My Bucket List...For Now

Hire a weekly maidservice

Go to Italy, France and Germany

Be published and sell copies internationally

Live to be a great=grandmother

Waltz again

Act in a Shakespearean play

Hear Keane in concert

Meet Sir Ken Robinson, Julia Cameron, Ray Bradbury, Jerry Lewis and Martha Stewart

Have my house finished, walls and floors

Get a masters degree in literature

Become debt free

Get my nails done

Work on a BBC film

Have a girl’s weekend with my best friends/daughters

Take Mom to the Shakespeare Fest in Ashland

Go to dinner and a movie complete with popcorn and soda

Visit the Hearst castle

Go to Solvang

See the Getty museum

Review (do anything that gets published) for Wall Street Journal

Pay for a vacation for my mother

Christmas shopping in San Francisco

Cruise the Caribbean

Wear a sequined dress, well

Have all my teeth fixed, while sedated

Drive through Ohio Amish country in late September

Sabbath: The Perfect Day

If seven is the perfect number, then the seventh day should be the perfect day.

That’s the point Dan B Allender is trying to make in his book Sabbath. Far from the dry scolding I expected, Allender’s nearly scandalous prose paints a picture of a day spent in the delight of the presence of the One who created us for wonder. Calling us from the busy, despairing grind of a workaholics anonymous existence, God’s purpose for the Sabbath was never to bore us, Allender insists.

Posing the idea that many of us prefer the predictability of sorrow to the serendipity of mysterious delight, the book may turn off the traditionalist who may insist, “Sundays were made to focus on God”, Allender reminds of Jesus’ words, “the Sabbath was made for man.”

At one point he even describes a Sabbath as more like hanging out in a French Bistro with the Savior than what most of us envision for the Lord’s Day. Ways to spend your Sabbath are suggested, and they vary from foot washing to smoking a stogie with a friend. Most center on food and time with people you care about.

This book should be read by every person who has ever spent a Sunday in drudgery, whether in church, or anywhere else. I won’t spend the seventh day of my week the same as I used to. This gentle voice has transformed my thinking!

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Thomas Nelson Publishers in return for my honest opinion of the book.

The Green Room: The Presence

The Green Room: The Presence: "How do you practice the presence of God?"

The Presence

How do you practice the presence of God?

Scattered

I am having a lot of trouble with focus. Perhaps wearing several different hats doesn't help.

I just counted seven.

So cutting out something is becoming the only answer to sanity. Should I cut out the money making activity, or the things that I do for fun?

As I write this, my daughter is attempting to pull me into her new venture - decorating cupcakes. Eight, if my resistance gives way.

The irony is giving me a metal taste in my mouth.

I sometimes think that the famed Renaissance men were proficient at so many things because they simply couldn't choose. Isn't there an app for that? Over curious, under decisive creatives who say no to a new thing only on their death beds, and even then...

I am the equivalent of a pellet gun. Lots of little things flying in many directions. Kind of dangerous. Those of you who know me can just shake your heads and go back to your housework, and day jobs. It never will be that cut and dried for me.

I could stop and take myself in hand and order my day rationally. But, I rarely do.

I must like it this way.

How do you stay focused?

Wanting

"Everything you ever wanted, in a permanent state..." sung Coldplay's Chris Martin, as I dropped my high schooler off this morning.

Was he singing about heaven?


Tapping into a place in me that I don't wear on my sleeve, his words brought me to tears, and I wondered how often I think about what I really want.

Modern life is like a coddling mother, offering instant food and drink, continuous social connection  and the promise of the good life through possessions that have not been available to so many people during the whole history of the world. We are perhaps numbed into a state of quasi-contentment. 

CS Lewis suggests the following:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.  

For the two minutes it took me to drive back from my daughter's school after I dropped her off, I told God exactly what I wanted. 

He listened. 

He knew.

And now, so do I. 

To Write, Perchance To Publish

Getting a late start at writing is...well...difficult. My brother joined the Army at 39. I guess it runs in the family.

The writing I do in my head, and have done all my life has been influenced by one author and one author alone.

Charlotte Bronte.

Her book, (or rather a filmmaker's newest conception of it)  Jane Eyre will be once again thrust onscreen on March 11, and I have a ticket waiting in my purse to go see it.


I have now reached an age which Miss Bronte was not fortunate to have achieved, and I have not published a substantial work yet, much less a work of the import and influence of a writer who, by her own admission considered the public 'indulgent' for inclining it's ear to a 'plain tale with few pretensions'. The modesty and understatement of her assertion could not have been more off the mark. Her writing hits the mark unerringly.

In rereading this gothic favorite, I have seen the self Miss Bronte carved into my being when at age twelve I read it with a mixture of great horror and delight for the first time. Identifying with the principle-guided suffering servant, I have tended not to asserted my voice, but rather have waited to be called upon. During the course of the narrative, numerous answers to pleas for help, however, are sent as Jane calls out to a higher power, which for her is the Christian God of the Bible. In this, I continue to copy Jane daily.

As Miss Bronte sent her work out for publication, one must assume her proactive energies were beyond the somewhat passive character of Jane. I am still learning from her.

One theme infused in the character of Jane I retain as my life goal: striving to follow God's law even to my own great personal distress, and an absolute reliance on God to provide the life He planned for me.

This is the treasure of Jane Eyre.