Holy Beautiful

I want to be profound here but know that I will fall short of the mark; my words are rusty from lack of use lately.

So - brevity, perhaps?

I stepped outside this afternoon and spotted this rose in full bloom, the first of the season.

Normally this bush blooms deep, bright pink roses from early spring until Thanksgiving.  But this first rose is so markedly different that I had to step closer to make sure I was really seeing what I was seeing -

An imperfectly perfect pink rose - half light, half dark.

Wholly beautiful.

And I am reminded of life - time gone by, time yet to come, time here and now:

There is light.

There is darkness.

And all of it is is holy beautiful.

From Left to Write February 2012 Book Club: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver | Sugar, Suburbs, and Strawberries

Could you live an entire year eating locally or the food from your garden? Barbara Kingsolver transplanted her family from the deserts of Arizona to the mountains of Virginia for their endeavor.


Join From Left to Write on February 21 as we discuss Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life * by Barbara Kingsolver. As a member of From Left to Write, I received a free copy of the book.  As always, all thoughts, opinions, and quirky points of view are 100% my own.

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On Saturday, knowing I had a deadline looming for a post inspired by Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, I tossed the book in the van with me and my youngest as I drove him to a classmate's birthday party. 

After making my hellos, I sat reading off to the side of the parental unit group, while our twenty-odd kindergartners spent an hour getting good and tired out running around in gymnastics room and then refueled with the gonzo sugary snacks standard to kids birthday parties: cupcakes and pop.

The irony of the moment - me reading about Kingsolver's plan to eat clean and local while my six year old and his buddies got hopped up on an array of products loaded with high fructose corn syrup - has stuck with me.  A solid hour of sweaty exercise (a good and needed and disappearing event for many young children) followed by heaping helping of sugar and fat.  It's a mixed message our kids get from the adults who feed them; no wonder the obesity epidemic in the United States includes 1 in 3 adults and a whopping 1 in 6 children as of 2012 data from the CDC. 

Before you slap your hand through your computer screen to knock me off my high horse, I will come clean: we eat cake and pop on birthdays at our house, too.  There are also boxes of sugared up cereal (Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Nut Cheerios) on the shelves in my pantry.  And yesterday, my house was a major distribution point for Girl Scout cookies, those boxes of overpriced, tasty sugar (and who knows what else) that annually doom even the most stoic of New Year's resolution dieters.

I'm no less guilty of the sins of sugar and preservatives than the next parent raising children in this age of industrialized food.

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I'm not yet finished reading the book (I'm about 100 pages into it), but as I read it on Saturday while the kids played and rolled and jumped, I was immediately reminded of another book I read earlier this year: Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land* by Kurt Timmermeister (I highly recommend it).  The books share a similar theme in the wish of the authors to find a way to eat whole, eat clean, eat local, and live off their own land.

I read Timmermeister's book with a sighing wishfulness; I find myself approaching Kingsolver's with the same sort of, "Ahhh....if only...," attitude.

If only we had a few - even just one - acres.  (We have a quarter acre lot in our neighborhood.)

If only I could raise chickens in the backyard.  (A flagrant violation of our neighborhood's home owner's association.)

If only the housing market wasn't scraping the bottom of the recovery trough here in my part of SW Ohio.  (We'd love to move out of town into a more rural area in the county but aren't too keen on taking a financial beat down by selling our house for less than we paid for it.)

If only local free range meats and local produce wasn't far more expensive than the offerings at the grocery stores.  (We are fortunate to live in a county where we have several CSA farms near us and farmers who raise beef and chickens but the cost to go 100% local and natural is prohibitive.)

Our neighborhood is of the suburban-type without truly being suburban; our little town has a rich 200+ year history and an identity of it's own.  We just happen to live in a recently developed area of our town (our neighborhood is about 15 years old) and our home is a typical suburban-type home: high square footage home smacked on top of a tiny lot of land.

I do garden with some success (mostly tomatoes and cukes), but our lot is shady and the soil is poor and in need of amendment every time I dig a new bed.  While I dream of planting fruit trees and have a few blackberry bushes tucked in along the fences, growing an abundance of food from my backyard has yet eluded me.  After reading Timmermeister's book as well as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I am inspired to do more this year, to plant more beds in my yard and to even look into renting a Victory Garden plot at my YMCA for serious veggie production.

But in the end, I can't escape the reality of life in the suburbs.  Suburban neighborhoods like mine were never built to create a means of sustainable living; they were built to give people a place to sleep and to house the symbol of American freedom: the automobile.

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We stopped in Kroger on Sunday after Mass and along with our sugar-bomb donuts (delicious but riddled with guilt), I picked up a few boxes of strawberries on sale for $1.50/lb.  

Knowing they aren't in season locally, knowing that these strawberries were likely shipped from the growing grounds of south Florida or the sunny coast of California didn't stop me from buying them.  We like strawberries, the strawberries are on sale; ergo, there are now strawberries in my refrigerator.

I don't know if I would have the strength of conviction to do what Kingsolver and her family did, to eat only what is fresh and locally grown, to turn away from all the rainbow of colors in the produce section of my grocery store.  I doubt my kids would survive a week without grapes or berries or apples during these last days of winter.

But I would like to try.  

As I type this, I've got whole milk in the crockpot, almost ready for me to start another batch of homemade yogurt.  (It's very tasty.)  I cook most of our meals from scratch (using those troublesome long-distance shipped veggies and farm-industrial meats, but still).  Despite our current high inventory of Thin Mints and Tagalongs, I bake cookies for the kids lunches and offer healthy after school snacks (apples, cheese sticks, popcorn) with a tall glass of water.  

I do pretty good on the food front but I could do better.  

It's time to at least try.

*My Amazon affililate link.  Thanks for your support.

**I'll be perusing Seed Savers Exchange later today.  It's time to start planning my garden.  Any of you fellow dirt-lovers have recommendations on varieties?  Many thanks.  ;-)

From Left to Write February 2012 Book Club: The Art of Hearing Heartbeats | Why the End Isn't the Reason Why We Begin

When Julia travels to Burma to search for her missing lawyer father, she discovers much more than she expected. Join From Left to Write on February 1 as we discuss * by Jan-Philipp Sendker. 

As a member of From Left to Write, I received a free copy of the book to read and review. As always, the thoughts and opinions in this post are 100% my own.

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All of my three children learned to read by the time they were five.  The only credit Knute and I can take for their early literacy is that reading out loud to them was a part of their every day routine from the time they were babies.  Bed time meant story time and there were many nights when we would find ourselves reading the same tale again and again and again until our own heads began to nod.  I imagine I'll be reciting, "The truffala trees!  The truffala trees!  All my life I'd been searching for trees such as these!**" and other Seussian lines under my breath in odd moments for the rest of my life.

These days, Knute and I don't find ourselves often reading aloud to the kiddos; they curl up each night in bed (after what feels like half an eternity of wrangling, silly bantering, and outright belly-aching about our repeated requests to brush their teeth, get their jammies on, and get.in.bed.already.dangit!) with a book, their bedside lamps on for another half an hour of reading time.

In some ways, I miss those years of reading stories with them.  There was the delight in discovering new children's tales together, ones that made both of us - child and adult - laugh out loud.  (Read any kids books by Doreen Cronin, Kathi Appelt, or Jamie Lee Curtis and you'll be laughing, too.)  There was the comfort of the end-of-day routine.  And there was the great satisfaction of opening the pages of an oft-told tale, one whose ending we already knew.

I was not far into the pages of The Art of Hearing Heartbeats before I had a clear idea of how the story would end because it is so skillfully and - bear with me on this pun - so artfully foretold.  While foreshadowing, when done clumsily, will absolutely ruin a story for me to the point where I will put the book down without finishing it, it works beautifully in this fine novel by Jan-Philipp Sendker because the end of the story is not the purpose of the story.


The telling of the story, as recounted by one character to another, is the purpose of the story.

How often in life do we see the end as the purpose, the reason, the driver to all we do?

Today, I flipped over my calendar from January to February.  One month gone already in 2012, thirty-one days where one of the leading topics across main stream media and new media alike was the subject of resolutions.  Early in January, the topic skewed toward making resolutions.  During the middle of January, the topic shifted toward keeping resolutions.  As January wrapped itself into the annals of history, the topic shifted again toward re-kindling resolutions or getting back up on the ol' resolution horse as February approached.

So many resolutions.  So many goals.  So many ends to meet, so many finish lines to cross.

When we race forward, always forward, relentlessly forward, the life around us begins to blur like the view seen from the window of a car speeding down a highway.  When we finally reach our destination, we have trouble remembering what we saw along the way.

We're finally there, yes; but the journey is over and we have few memories of our travels.

Reading and reflecting on The Art of Hearing Heartbeats made me consider my own TypeA approach to life: To Do lists; goal setting; looking forward.

Always forward.


While I know myself well enough to know that I won't ever stop pushing onward, striving upward, I'm reminded of how important it is to remember to slow down, to turn my head to see and experience what is around me.

I'm reminded that the end should never be the only reason we begin.

*Disclosure: This post contains my Amazon affiliate links through which I earn enough spare change to buy approximately (1) Starbucks Skinny Mocha every six months or so.  Thanks.  ;-)


**From "The Lorax," by Dr. Seuss, one of my youngest's faves to this day.

Wordless Wednesday | Future Briefcase Boy

I've never seen a kindergartner SO excited about a Trapper Keeper!

I only wish I could find a link to explain the "briefcase boy" stories that my father-in-law used to relate about his days at St. X.

For more Wordless Wednesday fun, be sure to visit 5 Minutes for Mom.

7 Quick Takes | #3 of 2012 {The Catholic Edition}

{This week, I'm sharing some of my favorite Catholic resources online - I'd love it if you'd share your favorite Catholic sites, blogs, or podcasts in the combox.  Thanks!}


1. The Catholics Next Door.  Almost two years ago, I joined a mom's bible study group (holla girls!) that had been started in my parish; one of the moms mentioned that she liked listening to Catholic podcasts when she was working around the house.  I'd had my iPhone for a few months at that point and had never once used it to listen to a podcast.  I decided to search "Catholic" on iTunes and discovered what has become one of my all-time fave podcasts to listen to while running on the track, mopping the floors, or folding laundry - The Catholics Next Door, hosted by Greg and Jennifer Willits.  If you have Sirius Radio, you can catch them daily on The Catholic Channel, 1-4 pm.

What I love about The Catholics Next Door is their honesty.  It's not easy to live an authentically Catholic life in our modern world; Greg and Jennifer don't sugarcoat their own struggles.  I can't say enough about how much they inspire me and have helped me in my own constant conversion.

2. Catholic in a Small Town.  Listening to The Catholics Next Door helped me discover one of my other fave Catholic podcasts: Catholic in a Small Town by Mac and Katharine Barron.  They are funny folks. It's a good thing I like to run my circles on the blue track at o'dark-thirty in the morning; I don't have to worry about startling too many other runners when I start laughing out loud at their stories.

I can totally appreciate their perspective as Catholics in a small southern town; Knute and I lived in Florida for two and half years and while we weren't in a small town, it was definitely an eye-opening experience to be a Catholic living in the south.  I'm so thankful that Knute and I are raising our kids in the greater Cincy/Dayton area where there's a strong history of Catholic culture, education, and values (not to mention  fish fries and festivals!).

3.  Catholic Answers.  Catholic Answers is like a podcast catechises - I learn so much from every one of their episodes.  It's a fantastic resource for anyone out there who wants to learn more about our Church teachings in an approachable way.  After listening to Catholic Answers for the past six months or so, I feel like I'm finally beginning to come into a mature understanding of my faith.

4. Word Among Us. When I joined my bible study group in 2010, I searched online for a daily Catholic devotional and discovered Word Among Us.  I usually drink my first cup (of many!) of coffee early in the morning while reading the day's meditation which is based on the daily Mass readings.  The meditations are short, inspiring, and a great way to start the day.

5.  Catholic Mom. The hands down best resource online for Catholic moms.  Lisa Hendey and the team of contributing authors at Catholic Mom are wonderful.

6.  National Catholic Register.  I discovered NC Register via Jen at Conversion Diary and I've enjoyed reading the different bloggers who post at NC Register.  There are many great news articles and additional resources to be found here as well.

7.  Fallible Blogma.  Matthew Warner's personal blog - great reading and always well-linked resources if you want to chase down the rabbit trail after more info.  This recent post?  Fantastic stuff, so much so that I sent it out to my bible study email list so we could all chat about it next time.

I'd love to stumble across more great Catholic resources online - feel free to shout out your links in the combox below!

This post is linked up at the home of 7QT, Conversion Diary.  Be sure to hop through the links there for more great takes from around the blogosphere!

Like a Prism | From Left To Write, January 2012 Book Club: Quiet by Susan Cain

Are you an introvert or extrovert?  Author Susan Cain explores how introverts can be powerful in a world where being an extrovert is highly valued. Join From Left to Write on January 19 as we discuss Quiet: The Power of Introverts* by Susan Cain. We'll also be chatting live with Susan Cain at 9PM EST on January 26. As a member of From Left to Write, I received an advance copy of the book to read and review.  All opinions, as always, are my own.

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I started reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain during the long and lazy Christmas break.  Our family was busy in the days leading up to Christmas; in the days that followed, however, there was a long stretch of time where our family calendar was empty.  We had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

And it was wonderful.

I spent many hours engrossed in reading.  I taught myself and my daughter how to finger knit.  I organized my little TypeA heart out.  Knute and I stayed up late talking and watching movies and sipping wine. The kids played on the Wii together, stayed in their jammies until well past lunch, and for the most part got along swimmingly.  For the better part of a week, we enjoyed the simplicity of just hanging out together as a family.

And knowing myself and my family as well as I do (and perhaps with a bit keener insight after reading Quiet), I can understand why a week of nothing was just what we needed.

While none of us are dyed-in-the-wool introverts, all of us - Knute, myself, and all three kids - are at our  most balanced and best thrive when we have some downtime to ourselves away from the noise of the world.  For us (at least, for Knute and I) a dream vacation isn't one that involves visiting Mickey or cruising the seven seas any other sensory overload version of the American Family Trip.  The perfect vacation for us involves nature, solitude, opportunities to socialize in small doses, and ample time to just hang out and do less, not more.

In the pages of Quiet, I saw many bits and pieces of myself.  Writing this post was difficult simply because I had so many different a-HA reactions as I flipped through the pages and so many different post titles popped into my head, titles like:

Behind the Screen.  
Wherein I discuss how blogging is the perfect medium for more introverted souls.

Sweet Spot. 
Wherein I describe my ever-burning need to find an organized spot in my home for quiet, downtime, and where I can write, read, and dream.

Modalities of Me. 
Wherein I remember all the many Mando Fun events I attended with my husband during my years as a Navy Officer's Wife and how I dug deep to smack a smile on my face and put my best high-heeled social foot forward.

Group Project.
Wherein I shudder at remembering all the different group work I was required to do during college and how I abhorred it.

Small Doses
Wherein I describe my deep love for my friends and family and the different groups to which I belong and how I best enjoy their company in small groups, not big crowds.

Nerved Up.
Wherein I connect the dots between being easily overloaded by sensory stimuli and introversion.

His Own Man.
Wherein I chat about the charms of my older son, the gregarious introvert.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking opened my eyes to the positive aspects of my own introverted tendencies.  In a world where the loudest voice wins, where sensory overload is the new normal, and the group dynamic dominates from the classroom to the boardroom, it's refreshing to read a book that champions a quieter, more thoughtful approach to life.

*Disclosure: My Amazon affiliate link, just so you know.

Wordless Wednesday | First Snow 2012!

Last Thursday (1/12/12) after school, dancing in the {finally here} snow.

For more Wordless Wednesday fun, be sure to visit 5 Minutes for Mom.

7 Quick Takes | #2 of 2012 {The Kindle Edition}

Image courtesy of Amazon

1. Because "simple" really means "techy".  Every time a gift giving occasion rolls around, Knute and I pinky swear that we won't go overboard, that we'll keep our spending low and our gifts simple.  And in the past few years, some of Knute's "simple" gifts for me have included a laptop and an iPhone and now, this Christmas, a Kindle.  And what did I, his dear wifely unit, get him in return, you ask?  What every child of the 80's secretly craves: ATARI Flashback 3*.

Not only is Knute having fun playing Asteroids again, our kids are both mystified and aghast at the primitive level of gaming with which their parents had to subsist during their childhoods.

2.  Small but big. My Kindle is the basic one without ads (without special offers, in Amazon-speak).  It's lightweight, thin, and super-portable.  One of the first books I added - and actually paid for - was the New American Bible, Revised Edition 2011*.  I love having a digital copy of the bible literally at my fingertips and I'm looking forward to taking my Kindle with me to Bible study next Tuesday and leaving the big ol' print one at home.  Being able to keep large reference books handy in e-format is a huge selling point, especially if you are a student.

3.  Free books. There are tons of FREE books available in the Kindle store. I've found that the best way to search is by ratings (4 star or above) in order to weed out some of the crapola.

4.  Classics. This is by far one of my favorite things about my Kindle - the sheer number of literary classics that are available for - you guessed it - FREE.  I have a number of books loaded to my Kindle that I've wanted to read for years and never did, either because they weren't required for one of my classes or because I just didn't have time or a copy.  I love the idea that I'm now carrying around a virtual library of good books in my purse.

5.  Accountability. My daughter also received a Kindle for Christmas as a combined gift from her Gma, aunt, and uncle - it was the ONE thing she wanted more than anything.  I set her Kindle up on Christmas Eve (before I knew I was getting one) on my Amazon account so now both our Kindles are linked through my Amazon account which means I can see whatever is on her Kindle and vice versa.  It's a nice check and balance for both of us and - BONUS - she can access my books via her Archive and vice versa.  Cost effective!

6.  Library books.  Using my library card, I can borrow ten ebooks at a time from the Ohio eBook Project for two weeks at a time.  Sweet!

7.  And yet...  I will never be fully and solely a Kindle reader.  Reading a book, a real-live-paper book is a total sensory experience, from the feeling of smooth pages under your fingertips to the smell of the ink to the sheer weight of a hefty tome.  The experience of curling in a corner chair, balancing a book with one hand and a cuppa java with the other is something the Kindle, no matter how useful, can't replace.  And then there is the sense of coming home to exactly where you belong that happens when you walk into a room filled with books.  I like my Kindle, yes, but I love my books.


Be sure to hop over to the home of 7QT, Conversion Diary, and click through the links.  Enjoy!


*Yo.  Those are my Amazon affiliate links, just so you know.