annarama

  • Seasonal Decor with Liturgical Flourishes

    I love decorating our house for the seasons, mostly because it keeps me from renovating our house, which would be much more disruptive and expensive. I get bored quickly with an unchanging environment – as does the natural world around here, I might add. However, I am also attuned to the church calendar, the liturgical seasons; and this affects my decorating efforts.

    I don’t put out springtime decorations until after Easter, because they are too jarring for me during Lent and Holy Week.

    I’ve talked now with people from a couple of households who told me they have been feeling so low these days, that they are putting out some Christmas items now, to make their homes feel more cheerful. (Since I am a Decor Hussy, naturally I’ll keep my Pumpkintide items out through Thanksgiving.)

    Personally, I struggle with how to decorate the house during Advent and Christmas. In my particular religious tradition, no Christmas decorations show up until Christmas Eve, and then they remain up through Epiphany. However, the Divine Spirit also gave me a wonderful family to love who look forward to seeing some Christmas items before late December, and so we do put some Christmas things up before December 24, and yes that includes secular decorations as well as religious ones. (We also take most of it down on New Year’s Day instead of waiting until Epiphany, because that’s when I can rope out-of-town family guests into taking down the tree with me.)

    However. Much like I can’t look at secular Easter stuff in my house during Lent and Holy Week, I don’t want to see stockings or Santa until it’s quite close to December 25.

    Recently I sorted through our seasonal decorations to see what I could donate to the thrift shop, which has already put Christmas items out. In the process I ended up reorganizing the boxes. Enter the Advent box of decorations.

    On the weekend after Thanksgiving, now that I’ve reorganized our boxes, we’ll be putting out our Advent wreath, and decorative items related to the natural world. Stars. Cute little wooden trees. Candles. A wooden Advent calendar with a hedgehog slider in a Maine-style winter hat, that glides along a strip of wood marked with dates from 1-25. A little gnome my daughter got for me when she was living in Finland.

    I can hardly wait.

  • “The difference between new birders and experienced birders is that experienced birders have misidentified more birds.” – the naturalist and retired park ranger guiding a local bird walk this morning

  • Carriage step and hitching posts. All of the horse head hitching posts around here have had their ears knocked off.

  • 25 years ago, most of this garden was a lawn.

  • Hooray for May! Goats beard, clematis, and climbing roses.

  • The Haunted Smart House Lights turn on and off randomly; speakers in different locations of the house start blasting the Everly Brothers. And none of us knows how to fix it.

  • From Leah Libresco Sargeant’s latest newsletter:

    I think feminism is, at its heart, a collection of people deeply concerned with what it means to be just to women, as women, not as defective men or generic, unsexed human persons. I certainly disagree with some other feminists on what justice consists of here, but I think we’re all concerned with fundamental asymmetries of sex and how to respond to them.

    Well said.

  • I updated my now page.

  • back for seconds

  • a Northern cardinal for you, @miraz @jabel enjoyed your link re “millers,” do y’all call cardinals redbirds? (Do you say y’all?)

  • Starlings are colorful

  • Dinner guest

  • Such a great Caturday today! Here is my tuxedo girl looking festive. Of course black and white is elegant for every occasion.

  • My daughter’s cats, who ignore the umpteen other cat beds around the house to crowd into this one.

  • toggle switch for fall 🍂🍁

  • Teach Me to Care, Teach Me Not to Care

    Caring in the right amount, about the right things, at the right time, gives us the energy and motivation to act on what matters. If your experience is anything like mine, however, you wake up at 3:00 a.m. caring too much about things you cannot fix.

  • We got to see Chris Thile play mandolin last night. Pure joy.

  • September, October, November = Pumpkintide where I live 🍁🥮🎃

  • AI musicians, AI actors, when will the first AI athletes show up?

  • Another Tablecloth Monster is interfering with my fall decorating!

    cat lying possessively on top of a tablecloth that the cat has bunched up under himself

  • As a former Catholic who has always loved Mary, I am glad August 15th is my baptismal anniversary.

  • Sign on refrigerator in my church’s kitchen

  • The Speed of the Soul

    “I was young, and I knew I was in need of a mentor, someone who could teach me the art of sitting with others in therapy. (…) Our first meeting, over thirty years ago, was unforgettable. When we sat down, Clarke reached to his left, placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, ‘This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.’ Then he pointed to a small clock also sitting there and added, ‘It hates this.'”

    • p 60, Weller, F. (2015) The wild edge of sorrow: rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

  • The Ancient Art of Recombobulation: Manage Your Outward Time by Managing Your Inner Life

    We do not usually turn to spiritual traditions for time management principles, but we ought to.

    rubber stamp images of clouds, waves, and ships

    AI-free rubber stamps, courtesy of Leavenworth Jackson

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