“Any day spent with you is my favorite day, So today is my new favorite day.” Piglet to Pooh
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What a world we find ourselves in with foundations being shaken, expectations disappointed and insecurity creating chaos. As anchors of stability in our homes, we have this opportunity to create beauty, loving rhythms, personal moments, adventure, fun and life to the days so that our family will remember these days with fondness. Today can become the new favorite day for your children and you!
But all of us need ideas of how to make this happen. On my podcast today, my friends and I came up with countless ideas of the ways we have created and nurtured life-giving memories with our own. I hope our ideas will inspire you.
Joy, my daughter, wrote some thoughts about what it really looks like to be brave in a quiet way during these times. I hope it will encourage you.
Joy: When I was young, I always had a sort of guilty craving to live through something disastrous to prove my mettle, to show how brave I could be. Now I know bravery requires hardship, and only the foolish desire it. But here we are.
And this is an odd one, isn't it? Our "enemy" isn't a dictator or a malevolent regime, it's a virus. And it's not targeting our military, it's targeting our most vulnerable, our old and our ill... it doesn't fight fair. And it's not just a pandemic of illness, but of disappointment. Cancelled graduations, weddings, honeymoons.
All in all, when I used to imagine being brave, I didn't imagine it would be like this, did you? But here we are. We needn't celebrate this, or moralize it, but this we can say: this is a chance, to pull ourselves together, to act responsibly, to love our neighbors, and to not be afraid.
Strangest of all, it seems the bravest thing is to make a nest and sit in it. It's underwhelming, really, but it's needful. So I fill my nest with small graces: a new candle, a few rosebuds, warm light streaming through the window... little things can bring so much pleasure. I keep watch on how I could help my neighbors (grocery runs for elderly friends), I pray for my family across the ocean, I cook more than usual, I try think of other things. It's a strange kind of bravery, but I hope it would make my younger self proud.
Follow Joy @joynessthebrave
And Joel shared some thoughts from Wendell Berry:
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
- Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
I love Berry’s directive to the world-weary pilgrim, to enter into the peace of wild things. I have always simply taken it as granted that no matter what the world might bring, I would always have nature at my beck and call, to comfort and succour me. Never did it occur to me that I might be faced with being cut off from that source of life, hidden away, shrouded for a time as-yet-untold.
And yet, I know from my experience with beauty in creation that its life is not merely in the encounter itself, but in the way we remember that beauty, and the way it recalls us and holds us when we return to it. As the world is retreating into itself and we may not have easy access to the world beyond for some time, I feel the urgency of that loss.
I want to use this space as a way to recall the beauty that continues to press onward just beyond my reach, and keep it fresh in my mind, so that I will know it and love it anew when I am able to experience it fully once more. I’ve grown a bit lax here, but I want to redouble my efforts to keep hope alive through the living memory of the promise hidden in the beautiful world that awaits our return on the other side of this. Follow Joel as he shares beautiful photography on instagram Stay, safe, well, and strong friends, and stay tuned... @joel.i.clarkson
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