All Things Made New

my never-still boy and i at the coffee shop

I have been struggling lately, with pretty much everything. Always I struggle with feeling like I am a crappy parent. Judge-y people don't help, not at all. Naturally. I doubt, though, that even the judgey people are harsher on me than I am on myself. So there's that. There's this odd transition that we all have been going through, of adjusted routine, of longer school days, shorter daylight. We have been doing some projects around the house (by "we" I mean mostly Ryan) and around The Property. (confession: our official, even legal, farm name is Ard Ri Farm, but lately I keep thinking of it as Tree and Leaf, from Tolkien's short story.) We bred the goats again, intentionally this time, so I am trying to finish off part of a ramshackle shed as their stall, so's they don't die as did the first round. I finished up, with Ryan's help, expanding the chicken coop: I won't feel comfortable letting them truly free-range until that unknown day I can get a dog. There's just too much predation, and with no gun, we have nothing to scare away foxes, which found us last year, and coons, which found us this year, and of course a gun would be useless for the bald eagles--Caledon is just about 10 miles ,from us--and endless chicken hawks etc. So outwardly, we've been really busy, and in a lot of ways it's been really good.
Inwardly, though . . . This happens with authors, where suddenly I will start hearing about someone everywhere I turn, seemingly. This time, it was Caryll Houselander, whom you cool people have already read, I know, but I haven't. So I found a couple of her books cheap on AbeBooks, which I prefer to Amazon, and it definitely was a prompting of the Holy Ghost. I started on Reed of God first, because it's about Mary and I've had this thing with Mary lately, wanting to know her better. I was hooked before the first page, and I especially appreciated this:


my kitchen Madonna birthday present,
not made of chocolate

"Even if I faced a blank future shackled with respectability, it was still impossible to imagine Our Lady doing anything that I would do, for the very simple reason that I simply could not imagine her doing anything at all."

Yes! And it just gets better from there.

It has been a hard year. Post-partum gets harder with each child, as I get older and have less rest and more to do; it was several months before I was not in discomfort, sometimes pain, after Aibhie. Then of course, The Accident, and all that entails. The whole month of August is a blank for me. Then recently hearing of my college classmate, Fred's, wife Nicole, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It's hard to . . . impossible to say what this latest news has done. Perhaps Waugh's words are best: "A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise . . . a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne": Not expected, this year, but the rest of it so very apropos.


so proud of her mess

I have been near despair, some of these days, when it all seems overwhelming, and today was near tears when I finally found my book again and read this:

"If only those who suffer would be patient with their early humiliations and realize that Advent is not only the time of growth but also of darkness and hiding and waiting, they would trust, and trust rightly, that Christ is growing in their sorrow, and in due season all the fret and strain and tension of it will give place to splendour of peace."

Peace. The peace that passes all understanding, all sorrow, all trouble; the peace that holds our aching hearts and gives them rest. Wait, with faith, with trust, that peace will come, in due time.