Out of My Own Heart of Darkness
January 28, 2008
My mother passed from this earth a year ago tomorrow. As many of you may have noticed, I took an almost year-long sabbatical from blogging. By Mother's Day last year, it became clear to me that I just couldn't go on blogging about the ins and outs of my days without feeling like it was all too trivial compared to the pervasive grief I was feeling. I had to give myself some time to heal. So, I did.
Today I am asking for your prayers over the next few days. I am feeling pretty well overall, but I know that tomorrow might weigh heavily on me. And, while my mother passed away on January twenty-ninth, she was buried on February second. Her birthday.
My husband is also going to be out of state for a business conference this week. As you can see, I do, indeed, need your prayers. I thank all of you for your prayers and notes of encouragement over the year. They have held me in good stead.
Having said all this, though, I want to let you know that I am now eager to get back to blogging and I have been tinkering with my blog a bit in preparation for my return. And I do so love to tinker! I look forward to catching up with all of you. God bless you, my dear friends.
Mother
May 13, 2007
Meditations by Elizabeth Nourse
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"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial,
an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."
Honore De Balzac (1799-1850)
Bostons!
May 9, 2007
Very Nearly Wordless Wednesday
Ed. 11
We decided to take Banjo for a play date this week and I, naturally, brought my camera along. There were thirty Boston Terriers running amok in one backyard. Truly more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
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Banjo & Friend Dancing
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Banjo's New Best Friend Benny
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Banjo Takes a Break
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Benny & Friend Share a Stick
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Yet Another Pretty Girl!
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Rare
April 28, 2007
Part Two: Nature
I
NATURE, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest,---
Her admonition mild
In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.
How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon,---
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down
Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.
When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky,
With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.
Emily Dickinson (1830-86)
Lily quit taking naps when she was six weeks old, so this is a rare glimpse of my child sleeping. She had been up all night at a sleepover and, although she fought valiantly, she finally succumbed to sleep in our backyard swing. As the sun slid down the sky, I began to wonder if she would continue there into the evening. She arose at dusk, though, never knowing I had taken her picture.
A More Ancient Mariner
April 23, 2007
THE SWARTHY bee is a buccaneer,
A burly velveted rover,
Who loves the booming wind in his ear
As he sails the seas of clover.
A waif of the goblin pirate crew,
With not a soul to deplore him,
He steers for the open verge of blue
With the filmy world before him.
His flimsy sails abroad on the wind
Are shivered with fairy thunder;
On a line that sings to the light of his wings
He makes for the lands of wonder.
He harries the ports of the Hollyhocks,
And levies on poor Sweetbrier;
He drinks the whitest wine of Phlox,
And the Rose is his desire.
He hangs in the Willows a night and a day;
He rifles the Buckwheat patches;
Then battens his store of pelf galore
Under the tautest hatches.
He woos the Poppy and weds the Peach,
Inveigles Daffodilly,
And then like a tramp abandons each
For the gorgeous Canada Lily.
There's not a soul in the garden world
But wishes the day were shorter,
When Mariner B. puts out to sea
With the wind in the proper quarter.
Or, so they say! But I have my doubts;
For the flowers are only human,
And the valor and gold of a vagrant bold
Were always dear to woman.
He dares to boast, along the coast,
The beauty of Highland Heather,---
How he and she, with night on the sea,
Lay out on the hills together.
He pilfers from every port of the wind,
From April to golden autumn;
But the thieving ways of his mortal days
Are those his mother taught him.
His morals are mixed, but his will is fixed;
He prospers after his kind,
And follows an instinct, compass-sure,
The philosophers call blind.
And that is why, when he comes to die,
He'll have an easier sentence
Than some one I know who thinks just so,
And then leaves room for repentance.
He never could box the compass round;
He doesn't know port from starboard;
But he knows the gates of the Sundown Straits,
Where the choicest goods are harbored.
He never could see the Rule of Three,
But he knows a rule of thumb
Better than Euclid's, better than yours,
Or the teachers' yet to come.
He knows the smell of the hydromel
As if two and two were five;
And hides it away for a year and a day
In his own hexagonal hive.
Out in the day, hap-hazard, alone,
Booms the old vagrant hummer,
With only his whim to pilot him
Through the splendid vast of summer.
He steers and steers on the slant of the gale,
Like the fiend or Vanderdecken;
And there's never an unknown course to sail
But his crazy log can reckon.
He drones along with his rough sea-song
And the throat of a salty tar,
This devil-may-care, till he makes his lair
By the light of a yellow star.
He looks like a gentleman, lives like a lord,
And works like a Trojan hero;
Then loafs all winter upon his hoard,
With the mercury at zero.
Bliss Carman (1861-1929)
I'll Fly Away
April 13, 2007
Will, the girls and I are taking a little family vacation this week. I wish I could tell you about all the educational aspects of our little foray and include photos, but that will have to wait. We are first and foremost getting away to have some quiet time together as a family. Since the loss of my mother, I have been relentlessly pushing people away from me including my own husband and children. I haven't really cried about things, but I wouldn't even know what to cry about if I could.
My mother and I had a complicated relationship. I wish I could tell you what a wonderful mother she was because, in turns, she was. But then, it would feel like a half-lie. And a half-lie is almost always or usually very nearly a full lie. If I tell you of the other topsy-turvy, spinning turns of my life with my mother, I would feel like I was betraying the good in her. She was a woman living her life as best she could on this planet. How can I criticize that?
If I tell you how much I want my mommy right now, you would assume I meant my mother. I assumed I meant her. Now I am not so sure.
I feel so lost. I want someone to hold me, rock me back and forth and softly, through my great heaving sobs, tell me that everything is going to be okay. Someone who won't care that I am getting her shirt all wet with my tears. And I want to stay there as long as I need to stay there. Not until she tires of it all and plops me back down on the hard wooden rocker all alone. I want to be able to cry myself to sleep and wake up still in my mother's arms. But not really my mother.
My husband wants me to get on with my life. To buck up. To be the adult. I don't want to be the adult right now. I want to have a great, screaming meltdown in the middle of the supermarket floor just as the cart is already half full of groceries and everyone is staring and muttering that someone really should do something about this child.
My children want me to help them with their math problems. To fix their dinner. To clean the tub. I want someone to do those things, too. Someone to make sure I have fresh sheets on my bed and a clean dress laid out for tomorrow. Someone who knows where my shoes are.
Where is she? Where is this person called Mother. Who is this person called Mother? Why is everyone looking at me?
Time to Vote!
April 9, 2007
The Homeschool Blog Awards are back and the voting has begun! Hurry on over before midnight April 15th to vote for your favorite homeschool bloggers! While you're there, please consider voting for my blog "Bioluminescence" as I have so kindly been nominated for "Best Artistic Content Blog" and "Best Blog Design". Remember, you don't have to be a homeschooler to vote. You just have to have a deep and profound love for each and every one of us. *grin*
