But mostly she and Tol stayed home and stayed busy in the leisurely way of people who know exactly what they have to do and how to do it and have got used to doing it, and who don’t have to do too much.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               From That Distant Land, by Wendell Berry

Staying home and staying busy

Do you know exactly what you have to do?

Do you know how to do it?

Have you got used to doing it?

Do you do much, not too much or too much?

or rather a serial. This time please read ”sewing tips needed.”

I am making curtains. How many rooms, you ask? One room only, I answer. ‘Tis not so bad, you answer. The room has four windows, big windows - I answer with a soft please help me voice.

I bought 35 m (roundabout 38 yd) crushed velvet. I like its plainness, its texture, and its otherness. And this otherness carries a not so easy to work with price. I’ll have to baste all the seams by hand before I do the sewing - with an ordinary machine. Albeit, I’m looking forward to it! 

I welcome all tips.

No, I don’t have this view presently. I’m facing a computer screen situated in the coldest part of the house.  The view is from the Tradouw’s Pass in the Klein Karoo  - a pass constructed between 1869 and 1873 by masterbuilder Thomas Bain. Tradouw is a Khoisan word for “the women’s path.”

Now, I need breakfast, or is it want? I’ll make rooibos tea - already had 2 cups of coffee - and enjoy it with rye bread: just to spoil the healthy breakfast I’ll top the rye with butter and Dutch cheese.  

As the oldest of four children I spent my childhood days exemplary in a pastorie. The red geraniums growing in a dry plantbox on the stoep, the big no-name tree on the sidewalk offering its seeds as pipes to smoke, and the patches of duwweltjies stinging our feet on the way to the park were the only treasures of nature I knew. In my final school year I applied for a teaching bursary: one for a bachelor’s degree in science was the only option. I majored in Botany and Zoology. I write this with a faintly audible “voice.” Later I married a scientist whose parents were and still are self-educated botanists. Even later I taught my children at home applying Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy - except her nature study approach and Anna Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study never made it to the top of my list of things to do and to read. 

What makes one decide to do some different thing? Wants, needs, fads? Things that fell between the cracks of long ago reappearing? A personal quest? Looking up, out, and yonder? Or age and the knowing that tomorrow will be like today except if I choose it to be different? 

I’ll come down to earth - literally. I’ll participate in the 100-species challenge - I read about it on Carol’s blog - and dedicate a page to it. In this way I can give back to myself what I think I have missed. Or I might just continue to accept that I don’t have to know it all, but that I can show more than a faint (or is it feigned) appreciation for things I ought to know.  Or it can just be fun. 

When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to a teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.  (A Consent, from That Distant Land, by Wendell Berry)

Miss Minnie - the above two sentences - epitomizes my teaching life and my view on education.  

Since I can remember I wanted to be a teacher. The education that happened to me in school and in teacher training was based on stuffing ideas into an empty mind, imposing a fixed content of ideas and doctrines to be learned by rote, setting tests and giving marks for correct facts. I was a well-trained parrot and a good one. My heart told me that this was neither teaching nor education. After several years of teaching I awoke one day to see my two children in a small private school: one parrot to be, and one labelled attention deficit. I did not want parrots and I did not believe in labels. My heart told me to teach them at home. I did no research, I did not know that this is known as homeschooling, I had no political or religious reasons for this step - my heart merely ached seeing what was happening to my six year old girl and my seven year old son.  I took them out of school and started teaching them at home. I was challenged from day one. I realised that homeschooling was going to be aimed at me, and that my children were merely coming along for the ride.

For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.

Hours and hours of searching, reading, researching, and tests and trials brought me at the doorstep of Miss Minnie’s teaching method. One evening, 12 years ago - unintentionally -  I asked my husband if I can use the internet to search for “something”. I remember my fingers typing “school at home and christian” as key words in the search engine, and my astonishment at the wealth of information. Three, no four homeschool support groups - their philosophies and beliefs - invited me, offered what I was searching for, and after 12 years have stood the test of time: Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn, Susan Wise-Bauer,  Christine Miller , and the ladies from Ambleside Online (mentioned in  no particular order).    

Mortimer Adler, in some book somewhere, said - the good student uses his teacher just as a child uses his parents - as a means of attaining maturity and independence. I had the benefit of both wor(l)ds: as parent and teacher I could show my children how to learn and think for themselves. Or as Harvey Bluedorn stated it: homeschooling is for the parents, we need to teach our children for our sake, and our children need to be taught by us - for their sake.

I enjoyed each and every precious moment - sweet and sour.

There is nothing better than being wise, knowing how to interpret the meaning of life. Wisdom puts light in the eyes, and gives gentleness to words and manners (Ecclesiastes 8:1).

Gentleness 

The fruit of my tree 

most of the times

so far to walk to

so difficult to climb

then to green to pick

What does gentleness say to you?

Do you know gentle people? What makes them gentle?

This is one understanding of being gentle. 

G — Gracious and good

E — Engaging, willing to listen

N — Nice to others, regardless of who they are

T — Taking the time to move at another’s pace

L — Loving

E — Endearing by acts of kindness and goodwill

Clothe yourselves with gentleness.

What does your acronym spell?

What will you wear today?

Handecraft: Middle English for handicraft. The dictionary defines handicraft as

• skill and facility with the hands
• a craft or occupation requiring skilled use of the hands
• an object that is crafted by skilled hands.

I am not gifted in the “skilled hands” area.  But I love learning. Latent yearnings towards newfangled learnings surface in my life like clockwork. And, as one dictionary comically reminds us  -  a clock is a machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him - thus, or is it alas, I yearn to learn something new, well - like clockwork.

This time it is quilting, African quilting. The only requirement for the class: the ability to sew straight stitches and zig-zag stitches.

“I can do that,” she said to herself. So she joined the class. She doesn’t want to be the expert quilter.  The steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence is the battery for her clock; the thrill of “getting there” is what makes her life tick.

Are you gifted in the “skilled hands” area? What handecraft do you enjoy doing? Do you yearn to learn new things? What makes your life tick?

 A busy man complained one day:
“I get no time!” “What’s that you say?”
Cried out his friend, a lazy quiz;
“You have, sir, all the time there is.
There’s plenty, too, and don’t you doubt it —
We’re never for an hour without it.”
—Purzil Crofe 

If you’ve guessed that the title might be Winter night - you’re correct!

Winternag is a poem written by one of Africa’s top 15 poets of the twentieth century, Eugene N Marais, a South African.  Wintertime on the Highveld is somber. This winter night depicts the fate of the Afrikaner at the end of the Anglo-Boer War.

O Koud is die windjie
             en skraal
          En blink in die dof-lig
             en kaal,
          so wyd as die Heer se Genade,
          lê die velde in sterlig en skade.
             En hoog in die rande,
            versprei in die brande,
          is die grassaad aan roere
            soos winkende hande.

          O treurig die wysie
            op die ooswind se maat,
          soos die lied van ‘n meisie
          in haar liefde verlaat.
          In elk grashalm se vou
          blink ‘n druppel van dou,
          en vinnig verbleik dit
             tot ryp in die kou!

I found the following translations.  Although not in the original language, i.e. Afrikaans, the poets did their best to imitate Winternag.

Winter night

This wind, so cold
       and spare,
This veld, ablaze in
       light so bare,
thrust forth like the mercy of the Lord,
the land reclines, a sharpened sword.
       And high up in the haze,
       scattered in the blaze,
the grass begins to dance
       beckoning the shades.

How sad, how shrill
       the wind’s broken beat,
like the cry of a girl
in love with a cheat.
In every curl of grass
       a drop of dew, locked fast.
Quickly it whitens
       to frost like glass.

~ Leon de Kock

“Winter’s Night”

O the small wind is frigid and spare
and bright in the dim light and bare
as wide as God’s merciful boon
the veld lies in starlight and gloom
and on the high lands
spread through burnt bands
the grass-seed, astir, is like beckoning hands.

O East-wind gives mournful measure to song
Like the lilt of a lovelorn lass who’s been wronged
In every grass fold
bright dewdrop takes hold
and promptly pales to frost in the cold!

                    ~ Marchant

Which one do you like best?

 

“All animals, large and small, possess some mechanism feeling pain, and this pain always acts as a safeguard against death.” (Eugène Marais, The Soul of the White Ant, 1989:261)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The name of a multi-vitamin way back; when I was so small I could barely see the box on my dad’s desk in his study. I remembered I wondered about the 45 - that it either had to do with the number of tablets in the box or that it was meant for people 45 years and older; in either case it wasn’t for children. And I remember looking at my dad and trying to place myself in his shoes, thinking what it will be like when I’m 45, but it was too big a number, and I couldn’t make a picture…but I remember walking in his footsteps…imitating some aspects of him.  

Today I’m 45. Yesterday I turned 45.

What happened?

Drawing ”yesterday’s picture” might not be such a bad idea after all.

A birthday gift from my two young adults: a blank canvas and an unfilled leather-bound journal; they labelled the gift “something inspirational.”

I read from The Mystery of Providence this morning:  

…Labour to get as full and thorough a recognition as you are able of the providences of God concerning you from first to last… Let your meditation be as intensively full as may be. Do not let your thoughts swim like feathers upon the surface of the waters, but sink like lead to the bottom…

Life continues to spiral upwards…will I do something?

A picture of myself: 

• who am I 
• where am I going to
• what are my values
• what is my passion
• what is my metaphor
• what are my gifts
• where can I be of service in the body of Christ

Questions from a course I attend.

Tonight - the last evening of the course - I have to draw a picture of my life: my past, my present and my future; my relationships, my work, my finances, my passions and my pleasure. I am not allowed to use any words, only images, symbols and numbers, and

i can’t draw -   

I remembered a paragraph from How the Heather Looks - the book that awakened a hunger for children’s literature

i never read.

Joan Bodger shared a glimpse of Joanna Field’s thoughts from A Life of One’s Own in which Miss Field wrote how she drew a map of her life - to show in pictures what she felt had been the most important things in it - and how, through this experiment, she realised that it’s not the facts about the world that children need to know, but the facts about themselves, and it is only through imaginative symbols of fantasy that they can at first find and then express their knowledge of themselves.  

In an unusual way pieces of my life spiral to meet in concert (?)