minimalism

The other day my neighbor remarked that he keeps telling his wife not to buy so much "stuff" for their house because this world isn't forever, and it's not worth spending all your efforts to accumulate junk. Of course I agreed with him, and added a paraphrase of 1 John 2:15-17 "don't love the world or the things in the world, for the world is passing away."

I've been reading the magazine Real Simple for years, and now have been reading some modern design-type minimalist stuff. Dwell magazine, for one. I think that minimalist design best captures the spirit of what I want in my home - uncluttered, friendly, and easy to maintain. I've been telling Jeff since we were married that I am a minimalist, but I usually was giving an excuse for not putting pictures up on the walls. It's taken me 8 years to realize that I really want to be a true minimalist - I don't want to be fettered by "stuff" - and once again I need to muck out the stalls, so to speak. And for me, it is a spiritual matter. Even though it's fine to enjoy stuff, I don't want to be obsessed with it or too attached to it.

It is spiritually stifling to me to have clutter and knick-knacks all around me. I can't function creatively let alone maintain daily routine if it's a mess, and if everything doesn't have a place to go or if there's too much stuff then it's a mess.

I guess it's time for another garage sale. Although it makes my kids paranoid when I have a garage sale. Yesterday Logan was looking at a photo album and said "mom, can you get me a new one of these? I think we sold it in our garage sale and I still want it" - it was a picture of him with a toy at Gramma's house (her toy, I guess since I didn't recognize it.)

George MacDonald

I was handed a copy of Christian History & Biography today (Issue 86, Spring 2005) that focuses on George MacDonald (Scottish pastor, poet, writer). He's one of my favorites (except that his novels can be a bit tedious). We read The Golden Key to Riley and Logan (at 6 and 4) and they love it nearly as much as I love reading it to them (Jeff & I fought over who got to read each section...)

He has a great essay on imagination that I need to get a copy of and reread. I'm sure there's an easy way to do that online if I had a mind to look around.

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Now that I pulled my Hopkins off the shelf (for the sake of naming this blog) I'm enjoying reading through a few of his poems. I love his words. "Pied Beauty" is always a joy to read aloud. Sometimes I read poems like this to the kids because I want them to hear the beauty of well-chosen words. One night I sat on Logan's bed and read them a bunch of my poetry. It was interesting to hear their reactions.

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Lani put me onto this article that is stirring people up. It's on Boundless.org (part of Focus on the Family) and is abound what happens if you put off getting married. In discussing this with Riley (I gave her a quick summary fit for her six-year old mind) she replied, "well, if you didn't have a family you'd just be bored!" I'm not sure it's quite that simple, but it's as good a point as any.

Crittendon, author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman and this article "The Cost of Delaying Marriage", doesn't write from a hopeful or God-glorifying perspective. If anything, her view is reactionary and pragmatic. However, however, there were smatterings of truth. We have been told we can have it all - and we really can't have it all. There is a cost to living a self-obsessed life (whether married or single) but the answer is not to jump into marriage earlier, the answer is the gospel of Christ and his life-changing hope-bringing reality that turns a person from self-obsessed to passionate for God and his glory regardless of being married/unmarried.

war

I read this sonnet by W. H. Auden the other day and it stuck with me. "Here war is simple like a monument" is the title/first line. It's worth a read.

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand face
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.

Wystan Hugh Auden
(1907-1973)

Obligatory title-explaining post

First - this is probably instead of journaling. I like to think things (of varied topics) out by writing. Blogging is fun.

Second - I feel the need to make a disclaimer of some sort. If you know me (or don't know me for that matter) you may expect something different than you find here. Oh well.

Third - and most relative to the title of this post - I value the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and when searching for a name for this blog I picked up a book of sonnets I recently acquired. Flipping through, I was tempted by many quips and lines, but was especially struck by Hopkins' sonnet "God's Grandeur" (and just for the record, I don't recall right now whether you italicize titles of poems or put them in quotation marks) and its ending lines - however, blogger already had blogs with many variations of the last several words there. I tried a few other things, none of which worked, then ran upstairs for my good old Penguin Classics copy of the works of GMH, to look up a poem named "Inversnaid".

This title comes from the last three lines which speak of how "Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men's faces."

Feel free to question, comment upon, just read, or ignore my posts - just (please) comment with your name (if you have one). It's so much nicer that way.