a long pause

Sorry for the silence during the holidays. We have been gone alot- and then recovering from being gone. It is also so rainy up here this winter. and cold. yuck. I need a beach. Josh and I saw a good movie over the holiday- Spainglish. Perhaps most enjoyed after a week with family- a way to "process" the dysfunction that is us. This movie, with its sad realities, also allows for a few laughs. You just have to laugh at times at your life. A bundle of giggles we all are. I think Annie Dillard writes somewhere that day after day God watches "our dancing bear act" without blowing us to peices, that believe it or not, it's ok to be people. I suppose she means thats its ok to be a mess, that Jesus loves us-still. Happy new year folks.

winter

winter
Originally uploaded by brookejared.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden 

Sundays too my father got up early 

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 

then with cracked hands that ached 

from labor in the weekday weather made 

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 

When the rooms were warm, he'd call, 

and slowly I would rise and dress, 

fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold 

and polished my good shoes as well. 

What did I know, what did I know 

of love's austere and lonely offices?

I have loved this poem for a long time. I am in the process of writing an essay about my experience as a nurse, mostly about how much I have struggled to love my job.I know this poem is about a father and a son, but the words have been on my m ind this week. Sometimes the work we do out of love is lonley and austere. As for the photo, it is not mine, but I liked it.

blue candle for a blue day

books

Some books I like.

The moviegoer by:Walker Percy
Blue like jazz by: Donald Miller
The Annie Dillard Reader by: Annie Dillard
Expecting Adam by: Martha Beck
Traveling Mercies by: Anne Lamott
Girl meets God by:Lauren Winner

It is good for us to read. It is good for us to get outside of ourselves. It helps us re-learn how to imagine-to have someone tell us a story as we try to picture it in our head. It is good to abandon the television at times and discipline our minds to engage in the written word. You might look at the world in a different way. You might even like it better. You might just be enchanted.