My best laid plans always come to naught; well, they just don't always work out as expected! So I seem to have missed yet another thankful Monday, and the much lauded child of last week has spent most of the intervening period confounding the medical profession! And us!!
So here are some autumnal moments from the weekend. A lazy ramble around the hill behind the Temple of the Winds. Very lovely, and a new-to-us play ground/grove that merges huge and fallen trees with polished tree sculptures, deliberately laid activities like see-saws and balancing bridges with mighty sprawls of branches to entangle and ensnare.
Did you know that Albert Camus told us that we could all get used to anything, even to living inside a tree trunk? I don't think he imagined the cosy, illustrated interiors talked about by MK recently: "
J’ai souvent pensé alors que si l’on m’avait fait vivre dans
un tronc d’arbre sec, sans autre occupation que de regarder la fleur du ciel
au-dessus de ma tête, je m’y serais peu à peu habitué… on finissait par s’habituer
à tout."
I've been reading l'Étranger for years now. Just over thirty, my goodness. With the Bible, let's be clear on that one, it never fails to speak to my life. Well, it reflects a lot about my life, I think. But then all literature is life, isn't it? That was my definition of literature when I was teaching. But what I think God gives us, in his literature, is more than just a reflection of how things are. There we find hope that, even if there are things we have to just get used to, like fainting in school lots or being the mother of children who always have something going on, even if there are callings that are constrictive and dry, "The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart." Psalm 19.
So if I say that I am grateful for school nurses and bean bags in school libraries, for hospitals and doctors a short drive and no wait away, for jobs that allow a certain degree of tolerance, for bright autumn glorious days amid the dark wet ones, for dark wet autumn days where you furrow deep home, for fires and candles and lights and friends, for books- secular and divine, for friends who lend DVDs and won't lend you the Arial poems until you find the DVD, for a car to get about quickly and easily, for all things orange this month, for the promise of getting the pumpkin box out soon, for husbands who clean, and for outside outside outside, if I do all that I do believe I'm up to 880 gratitudes with only 120 to go before year's end. Phew!
3 comments:
Those are powerful gratitudes, dearie dear. Your heart is so squishy. I love you!
If L'Etranger has been part of your heart's sustenance all these years I think you have pretty much sanctified it, Mags. You know it's not Outside as in secular.
I'm sure I read it in French class. I had the most amazing French classes in high school. One year I was the only student at Level 4 so I sat in with the French 3 kids but mostly read literature on my own. That inspired me to do a paper on Existentialists for my English class.
BUT - I probably already told you this years ago, because weren't we talking about trying to read Kierkegaard?? Anyway, I have no recollection of Camus's books at this point, so I'm glad you refreshed me a little.
Ah, Mags, it sounds like your life is quite full right now. I just LOVE what you said about literature, about how it shows us life. And about how God's literature is a bit different -- it shows us life, but it also shows us our hope, our life eternal, the WAY to get there! Because sometimes this life is just hard, and we need to be reminded there is a life to come. Thank you!
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