catbird at the garden

 showing off a beautiful tail.

 I had no idea.

another Memorial Day

 It rained much of the day - it's pouring now - so I imagine the parades were cancelled. There were no military plane flyovers, which I always look forward to. We still had our little celebration, though. And I've got some Italian bean and butternut squash seedlings.

BIRCHINGTON CHURCHYARD

A lowly hill which overlooks a flat,
Half sea, half country side;
A flat-shored sea of low-voiced creeping tide
Over a chalky weedy mat.

A hill of hillocks, flowery and kept green
Round Crosses raised for hope,
With many-tinted sunsets where the slope
Faces the lingering western sheen.

A lowly hope, a height that is but low,
While Time sets solemnly,
While the tide rises of Eternity,
Silent and neither swift nor slow.

-  Christina Rossetti

early morning fancy

It's funny that the atmosphere of peace which abides in early mornings, is not disturbed or hindered in any way by loud and joyful birdsong. 

 One can really imagine fairies moving about at such an hour, too. 

Down along the rocky shore

Some make their home,

They live on crispy pancakes

Of yellow tide-foam;

Some in the reeds

Of the black mountain lake,

With frogs for their watchdogs,

All night awake.

-  from "The Fairies" by William Allingham

"The woods and groves around her, that had seemed so friendly... were strangers now. There were no homelights anywhere. Would she ever get home? All Judy's stories, enjoyed and disbelieved at home, became fearfully true here. Those strange little shadows, dark amid the darkness, under the ferns...suppose they were fairies. Judy said if you met a fairy you were never the same again."

                                                  -  from Pat of Silver Bush, by L.M. Montgomery

suddenly it's summer

 The scent of grass as its being mowed. The musical conversation of the catbirds. Going from flannel to muslin nightwear, overnight!

The lawn is a little squishy, but the sun came out and it's going to be full summer for a few days this week. I went out to the garden to spread some compost and grass clippings around but am still not sure if it's ready for plants. But I don't have plants anyhow - I set up the greenhouse nice and early, but never started any seeds in the house - the thought of Daisy getting hold of them made me hesitate and then I was paralyzed. Meanwhile, April winds knocked the greenhouse over twice - good thing it was empty at the time. And all the rain we've been having, and not being sure the raised bed was quite ready - well, looking back I'm actually glad I didn't start the seeds without being certain. I'll just have a late start.

Yesterday was Pentecost. "In our labor, rest most sweet; grateful coolness in the heat." And now the season of Easter is over.

caring for the seed of eternity

 "The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self."

                                                    -  The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel

the deep down things

 I finished C.S. Lewis book. Toward the end, there was a section that seemed so dense and I decided that I didn't have to read every word, but then, looking at the last chapter I felt like reading it.

Jason Baxter speaks of nostalgia as a positive thing: "Lewis was nostalgic for the future." he says. "The old model was not wrong, strictly speaking, but a kind of deep, human subconscious desire for a world that, in some sense, we are meant to occupy, but not yet."

He says, "The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty's remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future, rooted 'deep down things'.* It is hope. And the great thing about true hope, this nostalgia for the future, is that it has none of the irritability, fear, anxiety, and discouragement that flavors many of the words of those who describe the demise of Christendom in our day. We were denied the garden, and then we were exiled from the enchanted cosmos. Now we must own our modernity, But by doing so, we engage in an extraordinary ascesis of the senses. We must move forward and look beyond."

                                     - from The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis

*God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

elf patterns

 I thought Daisy was asleep on my bed, when she suddenly got up and went to the window, obviously seeing something. I looked out - a rabbit. She actually heard a rabbit, eating grass (or whatever). Well, everyone knows rabbits make the earth shake. But really - she heard a rabbit hop in the lawn and eat grass. Amazing.

It rained and stormed yesterday evening, and I saw a rabbit sitting in the rain - they like it, I've noticed, and they like eating the wet grasses. And I like watching them. You knew that.

I'm sorry to say I've made no progress on my dress, as there's been other sewing to attend to. One of them is this pretty blouse.

It has a wide-ish neckline with elastic all around. It's fine when it's on, and it covers my narrow shoulders all right, but it makes me nervous, because if the neckline were to get caught, who knows what would happen? I thought if I made the area stable, it would be better.

I took a double strand of embroidery floss and stitched on the inside all around, into the folds, to inhibit the stretchiness.

You see how I did it, and it was just like basting stitches, but it really reduces any stretching, and the neck is wide enough that I can easily put it on and take it off. So I didn't really sew on the elastic, I just stitched the bunched folds together so they can't open out again. 

A friend gave me a Lenten Rose (hellebore) and I want to put it on the north side where I can see it from my window, but the stockade fence there is partly collapsed and we have to decide on if we'll change anything over there first. 

From the defining conversation between Tolkien and Lewis:

You look at trees, and call them 'trees', and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a 'star' and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, 'tree', 'star' were names given to these objects by people with very different views than yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of 'trees' and 'stars' saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw these stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole creation was myth-woven and elf-patterned.

                                                  - The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, by Jason M. Baxter

the emphasis is mine

the whirlwind

 I was lying in bed, the sun had just come up, the birds were singing. Suddenly, a whirlwind - no, not the Holy Spirit, Pentecost isn't for another two weeks - came rushing down the hall, up onto the bed; it ran up the length of my body and down again, and out the bed onto the floor. I hardly knew what hit me. But, of course I did know.

You guessed it.

heliocentric

 "Through faith we must all learn a kind of Copernican revolution. Copernicus discovered that it was not the sun that went around the earth but that this earth along with the other planets revolved around the sun. We all begin by seeing ourselves as a tiny earth around which all the suns must turn. Faith teaches us to leave this error and to behave like brothers and sisters, joining together with all the others in the round dance of love around the one center that is God. Only if God exists, only if he becomes the center of my life, is this love my neighbor as myself possible. But if he exists, if he becomes my center, then it is also possible to reach this inward freedom of love."

                                                 -  Pope Benedict XVI

*emphases, mine

good morning

 A festive chirruping announces the day,

singing in the light of dawn.

Christ spurs on the soul,

inviting us to a rebirth, this day.

Arise from your beds, he urges,

where a feeble languor makes you inert.

Be watchful, chaste, good, and sober;

for I am close to you.

Let us invoke Jesus, aloud,

sorrowing, praying, repentant;

an ardent invocation

keeps a pure heart on the alert.

O Christ, drive away sleep,

break the chains of night,

make good the ancient fault,

bring to us new light.