"If we want to prevent Pentecost from being reduced to a mere rite or even an evocative commemoration, but want it to be an actual event of salvation, we must prepare ourselves in devout expectation for the gift of God through humble and silent listening to his Word...."
- Pope Benedict XVI
I was thinking that the day has gone by and I hadn't accomplished so much. But sometimes you get an inspiration to do a thing here, and another there, and it doesn't take long but you've done something that's been hanging over your head for ages. And it was quick, and rather easy.
I finished reading God's Hotel, and was poking through my book pile. I found something which we'd withdrawn from the library, called From Laurel Hill to Siler's Bog: The Walking Adventures of a Naturalist. It's not exactly a journal, but a chronicle of the author's time in the Chapel Hill (North Carolina) area, studying the animal and plant life. As naturalists do.
Books like this are very pleasant and quiet to spend time with. He mentions a spot called Morgan's Creek, named after a Mark Morgan who settled there with his wife, but "until he could build a cabin from the surrounding forest, he and his wife lived by his creek in the hollow trunk of a tall sycamore, ten or twelve feet across." Well! Can you imagine? I wonder how long they lived like that. I hope their marriage was a happy one.
A month after starting my blouse, and there's an issue, so I'm stopped for a while. I would just like to work on a sewing project which goes along from beginning to end, without any out-of-the-way problems. But I also don't want unfinished projects to pile up. A mending pile seems normal, but other piles I don't want.
I brought home a cookbook the other day, which is all one "pot" recipes, but not all in pots, exactly. A chapter on skillet meals, one on the slow cooker, another is oven dishes, etc. This one is a keeper, for the oven, on a high temperature. It's got chicken in it, three carrots, some frozen peas and a yogurt and lime sauce which you stir in afterward. Very tasty!
Holy Spirit, Truth divine,
Dawn upon this soul of mine;
Word of God and inward light,
Wake my spirit, clear my sight.
Holy Spirit, Power divine,
Fill and nerve this will of mine;
By thee may I strongly live,
Bravely bear, and nobly strive.
Holy Spirit, Right divine,
King within my conscience reign;
Be my law, and I shall be
Firmly bound, for ever free.
- Samuel Longfellow
There is a fine art museum in Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner. I went with a friend. We'd tried going a few years back; got there, it was closed. It was a Tuesday. We hadn't thought to look it up first - museums aren't ordinarily closed on Tuesdays. The Museum of Fine Arts was open! Anyway.
My brother told me to look for the John Singer Sargent painting - you know the one, he said - of the lady with her arm stretched out. Sargent might be his favorite painter, and I'm sure I've seen many of his works, but I wasn't sure I'd seen this one. Anyway, it was right there when we entered the place.
The thieves took some things by Degas, a Manet, a Chinese vase or urn, an eagle finial from the time of Napoleon, two Rembrandts and a Vermeer and a couple of other items. Yes, Rembrandt and Vermeer. I don't know about you, but they are definitely two of my favorites!
And this is the frame which contained his only seascape, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
It would have been nice to see that one. Here it is:
It would be nice, wouldn't it? Where is it now, I wonder? They were sliced out of their frames!
And the Vermeer; there are so few of them. I took the photo so I'd be reflected in the glass.
I like to see the Rembrandt self-portrait to the right in this photo. They did take one of his self-portraits, but a sketch. He did plenty of those.
The Vermeer -
The podcast presented a fascinating story, very well done, if you're interested.
There were guards everywhere; I couldn't carry my jacket over my arm, it wasn't allowed. I was too warm, but had to wear it. Did I mention that there was no security system in 1990? Only a guard, but no electronics. Incredible.
These signs were on everything, but almost nothing was labeled. Maybe a handful of items! We would have liked to know what we were looking at! Well, they did have the QR codes, and we did use that a couple of times. Finally, a guard told us that the lack of labelling was because she didn't want things to be labelled - it was a home. And nothing is ever to be moved, or rearranged. That's why the empty frames.
There is a long room with a dining table which can be rented for your event. And there's a wonderful garden, in an atrium, I guess. Full of foxglove and what looked like pink hydrangea. Isn't it early for those?
The cats like to sit in chairs at the doors, watching everything. But Daisy was on the front window sill, and a baby robin perched on that plant container just outside the front door. It sat there for two or three minutes, a long time, with Daisy watching from the window, and me talking to it. I was so surprised it stayed, but I guess it was young and hadn't learned to be cautious. A robin parent was nearby, talking furiously, and still it sat. Finally, Daisy flew to the chair to get a closer look -the bird stayed. I couldn't believe it. And then my brother came in to take a photo, and it was too much for the young bird. But, what excitement!
We sang "Three Days" at Mass this morning; the Easter season is almost over - next Sunday is Pentecost.
Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest,
And in our hearts take up thy rest;
Come with thy grace and heav'nly aid
To fill the hearts which thou hast made.
Our author, after studying the medieval methods of Hildegard von Bingen, wanted to go on the popular pilgrimage of the day, the one that begins in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and goes into France. Because of her responsibilities at the hospital, she had to break it up, doing part of it - over three or four years, I forget which. She found a friend to go with her.
Rosalind and I began to organize the second section. We would walk for two hundred miles through the south of France, and we would begin in our footsteps of the year before. We flew to Paris, took the fast and slow trains to our starting point, and spent the night in the hotel we'd left the year before. Then we put on last year's clothes, fastened our shells to our packs, lifted up our walking sticks, and took the next step.
Our doctor then tells about the mainly uninhabited lands they pass through that day, and the monastery they will rest at overnight. They have to be there by seven or will miss dinner. Period. They realize they won't make it.
It was way past seven when we arrived. As we walked through the monastery's gates, flushed and thirsty, our of the main door came a tiny, very old nun in a dark blue habit and white wimple. She, too, was flushed and sweating. But she was smiling. Her eyes behind her glasses twinkled. She said in French, "You made it! We were so worried! Come in."
We followed her inside. With its stone floor, stone walls, and stone ceiling, the monastery was cool.
"Put your things here," she said, showing us the stone washroom. "Wash up...and hurry. We've delayed dinner for you."
They ended up having one of the best meals ever, and enjoyed the company of the other pilgrims then, and throughout the pilgrimage. I had my own room, whitewashed and plastered, with a sleigh bed of walnut and a rope mattress. In the night, there was a thunderstorm; in the morning, there were the monastery bells, and out of my window I could see the nuns' medicinal herb garden down below. The longest and hardest day turned out to be the opposite of what I'd expected. And over and over again, for the rest of that second section, that's how things would turn out. That was the main lesson I took from the pilgrimage that year.
During that second section of walking I began to see that a pilgrimage had a rhythm, a dailiness, just like at home. Every day I awoke, ate breakfast, started walking, and things happened. People showed up; I had adventures. Some I liked, some I didn't. Some I expected to like and did not like; others I expected not to like and did like. I began to see that the unexpected - the inattendu, the unawaited-for, as the French have it - was the only thing I could expect. One was presented with an experience, a person, whose value one did not know in advance. What seemed to be good might be bad; what seemed to be bad, good. One didn't know; one had to wait.
That waiting to see how it would turn out was what made pilgriming different from ordinary life, I began to see. And that year I learned I didn't have to leave it with my last footstep. If I wanted, I could take that kind of waiting home and have my daily life become a kind of pilgrimage.
With that open expecting, I discovered that a day at the hospital was even more interesting. One never knew. All one knew was that there would be a beginning and a middle and an end to the day, just like on a pilgrimage. And just like on a pilgrimage, characters would appear - patients, nurses, deliverymen, doctors - with spiritual and moral messages, if I chose to decipher them. Sometimes in words, sometimes in actions, sometimes in silence.
- from God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet
have your figured out that I think everybody should read this book?
The author, a physician, bought a Christmas gift for a patient -
"...I couldn't help but notice the pleasure I was getting out of him and that vest. It didn't seem quite right, somehow, but there it was. This got me to thinking about charity - its motivations, its emotions, and how, after hospitality and community, charity was the third principle of Laguna Honda.
The charity I meant was nothing organized. It was not in the hospital's mission statement, or on its website, or in the PowerPoint presentations of middle management. And yet charity, in the medieval sense of a 'personal action evoked by dearness and contributing to the well-being of its giver as well as its receiver,' was as much built into the place as its arches, bell tower, and church.
Charity came into the West when Saint Jerome translated the Greek word agape by the Latin caritas, which became the English charity. Today agape is usually translated as 'love,' but agape was more nuanced; in ancient Greek it meant 'to treat with affectionate regard.' Caritas, charity, is closer because the root of caritas is cara - "dear" - as in expensive and cherished. So caritas has the sense of 'dearness' - of a love that is precious and sweet.
In English, charity evolved over the centuries. At first it meant 'the love of God', later it meant the actions that expressed that love - in specific, caring for the sick poor. In the Middle Ages, charity was accepted as doing as much for the giver as it did for the receiver, the 'goodness of charity being a bond of love that draws us to God.'
And even when the monasteries in England were disbanded, this insight - that caring for the sick poor was a spiritual good for the giver - continued to inspire charitable institutions. It was one reason why the state built hospitals to care for the sick poor, and why we still believe and act as if taking care of the sick poor is something that a society should do.
...But in addition to this organized charity, and at least as important, was personal charity, and the longer I was at Laguna Honda, the more of it I saw. There was the nurse who roasted an entire pig on his Sunday off for a homesick Tahitian patient with breast cancer. There was the doctor who took a music-loving patient to the opera. There were the birthday dinners for patients that staff paid for themselves; clothes brought in, cats adopted. ...But...what was the motivation? And was the pleasure charity gave me good or bad?
The Greeks called that emotion eleos, I later discovered, and defined it as the 'feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil that befalls one who doesn't deserve it.' The pleasure I felt was, in part, the relief of pain by giving. Eleos gave the Latin eleemosyna, the French aumone, and eventually even our English alms. The emotion of eleos was why Laguna Honda had been built as an almshouse in the first place and why it was still an almshouse, despite its name, because eleos - alms, charity - was still one of its main motivating forces.
Charity assuages eleos and it is selfish, at least in part. And there is more selfishness in it than simply the relief of one's own pain; there is a complicated pleasure in it, which is what gave charity its bad name and what made it, as the third principle of Laguna Honda, a secret. Its motivation is always suspect - acts done not necessarily for the good of the receiver but of the giver. That was why at Laguna Honda charity was hidden; and although I saw a lot of it, I never heard it mentioned. It was passed along only in actions. Yet...everybody did that sort of thing."
- from God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet
Community comes from the Latin communio, for which the Oxford English Dictionary gives two derivations. Communio as a verb comes from munio - wall - and means "to build a wall around". So a community is defined by the wall - symbolic or otherwise - around it. Everything inside the wall is the community, and everything outside the wall isn't.
That was a good definition of the community of Laguna Honda. You were a member of it just by being inside its wall. Because the hospital did have a wall, a real wall of polished rocks, piled up and shellacked by patients long ago. And we were a community simply because we were behind that wall and stuck with one another - doctor, patient, nurse, administrator, and budget. We had to do the best we could with what we had.
But communio as a noun derives from munis - gift, so communio also means "those who share a gift in common." That was true of the hospital's community, too, though it was not as obvious as the wall.
- from God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet
Last year at the library, another plant appeared near the sink in our workroom. There were two, actually, in an ugly gray wood box. And I waited for someone to tell me where it came from, who gave it to us, and ask if I would add it to the list of plants I try to take care of. No one ever said anything, nobody knew anything about it.
Time went on, and it stayed in that spot; I would feel the thick, oval-ish leaves and wonder if it was even real - I wasn't sure. I never gave it one drop of water.
Probably three months went by. It never drooped, the leaves always looked the same, green and - well, the same. I was annoyed that no one said anything about it to me - someone must have taken it from the donor, but they weren't telling me.
Then one day I was watching a youtube video - the Daily Connoisseur - and she watered some plants. Her orchids. I was struck by the thunderbolt, so to speak - those blasted things were orchids! Fussy orchids, exotic orchids, and I was ignoring them for months, without a drop of water!
I knew I had to mend my ways. And I remembered that my all-time favorite blogger, Anna, of Pleasant View Schoolhouse, had orchids, and she had a method of caring for them that worked for her.
So it's maybe been two months? And one of them has bloomed!
Here it is in the sink. What Anna did was to take each and run it under a lot of water. Then, give it another quart of water with fertilizer in it, three times per month. This is what I've done, and a couple of weeks ago I also moved them to a spot with less direct sun. Here is Anna's post, from 2008, Orchids without Fear. It works.
To continue last night's post, I came home from work today to find the same yarn I used for the mitts, all over the house.
Starting in the kitchen, into the living room (above), down the hall and into the spare bedroom, before ending in my bedroom.
Well, that must be backward, because she found the yarn in my room, so you have to reverse it, but that's the way I found it.
I was laughing, actually, maybe a little too much. What next?
I awoke this morning to such pleasant sounds: a car going by, a crow cawing, and conversation in the forsythia hedge. I don't know if the catbirds are back yet, but it didn't seem like finches talking. My neighbor's apple is blooming beautifully, and I'm looking for orioles but haven't seen any yet. However, I keep getting whiffs of something sweet; it's too soon for roses, so I looked up apple blossoms, and yes - they have a scent. It's lovely! It will be in the seventies this week and really feels like spring. May is probably the greenest month, since when the heat comes the grass loses some color.
Our own apple tree has loads of blooms, too. We'll see what that brings
Yesterday was Tabby Cat Day and today was Daisy's birthday, according to the vet's calculations. She's a year old, but I'm not sure a bit wiser.
My brother began his day by getting up at five thirty and going to the basement to clean the litter boxes. Why, you may ask? Why so early? Well, he said, because the two were bothering him - it's light by five thirty now, and they are getting active at that time. He couldn't sleep because of them, so he gave them some food, and went downstairs.
And that's where he noticed it - rather than describe it as a large, brown area, which might alarm you - I'll explain that we've got a couple of bags of potting soil down there, and one of them was not small and was closed with a rubber band. The band appeared yesterday upstairs, and we wondered where from. This morning the potting soil was all spread out - around a large area down there. It was so much, that it couldn't be vacuumed up, so he had to scoop it until it could be vacuumed.
Incredible. So that's how Daisy's birthday began.
