestyle we're already pursing.

In my internet wanderings, I've come upon a resource called the New Catholic Land Movement.  There is a greater dignity in seeing the product you have created, rather than doing abstract work for a symbol of a symbol of wealth (checks are imaginary money, and money is just made out of paper, and that paper is supposed to symbolize the gold in the national vault--wha??); or earning your daily bread by just spreading around ideas and things, rather than creating them--or worse, using and destroying them.  I see all these exceptional, lovingly and quality made items on Etsy that I actually covet, and I think, 'the only thing that keeps me from making those things myself is that I'm busy blundering doing unrelated things in order to make money so that I can eat and clothe myself and my family.'  But wouldn't it just be simpler and more satisfying to remove that nonsense in the middle and just do something that has an immediate, practical, and good end--like planting seeds for food, or keeping sheep to spin thread, or building the things you need like furniture and shelter?  A life like that wouldn't be devoid of luxury altogether, and I there's no question that there'd be a need for poets and painters, but the two types of vocations are much closer in their purpose than the modern world seems to imagine.

That's sort of the philosophy of distributism.  I know the romance would melt away for me soon enough, with hard winters and dependence on the hand of God, but I've already had to train myself in doing without, especially this past month.

-- 7 --

Last but not least, Soul Gardening is hosting its inaugural incentive offer.  Donate any amount to keep the grassroots ministry going and they will send a free copy of the award-winning "Eastern Bound" CD.  If you haven't yet, sign up to receive this quiet little journal; it is truly a must-have for any mama, stay-at-home papa, homesteader, homeschooler, or person who feels the occasional loneliness of isolation and wants lifting up by the black-and-white printed spiritual communion of the Church on earth, Catholic or no.  And oh my, the illustrations are so humbly breathtaking!

Join Jen at Conversion Diary for 7 Quick Takes Friday!

Theme Thursday: Recess

Theme Thursday hosted by Cari at Clan Donaldson.

I got out to the second half of Mass this morning and even had enough stamina to let the Squirt loose on the playground afterward.

The detox/cleanse has smoothed the way to discipline in other aspects of my life.  I already mentioned the growing tidiness of my home; but there is also a clarity of time and direction that has been absent from my life, especially recently, what with my self-imposed and over-burdened calendar.

With rhythm comes freedom.  The paradox of living one's life according to a (semi) rigid schedule is that rather than absorb time, it multiplies it.  I find myself with more of it on my hands than if I'd had a shapeless, unplanned day, with the hours laid out before my feet, seeming to go on and on forever.  The impression is deceptive, and it tricks one into a sense of too-much-time-to-be-wasted.  With the result being, it is wasted.  While a day divided into concrete plans forces me to make the most of every scrap of second.

Even in a day without appointments and work scheduled, I enjoy rising and setting to my morning routine: vitamins, breakfast, prayer, dress and groom myself and my son, make the bed, clear up the kitchen, check the e-mail, and blog.  Then I can turn to the tasks I must attend.  Or I may take some leisure time: read a book, watch a television show, call or write a friend, surf the net, free-write, play with my son.  Grocery shopping is an activity which I love to use to divide the day into sections, and more frequent marketing helps me with meal planning, healthful eating, and budgeting.  It's also an outing for entertaining the short attention span of my busy toddler.

Like all aspects of Christian living, it goes against first instinct to restrict one's treasured freedom; to say "no" sometimes to people who ask something of you; to anchor mealtimes throughout the day and clear all other commitments for the daily bread.  But I've found that I end up gaining all these things back again, and more--the energy to visit with friends, the satisfaction of accomplishing a day's important tasks, and plenty of time for soul and self, for rest and relaxation, for play and . . . yes, recess!