On, In, and Around Mondays: Re-Covering Time

I place a white porcelain cover on the small white porcelain tea pot. Over this, I place the white tea cozy, with the red and beige stripes and two little red birds, seemingly in conversation. I leave them to their private whisperings, give the tea time to steep.

Loose tea takes longer than a tea bag. I must find a spoon. I must twist the cover off the tea caddy and dip inside, measure out what I desire, and scatter it into the tea basket. I must let the leaves unfurl in the steamy darkness. Is eight minutes—start to finish—too long to wait for heaven?

Now sipping my Christmas tea, the eight minutes already a memory, I peruse two different books. One about tea, one about bread. I turn the pages slowly, write my favorite lines onto colored cards. Tea cuttings, I learn, take around a year to a year and three months to reach a stage where they can be planted in the tea garden. Then they must grow 15-18 inches before they are eligible to be severely pruned, and once again take time to grow into a flat table, a plucking table.

Bread is similar, in regards to time. We can use flour artificially aged with bleach and bromate (bromate being outlawed in European countries, because it is a carcinogen). Or we can use flour set out in the air, where oxygen, the very thing we breathe, will refine qualities, ultimately cultivate taste.

We don't have time for the line, said an essay in the book I reviewed last week.

The line, a single row of words—have we really no time?

If we have no time for the line, we have no time for loose tea. We have no time for the tea bush, gently coaxed to golden bud. We have no time for finely structured bread.

Let me, let me re-cover time... for the single line, the tea, the bread.

________

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

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This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

On, In, and Around Mondays: Figuring

"Everything is terrible!" she wails, and leans into my arms.

Everything is not terrible.

There are worse days, worse places, worse lives. But to her, in this moment, everything is terrible. She is our sensitive child. And maybe the past few days of mini crisis, the weeks of us-too-busy-for-her, have piled up.

I understand. I myself am in a time of "figuring." Looking for some way to feel a sense of space. It always comes 'round to this. I empty my life, I fill it back up. I feel burdened. I must re-figure.

Walk away, I think.

So on Friday I go skating .



On Saturday I don't write (thus my lateness here today), but instead keep a promise to make a blog for my Eldest.

On Sunday we go walking. I laugh at my Youngest's way with the world. She is making snow hats for every fire hydrant we pass (and in my laughter I forget to take photos, which is a small regret).





On Sunday evening we take time for my Youngest, the fire-hydrant-snow-hat girl who thinks everything is terrible. Time to figure how to make a Japanese tent (is there such a thing?) that she actually fills with Chinese items. We find some Japanese music and download it; we change my plans for French-toast dinner and order-in Japanese.









Lights down low, she is finally smiling. I am still figuring. But for the moment everything is suspended.




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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

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On, In, and Around Mondays: Finding Our Place Within

The place I am this morning is tired.

Maybe it's the time-change. More likely it's that the day ahead is too small for what I need to fit into it. Laundry, home schooling, business, preparing a talk for tomorrow.

Yesterday I did nothing much, because I knew the place I was in. But my daughters and I played a little poetry game.

"Bring a notebook and a pen to dinner," I said.

"That sounds mysterious. And exciting!" chimed my Littlest.

We borrowed lines from Elizabeth Bishop, to use as our own first lines. Then we played with various catalog techniques... repeat words at the beginning of the lines, repeat words between lines, repeat words at the end of the lines.

I can't say I wrote anything really worth sharing. My Littlest also found the exercises difficult. She and I are the same kind of writers; we write from a place of personal rhythm. Even so, I imagine that my Littlest and I were skill-building, though our poems-of-the-moment suffered. But my Eldest was empowered by the experience. And all of us agreed it is a marvelous way to play with words.

Here are two poems from my Eldest, then...

A washing hangs upon the line
a washing rain engulfs it.

*

With ten big beads,
one a pin for a dress of beads,
black and red beads,
one bead lost in a lawn where beads
of dew still stand, two beads
blue shiny earring beads
three beads forgotten in a box of buttons, only beads
to attest to ten big beads,
now three beads left, beads
yet unfathomed, unexplored, unused. Beads.

— by Sara

Japanese Maple photo by L.L. Barkat. Poems by Sara, used with permission.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also in honor of Random Acts of Poetry.

On, In and Around Mondays: 3 Ways I Quit Technology

This is how it happens.

One moment I am happily gazing at my computer screen. The next moment I feel tired. Or is it hungry? Maybe I want a piece of chocolate. No. Maybe it is the piano I am wanting.

I turn away and wash a dish, clean out a drawer, go outside, play the piano. Whatever seems like the next thing.



It used to be that I couldn't listen to the tiredness, the hunger, the wanting. Why didn't I listen?



Listening is the first thing. It helps me know when to forget about blogging, tweeting, checking email. It helps me remember to look up, and out, beyond.



Tea is the second thing. At four o' clock every day, I find Creme Earl Grey, Bagatelle, Granada Green or African Red Bush. I sit on the back porch, stare at the little garden. My mind wanders. Ten things that were bothering me float away on air, or so it seems. I can see what needs to be done, or not done.





A weekly technology Sabbath is the third thing. I take mine on Sundays. The woods are calling, and the bridges. Or the little lanes. Ten more things that were bothering me disappear into the green, the water, the trails, the stones.



Listening. Daily tea time. A single Sabbath day. I quit technology with these, and then I return. Happily.



Rockefeller and Kitchawan park photos, by L.L. Barkat.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

RELATED: Write specifically about your relationship to technology and you can add your link at TheHighCalling.org.

When Words Are Few

"Sabbath"

Sometimes,
when words are few,
I think to pick
a flower, white,
for you, a star
nameless, waiting.


Flower photo by L.L. Barkat.

Why Do You Write? (tweet, blog...)

The path meanders upward, embraced in shadow. A red-winged blackbird lights on the underbrush where pearl-orange berries hang. Further on, red berries dangle too, like liquid glass. Poplars and firs give way to bamboo, and through a gap I see fields of roses, pink and wild. The air carries their scent, even as it moves cattails now full with ivory cotton swelling.

A single cardinal punctuates grass, turns his head to the side, just after the pond. Oh, the pond! Brown fish like blunted chopsticks sit motionless, while powder-blue dragonflies whir and dip. A naked branch, dead to the year, becomes a landing dock. Dragonflies, dragonflies, like blue-powdered leaves, clutter the skeleton branch. And here is a cluster of golden brown mushrooms. Or there. Look! Yellow flowers like banana bunches, and lavender too. Banana flowers. That's what we called them as children.

My girls go before me, biking through time, past creeks and swamps. They like the tunnels, shady and cool. I hear them up ahead, whistling in the dark.

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Why do I write this for you? Tell of my Sabbath biking? I write because I suffer.

Suffer? you say. What have cardinals and red berries got to do with suffering?

Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift has an interesting observation about gratitude. It is, he says, what we 'suffer' between the time we receive a gift and the time we pass it along.

So, yes, I write of girls on a path, of wild roses and dark tunnels... because I have suffered gratitude. For these Sabbath gifts. And now I find relief, in passing the gifts to you.


Fairy Forest Painting, by Sara B. Used with permission.

RELATED POSTS:
High Calling Blogs The Gift: Generous Elves

When Did You Labor? (or, will Sabbath help your gift go viral?)

Sam got stuck in the Intro, and I decided to wait for him in Chapter One— just a little corner of it... just the last sentence... okay, just the intro to the last sentence (see, Sam, I'm working with you)...

The Lord says, 'All that opens the womb is mine...' And this reflects back on the Introduction, which uses the image of laboring... When we are moved by art we are grateful...that [the artist] labored in the service of his gifts.

This supposes that we know what our gifts are, and that we take the time to refine and share them. For those who love the cyberlife, this can become a thorny issue. It's easy to get carried away on the wires for hours on end, while our gifts sit idle. As Vincent Rossmeier notes,

I would say that if there's one thing that's causing the novels of the world from getting written right now, it's surfing the Internet. I do think that a lot of creative people want to be working on their craft, they want to be thinking big about what they should be doing and my belief is that the culture is encouraging them to think small. To me, the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves. To carve out spaces in our lives away from information.

That's one reason I take a weekly technology Sabbath. It helps me carve out thinking and dreaming space. It relieves my heart from all the hype and bad news (I'm talking about the news links that pop up when I open Yahoo). I'm even working on a daily schedule of unplugging and prioritizing, based on some cool suggestions I found in Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life. (This book oversimplifies sometimes, but it's worth a definite checkout at the library.)

So now, if you'll pardon me, I'm off to do a little labor in the service of my gifts.


Gladiator-Flower Broom photo, by L.L. Barkat.

MORE BOOK CLUB POSTS:
High Calling Blogs' Mozart, Tiger Woods and Me: Gift 1 1/2
Liz's Increase and Sacrifice
Laura's The Gift, Forcibly Taken

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Arguing with Lauren Winner

Every so once in a while, I reread a book I love. Recently, this has meant delving into Lauren Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath. This week, upon rereading, I discovered that I said things in Stone Crossings that could be construed as being at odds with Winner's thoughts on Sabbath. She says...

...rest for the sake of future productivity is at odds with the spirit of Shabbat. ... [the] problem with the current Sabbath vogue [is] the fallacy of the direct object. Whom is the contemporary Sabbath designed to honor? Whom does it benefit? Why, the bubble-bath taker herself, of course! The Bible suggests something different. In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him. Exodus and Deuteronomy make this clear when they say, 'Six days shall you labor and do all your work. But the seventh is a sabbath to the Lord your God.' To the Lord your God. p.11

And here is what I said...

Back in the time of the Israelites, God had a novel way of building discipline, emptiness and want into the lives of his people. He mandated the Sabbath— once every week, once every seven years, once every fifty years....These Sabbaths each had specific purposes, but I believe they also functioned to teach us what my grandmother knew: emptiness, want and discomforting discipline are channels through which bounty can ultimately flow.

After all, looking back to the seventh-day Sabbath, we see that a vacuum of work prepared minds and bodies for productivity. And in the seventh-year Sabbath, we see that letting the land lie empty prepared the ground to burst forth with produce. Finally, on the fifty-year Sabbath, we find that the discipline of turning over accumulated slaves and property could prepare the heart to remember who really owned the "cattle on a thousand hills"... ultimately deepening dependence on God. pp.91-92


Reading these two quotes, this is what I think today... It is possible for two things, apparently in conflict, to actually be true. This comforts me. I wasn't in the mood to argue with Lauren Winner.


"Mourning Doves Talking" at the Smithsonian. Photo by L.L. Barkat.

STONE CROSSINGS:

Ted's latest book club post

Time to Be

Sabbath. I love how Lauren Winner explains the Jewish concept, in Mudhouse Sabbath, even as she admits she is out sipping coffee and writing in the margins of a book.

The time period, she tells us, is called "Queen Sabbath" and is described as a bride. Most brides get quite stressed, but as my children's Hebrew lesson reminded us today, Sabbath means "rest". Queen Sabbath is no ordinary bride! She is royal, beautiful, filled with promise and calm.

I'm looking forward to a Sabbath of sorts over the next week. On Thursday, I'll head off to California, a place apart. Redwoods and mist, a room of my own, quiet mornings when no one else is up (the time difference assures this for me). Not quite a Jewish Sabbath, but not my usual fare either.

If all goes well, I'll hold my book for the first time, smell the new pages, remember that God took a mess and turned it into a gift to others, through the careful shaping of words and memories entwined with His Own Word.

Overall, I'm looking forward to a time to simply be...


Antique Clock in Mother's House photo, by J Barkat. Used with permission.


RELATED:

Dave Zimmerman's On Birthing a Book

New Waiting for Stone Crossings photos at Zimbio

Sabbath Kept

The days have been lazy. I have felt a light breeze coming over rippled water, and watched the last rays of the sun melt over a blue lake. In shallow waters, I retrieved an oval, seagreen-colored rock. It sits now on my counter.

With one daughter, I jostled to win air hockey, while she laughed loudly and held my gaze. With the other daughter, I forded a creek we found after hiking through hushed woods. I consider that this daughter now understands something of stone crossings. Both the girls peered with me at wood sorrel, a lemony forest gift we bit into, blinking and smiling.

I read Harvest of Hope and considered the sorrow of the Killing Fields, while also discovering how my small donations can bring new life to Cambodia and other places across the world. I started yet another journey into my childhood past, with a book called The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. I made it halfway through Lynne Baab's book Sabbath Keeping. Indeed, I have kept Sabbath and feel the better for it.

In Baab's book, I found and savored this from Wayne Muller:

Sabbath is a time to stop....To stop working, stop making money, stop spending money. See what you have. Look around. Listen to your life. Do you really need more than this? Spend a day with your family. Instead of buying the new coffee maker, make coffee in the old one and sit with your spouse on the couch, hang out— do what they do in the picture [in the advertisement] without paying for it. Just stop. That is, after all, what they are selling in the picture: people who have stopped. You cannot buy stopped. (p.62)

It is true that you cannot buy what I found over my extended Sabbath. You cannot buy a deep breath, which is precisely what I took. And you cannot buy the free gift of rest, which is a new readiness. Yes, thanks to the gift of rest, I feel ready for the days to come.


Rose of Sharon in Rain photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

Sabbath

Yesterday, I held my daughter close for a long while. To listen to a particular sadness, to give her my presence. It was healing, just sitting there breathing in rhythm. It was restful. I closed my eyes.

Sometimes we need that. To just close our eyes. To breathe. To love and feel loved. Yes, we need Sabbath.

The Jewish tradition calls the actual Sabbath "shabbat". I like this quote from the memoir Stranger in the Midst, regarding shabbat...

"Shabbat is like nothing else. Time as we know it does not exist for these twenty-four hours, and the worries of the week soon fall away. A feeling of joy appears. The smallest object, a leaf or a spoon, shimmers in a soft light, and the heart opens..." (p.2, Mudhouse Sabbath)

Reflecting on this quote I realize I want to close my eyes and open my heart. Close my eyes to the worries of a whole month, or maybe even a year. I want to pay attention to the smallest objects, and the tiny people in my life. Not just for a sabbath but for a whole week of sabbath. And so it is.

After tomorrow, I will be back in about a week. Maybe a little longer if an embrace of peace will not let me go. Shabbat shalom.


...you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. Psalm 104:13


Fern After Rain photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

Fallowing

As I'm just back from a time of "fallowing," I thought it would be good to move to that topic here. Besides, it is the next topic in Berry's list of what the Peruvian mountain farmers do to control erosion.

On the surface, the practice of fallowing makes little sense. For how could leaving the ground unplanted contribute to keeping soil in place? How could doing "nothing" accomplish "something"?

In truth, there's much that goes on in a fallow field. The farmer plows the soil. He may plant a cover crop to restore nutrients to the soil. Or he may let nature plant what it will. Ultimately, this improves the soil's structure, which influences how it absorbs and retains water.

I consider that to let my life go fallow at times does not mean "doing nothing." Indeed, it may entail doing something unusual, even a little wild.

Maybe, just maybe, this is what I'm doing out in my secret spot in the back yard. When the rains come and the next season for planting comes, we will see if something new and strong and restructured emerges...

Standing Seedlings Invitation: If you post something related to this Seedlings post, let me know and I'll link to you.

Pine cone photo, on the way to my Secret Spot. L.L. Barkat.

NEW LINKS TO THIS POST:

Sabbath

Preparing the Soul

Unanchored

Another Take On Silence

Five Reasons Why I Blog (or, how fallowing-in-Florida made me less serious)

NEW LINKS TO TERRACING:

Incas & Disposable Everything