Where the Moose Go

The moose have been hungry in Alaska this winter.  This doesn't have much to do with anything that follows in this post, but it does give me a chance to post this photo of my Mom's cute window hanger (and the moose-hungry-making winter landscape behind it) and also, when else am I ever going to get a chance to write a line like that with credibility?

 I am thinking of opening a novel with the line, though, "The moose were hungry that winter...."   Now I have a head start for next November's novel writing! 

Ever since the New Year I have been trying to figure out my plans for this blog.   In November I started a new blog and though that one hasn't quite hit its natural stride yet, it overlaps so much with this one that I don't really need to keep this one going.   In the past I have managed to keep two or more blogs alive at the same time, but recently I just haven't been keeping up that pace.   I used to think I was addicted, and maybe I was, but nowadays I almost have to make "blog every day" a Lenten resolution! (not quite a penance, because it IS after all something I enjoy and am by no means obligated to do).   Anyway, most of the posts I write on here can just as easily go on the other one. 

So I am thinking that  default posting will be on Take Up and Read.    We have lots of plans for that blog.  It is Catholic in emphasis as a quick look will show, but it is also about literary homeschooling and large family logistics and that sort of thing, and non-Catholics are very welcome.    Chari and I are both converts with many non-Catholic friends and family members.

As for the moose, I feel sort of sorry for them.   I see them lope past outside quite often.   I heard from Mom's neighbor that the deep snow really tires them out and also makes it hard for them to find food, so they have been gravitating towards roads and railroad tracks because it is easier to walk there.  But of course, that isn't a great survival strategy.    Come to think of it, that is a good Lenten parable.... I too often gravitate towards the wide easy road where engines of destruction can easily sweep me into their path and toss me aside.   

I am not planning to close down this blog -- I like to leave my old posts up so I can link to them in future -- and I may still post randomly when I want to draw attention to something -- but I just wanted you all to know where I had gone and what is going on.

A MOST BLESSED LENT AND EASTER TO YOU ALL!

Take Up and Read Update

Today will be a quick post linking to what Chari and I are writing on our other blog, Take Up and Read:

First, there are still two more days to take advantage of a discount on the ebook version of A Picture Perfect Childhood, by Cay Gibson. For the rest of November, only $1.99 at Lulu.

Also, Chari has some ideas for celebrating a literary Advent:

It's a Picture Book Day: Advent Style 
A picture book a day, for Advent!

Our Literature Evenings
How to share literature in the company of friends, family and/or neighbors

A Christmas Literature Evening
Book suggestions and how-tos for having a Christmas literature evening.

First Sunday in Advent -- a Song for You
We are going to try to share a favorite Advent hymn each Sunday of Advent.

As for my contributions: 

I'm writing reviews of public domain books that might be of interest to homeschooling moms and/or kids.  Here's the first:

 The Rectory Children, a tale by Mrs Molesworth.

I also wrote about
Aidan and His Work,
and Our Family Shamrock.

Finally, my contribution to the ongoing Advent theme at TUAR:
The Jesse Tree. 

I hope you come over to look!

Poetry, the Imagination, Morals, Paradox, Mystery, Sensibles, and the Observer Effect

I had so much fun catching up on my Google Reader today.  You can see my shared items on the sidebar but here's a few heavy but interesting ones I wanted to save especially to go back to later.

Somehow all those things in the title seem related to me, but I can't quite figure out how.  How about you?  

-- Starving the Imagination -- Russell Kirk at Paying Attention to the Sky

Yet this is no effective way to impart a knowledge of norms: direct moral didacticism, whether of the Victorian or the twentieth century variety, usually awakens resistance in the recipient, particularly if he has some natural intellectual power.

 How Poetry Finds Laws for Moral Existence -- Russell Kirk, at Paying Attention to the Sky

Sheer Experience, As Franklin Suggested, Is The Teacher Of Born Fools.
Of course it was not by books alone that the normative understanding of the framers of the Constitution, for instance, was formed. Their apprehension of norms was acquired also in family, church, and school, and in the business of ordinary life. But that portion of their normative understanding which was got from books did loom large. For we cannot attain very well to enduring standards if we rely simply on actual personal experience as a normative mentor. Sheer experience, as Franklin suggested, is the teacher of born fools.
Our lives are too brief and confused for most men to develop any normative pattern from their private experience; and as Newman wrote, “Life is for action.” Therefore we turn to the bank and capital of the ages, the normative knowledge found in revelation, authority, and historical experience, if we seek guidance in morals, taste, and politics. Ever since the invention of printing, this normative understanding has been expressed, increasingly in books, so that nowadays most people form their opinions, in considerable part, from the printed page. This may be regrettable sometimes; it may be what D. H. Lawrence called “chewing the newspapers”; but it is a fact. Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.

Organizing Curriculum -- Why History?   at Life, Books and Education

But why use history as the organizing principal – especially if it has never been part of classical education in the past?  I've been thinking about this question ever since I read the preface to Norms and Nobility.  David Hick’s writes, “Although in my curriculum proposal I use history as the paradigm for contextual learning, the ethical question ‘What should one do?’ might provide an even richer context for acquiring general knowledge.”

Also, a series on Mysteries and the Higher Mystery, by Daniel McInerny, at High Concepts

• Mystery as Paradox

What good and bad paradoxes possess in common is the shock derived from contradiction: paradox is [apparent] contradiction, explicit or implied” (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). That shock may occur in a fragment of Heraclitus or in the Gospels, but it is perhaps most often encountered, though usually incognito, in tales of mystery and suspense. In fact, G.K. Chesterton, the master of paradox, in Heretics defines paradox as mystery (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 14).

• Sherlock Holmes 

The Holmesian “Clue.” The clue is a bogus epiphany. In itself it has no ontological significance. It doesn’t open to contemplative penetration the intelligible depths of some object; rather it suggests to the quick deductive wit discursive attention to the superficies of a dozen other objects. The clue and the chain of reasoning function, like a jigsaw puzzle, in two dimensions. The sleuth’s reconstruction of a crime works at the level of efficient causes only; the epiphany implies an intuitive grasp of material, formal, and final causes as well (Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 176). 

• Father Brown

the Chestertonian sleuth is not about “clues” as much as he is a reader of the human heart. “the only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will,” “In Defence of Detective Stories.” 

Finally, James Chastek at Just Thomist wrote on the topic Could sensation make an essential division in physical theory?

Seen from this angle, the purely relative difference between the very small and the classically sized takes on an absolute value. Sensation uses physical interaction, and the relative distinctions of large and small make essential differences in physical interaction. Hitting a bug with your car is not the same thing as hitting a tree.

and Catholic sci fi novelist Mike Flynn followed up on that one with a post Heisenberg Dances with Aristotle.

in Aristo-Thomism, the sense object is a compound of

• a thing in the world and
• the subjective/personal dispositions of the one sensing.

IOW, the observer affects the thing observed.  The proper sensibles really do exist in the world AND they are combined with observer’s subjective disposition.  Why don't we call this "the observer effect."Funny.  That has a familiar ring to it.

Odds and Ends Sunday

This will be a random post of bits and pieces since I don't have a regular post for today. 

1. 

First, please please keep praying for young Matt Wise.  He and his family are going through a very difficult ordeal with his ARDS.   Aidan had a bout with this disease as a young infant (it was caused by fluid overload from blood products during his liver failure) but it was not as severe as Matt's.   As with Aidan, I think the continued prayers for Matt are crucial.

2.  

Also, while you are praying, will you pray for Michael Summerville and his family?  His mommy and aunt are long-distance friends of mine and they are brave, loving people who can use those prayers.   I think anniversaries and holidays are particularly difficult. 

3.

And one more prayer request.. for my son Sean, presently living in Oregon with his brothers for his senior year of high school.   His foot was injured during football practice and we are currently facing some decisions about whether surgery is needed or not. 

4. 

I have been reading around the blogosphere that Google Reader no longer allows you to share favorite posts.   I have been asked how I am still able to share favorite posts and so I will mention this free app called Mobile RSS.   It is compatible with IPhone, ITouch and IPad and requires iOS3 or later.    Because I really almost NEED the share feature to keep track of favorite posts from other blogs, I am really really hoping this won't go away.    I am missing the shared posts of others, though.  Sigh.   Another thing I like about Mobile RSS is that it lets you clip blog posts over to Evernote.  It's really quite a good app, and FREE! 

5

Now I'm going to link to a few from Take Up and Read, the blog my friend Chari and I recently started.
First,  I posted a few Disney vacation pictures over there. 

6 


Also, Chari posted about her November tradition of a Thankfulness Tree.  Fun idea and the way she does it, guests get to join in, which seems even more fun.  

7.

I wrote this post, Together for a Reason,  in response to Elizabeth's great post What I'm Never Going to Tell You.   I was going to post it here, but Chari and I agreed it was better over there.   As older moms who have homeschooled for many years, we have seen enough to know that there are no absolute guarantees, and in fact, to think that Homeschooling the Right Way =  Practically Perfect Kids is sort of missing the point of  the real strengths of homeschooling.    Homeschooling is still good and worth doing, but not for that reason. 

8  

If you have a Kindle, and are doing NaNoWriMo this month, this might be of interest:   There are presently a few How-To typing writing books for free at Amazon.   I am just linking to the "free" list (on the right of the page) not to each individual book.  

I don't know how long they will stay free.  I also don't personally know if any of them are good or not.   I just downloaded them in the hopes that I might be able to use bits of them with Kieron.   He has asked me to sort of do an ongoing Writing Practicum with him since he's a social learner and it helps him get enthused about the story he is working on.

what are journals anyway?

This picture is from Sunday, the morning after we got back from our northern travels, when I could still photograph sunlight.... sigh.   Then the sun disappeared.  But I trust it will return.  And there is still coffee! 

My friend Chari at Our Heart's Haven pointed out to me that I wasn't being accurate a few days ago when I wrote after a post:  "This isn't really a journal....more like a mishmash."

She said that there are all different kinds of journals, and it's true.   Just like there are all different types of blogs... and really, a blog is sort of a new way to journal, after all. 

So a mishmash of daily events, planning and linking is truly a journal proper. 

I guess I was thinking more in terms of a journal as a diary of the day's events( and there is another word that derives from a word for "day"!)  

A diary is a record (originally in handwritten format) with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience.

Even that is wider than just a narrative of the day's events.

This is kind of a relief.  The format is broader than I had thought.

Bottom line:  There is freedom there.

(Freedom to choose well, which is the part that sometimes trips me up -- I want everything to be the ultimate BEST, and then I get discouraged by the impossibility of that, or locked into a systematic pattern that I've decided is the best.  But Truth, Goodness and Beauty have to be approached, they can't be trapped and contained). 

It's a bit of a stretch, but that's the way I've been approaching homeschooling recently.  It is broader than I thought.  I know that when I talk about timelines or reading Shakespeare and haiku to the kids or watching Mental Math lectures, it doesn't really sound like unschooling as it is commonly thought of.  Nor is it quite anything else, like I could recommend it as The Way to homeschool.   But the thing I am trying hard to do (which I can't seem to explain very well) is to open things up, to look at all the possibilities, and choose the one that seems to fit best.   But it seems to work better to choose poetically than to just impose things on us because they seem suitable.

It's hard to explain, see?   It seems to relate to the way the two workers in the parable invested their talents, while the third man buried his.   Somehow "burying" is safe but not expansive.  Somehow, "caring" is needed, and it inevitably involves a kind of reaching to something outside.    

When Sean was playing football locally (instead of up in Oregon as he is now), the crowd and the kids would beg the coaches to let them "air it out."  That meant that instead of their typical grindstone offense, "three yards up the middle in a cloud of dust" they would get to throw some passes, do some unexpected things, give the game and the kids a chance to breathe a little. (keep in mind that this is an English Lit major's definition of a football term, and you'll be fine).

There's also that football description "playing with heart."  Sometimes you see a kid who doesn't have it all athletically -- he's small and skinny, perhaps -- but he "has heart".  He plays with all he's got and more.  You can recognize it and admire it and sometimes it changes the course of a game, where on the other hand safe and careful sometimes loses games.    

That's what I'm trying to consider  right now in a way.   Just as a journal can comprise all sorts of things, so can a homeschool.  But it has to be directed by love, by "heart" and "breath" not by desire to take it easy, or desire to be irreproachable.  Those are negative goals

 For some reason, as soon as I decided that, I started getting interested in things like timelines and art cards that would just make me want to yawn with boredom and stress last year (when we were doing art and history notebooks because we "had to" for our charter).

(I think I was getting burned out even though I didn't realize it!)  



Gratuitous pic below -- Paddy having a quiet reading time that same sunny Sunday morning just 5 days ago.  To keep things real, I will mention he is not reading some classic Ambleside book, but browsing through his Dad's Marvel Encyclopedia.   Ah, where would cultural literacy be if you don't know all the supervillains that Spiderman ever fought!  

And the violently scribbled creation in the foreground is one of Aidan's coloring pages -- he takes coloring with crayons to a new, bold level.    You may think it looks like the work of a kindergartener who has to color for his teacher and wants to get it over with as fast as possible, but anyone who is familiar with Aidan's work knows it is So. Much. More. Than. That. 

Memory Lane and Shadow Battles

Not all who wander are lost......

 About every couple of months I try to go back and look at some of my older posts, especially some of the ones scattered across the web in other locations.   If you have kept a blog for a long time, or more than one, you should try it.  It is like a kind of retreat.  Literally, in the sense of retracing your steps!

Or if you keep photo albums or scrapbooks, take a Sunday afternoon once in a while to flip through them and think and remember.  Maybe you will find yourself with a restored outlook or a reminder of something you have half-forgotten, or a changed attitude towards one of your children.  I know I always come away with something when I retreat back in time this way.

So if you are still here, I am now going to strew old dormant blogs of mine in your path! 

Once for about 3 years I kept an unschooly type journal called Mo Shuile Togam Suas (if you don't know what that says, I guess you are part of the billions of folk who don't speak Gaelic -- I am another of those billions of folk, but I found it somehow after I visited Ireland in 2007 -- I guess it is Scottish Gaelic, not Irish, but then I am of Scottish descent myself, though my children are a mixture).

Mo Shuile Togaum Suas  "I will lift my eyes...."

I love the header so much Icredit to Ron and Andrea at homeschooljournal.net) that every time I visit  I want to start writing there again, but then I tell myself, "I started this blog (Quotidian Reader) so that I could combine my blogs, so I wouldn't spend so much time online, etc."   But it makes me wish I journaled here more, because I love looking back through my old journals.  "Oh, I remember when we celebrated Talk Like a Pirate Day....and when Aidan had his G-Tube out....!" 

I also used to run Sierra Highlands.  

This blog was for my more general commentary, though of course some autobiography wound  its way in).   Before that, it was called In a Spacious Place, and before that Every Waking Hour, and those names reflect changes in focus.  I went from unschooling discussion, more to Charlotte Mason/classical/general education commentary, and then I started writing more about family things and less about homeschooling per se.    I am proud of that blog and I often go there to look things up -- quotes, especially, because I put a lot of good quotes on there.  But I rarely read through it so contentedly with a smile on my face as I do with my journal posts.

I stopped updating it soon after my father died, and after some time offline I started up this blog that you are reading now.   

Now we come to  Schola et Studium.

I started it a few years ago when I moved away from unschooling into an Ambleside type curriculum, so I could have a place to keep plans and learning logs.   It took on a life of its own because I do love to plan and recordkeep and make pretty things.   I rarely read through it anymore, but I like to visit it sometimes because it is so pretty and organized, and looks like someone else altogether was running it, someone who had a spark of energy that I currently lack.  Or maybe I am preserving it for actual interaction with my kids -- I'm not sure.   Anyway, that's not me right now, though sometimes I wish I could get it back.  Sigh.

Finally there is House and Hold.

House and Hold

This was the first blog I ever started.  I kept it quiet because I was just learning how to blog.  Eventually it became something like a household notebook where I kept minutiae related to house management and health and kitchen things, things that concern my vocation as "the heart of the home" (which was the original name of the blog, but I changed it because I wasn't really talking about heart things, so the title seemed misleading, and also Elizabeth's beautiful blog had a very similar title).

I hardly ever look at my household notebook blog now.   My favorite part of it is the description:

Celebrating Simplicity, Leisure, Order and Wonder in a Family of Nine in the Sierra Mountains.

Gee, I wish.  But we are no longer nine in the Sierras, and the abstract nouns were always aspirations more than day to day reality.    I still like the sound of it though.  PerhapsI should have called it "Reaching Towards Simplicity.etc"

I sense uneasily that I wrote almost this same exact post not too long ago.  Ah, that's what happens when you get old.  My husband's grandfather used to say that.   He is the original owner of that cabin pictured above, which belongs to his daughter now, my mother in law  That's what the cabin looked like originally, I think in the 40's or even earlier.     

What is the point of this ramble down bloggy Memory Lane? 

Well, several thoughts came up while I was writing it.   The only one I really feel like writing out, though, is that when I look back on five or more years of blogging, what I am gladdest to have kept are the journals and the quotes.   Then there are a handful, a small handful, of what might be called articles that I feel good about having written.  The ambiguity with these latter ones, though, is that I remember vividly how much time and focus they took.  I have mixed feelings about spending so much time on something that is, really, more a hobby than anything else.   I know that those few really good ones took more than I normally have at my fingertips.  So it's nice that I was able to write them, but it doesn't really feel like it was me, somehow.   I probably can't explain it any better than that.  I feel differently when I spend a lot of time and effort on something that is useful to someone else.  Then it doesn't disturb me so much.

The other times I feel vaguely troubled about something I've written in the past is when I feel like I'm trying somehow to pretend to be someone I'm not.  I don't do it on purpose.   But sometimes I am conscious that there is a role out there to be filled -- and my writing self inadvertently tries to rush in to fill the perceived vacuum.     I suspect it's the same part of me that wants to be of help, but in this case is taking the wrong approach. .... like being the Shadow Warrior (the Kagemusha one, for you Kurosawa fans who are reading this, not the video game I found when I googled just now).

Kagemusha

If you become an impersonator, it's hard to stop.  All those blogs were parts of my life that I was concerned enough with to want to blog about, but I think I probably started and left blogs because I felt like they were trying to turn me into The Person Who Blogs Here and that was only one part of me.  I don't think it's really the blogs though, and it certainly isn't the readers, because I've always had readers who have a similar supply of separate hats they wear in their different roles, so they know how it is.    It's something about me.    I'm just writing it down so next time I am looking through old posts it will remind me of something I need to think about occasionally!

Digital Silence

Picture taken by Clare

What happened to my regular blogging?

If I had a photo of crickets chirping I would post that, but bubbles are even more silent, I guess!  

First we went traveling -- and since then several things have been making me spend a lot of time processing.

If I could explain it all, I wouldn't be having a blogger's block.  I just have to sit and wait and think my way through, and play with my kids, and talk to "real life" people until I know what I'm thinking and feeling. 

I hope to get back into the swing of things.  I put myself on a digital diet so that I wouldn't have that excuse for not processing.   So that's another reason I haven't been on here too much.

Related to that, I've been reading Outside Lies Magic. (First read about the book at Lissa's site)   It advises us to "Get Out Now" and turning off the netbook does help with that, though I have ways to deal with the vacuum left by the lack of that humming electronic presence  -- by burying my nose in books.    They seem to hum to me too, though not with such an electric buzzing noise.

Hope to get back on here again soon.   I hope you are all having a fun summer -- or winter, over there in Oz!

what to do when you accidentally publish a blogpost too soon

Oops, my touchpad control went crazy and accidentally pre-published this post which I was composing for the future, so I'm editing it now.    It was originally a homeschooling post meant to be published on Thursday.

I'm trying to see if I can fool Google's Instant Reader that way.

Update:  It seems to work.   So here's what you do if you accidentally post a blog that you wanted to save for later, or that you immediately realize was too revealing or personal or potentially hurtful.

Google Reader captures your post almost instantaneously, so even if you delete or send the post back to draft form, your original feed often remains.

HOWEVER -- if you immediately edit the contents of your post and republish, as I did now, it looks like Google almost immediately recaptures the edited feed so you can minimize the damage.

Only people that read on Google during the interim between your first posting and your edited revision will see the unfortunate unintended draft.

Just keeping this up here in case it is helpful for anyone else.