sick, unsettled, hard talk and SNOW

1. Archie has his first cold. Boo! I feel so bad for his little body. It must feel weird to cough for the first time in your life.

2. I feel unsettled about some things. I always vascilate with my faith, questioning different things. I want it to be more steady and to feel peace with my relationship with him. Lord, I thank you that I can talk to you about these things.

3. I have to have a hard conversation with someone I love and it's eating me up inside because it won't be easy and I don't know what I want to say. This person hasn't been receptive in the past which makes it even more hard, but I am changing a lot and things need to be said. Hopefully some change will come about in our relationship.

4. And finally, It snowed yesterday!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE snow. Always have, always will. I don't love it in April when I am longing for Spring, but I love it now! Time to hit the slopes!

flour, making things, and prayer

1. Until today the only flour I had ever bought was regular all-purpose flour. Today I bought bread flour- I am moving up in the world! And yes, I plan to make bread and pizza dough with that flour!

2. I have been hearing from so many different sources about the pride that can come from making a living by creating/making things with your hands. Darren and I have been dreaming about this sort of future lately.

3. Today I got to pray over my neighbor Lindsay about her pregnancy. It was pretty sweet.

A snippet from The Unsettling of America on Specialization

The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at the specialization from the opposite standpoint - that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery - indeed, the impossibility - of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The first, and best known, hazard of specialist system is that it produces specialists - people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal.Thus, the average - one is tempted to say, the ideal - American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and "agribusinessmen", the problem of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working and eight-hour day at a job for the quality of consequences of which somebody else - or, perhaps more typically, nobody else - will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him.

The beneficiary of his regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals - or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit-down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on television. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts, or perhaps legal experts.

The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money are inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people's. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult other certified experts about their anxieties.

It is rarely considered that this average citizen is anxious because he ought to be - because he still has some gumption that he has not yet given up in deference of the experts. He ought to be anxious because he is helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim. If he lives by the competence of so many other people, then he lives also by their indulgence; his own will and his own reasons to live are made subordinate to the mere tolerance of everybody else. He has one chance to live what he conceives to be his life: his own small specialty within a delicate, tense, everywhere-strained system of specialties.

From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well. Our typical industrial or professional product is both ingenious and shoddy.. The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.

What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure. It becomes more and more organized, but less and less orderly. The community disintegrates because it loses the necessary understandings, forms and enactments of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions, ideals and realities, past and present, present and future, men and women, body and spirit, city and country, civilization and wilderness, growth and decay, life and death- just as the individual character loses the sense of a responsible involvement in these relationships…

The only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present. When supposed future needs are used to justify misbehavior in the present, as is the tendency with us, then we are both perverting the present and diminishing the future...

Although responsible use may be defined, advocated, and to some extent required by organizations, it cannot be implemented or enacted by them. It cannot be effectively enforced by them. The use of the world is finally a personal matter, and the world can be preserved in health only by the forbearance and care of a multitude of persons.

becoming content, skills and The Unsettling of America

1. Realizations keep coming at me! More and more each day! What a beautiful thing! Throughout my life I have always struggled with discontentment. Growing up, it was always counting down the days until the next trip or planning for the summer, etc. I was never one of those girls that neccesarily longed to be a mom, but deep down I think it was something that I knew I would be pretty comfortable with and maybe even thrive at. It was at some point last night as I was watching The Help, that I remembered those buried feelings. I had this feeling like, "yeah, I am right where I want to be." There certainly aren't defined parameters in my new role as a mom, but lately I have been feeling the wealth of things I want to invest in as a mom. My heart feels very full.

2. Another realization is that I want to learn a lot of new primarily domestic skills. So far, they include:
- learning how to knit a hat
-learning how to bake
-learning how to sew more proficiently
-learning how to make things that I normally buy like laundry detergent
-learning how to grow a successful garden in the spring
-learning how to be more resourceful

3. I've recently started reading The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. I have put off reading it for a while because I thought I would get pretty depressed by what I learned...but more than being depressed, I have so far been very moved...feeling like I have been hit by a ton of bricks! Well maybe I will just leave this passage from the book for another post since it is so long. It's the exact reason why I want to learn how to do things for myself, learn how to entertain myself, etc. So fascinating and right on in my opinion!

my little nacho

knowing myself, joy in the journey and nacho!

1. I am taking steps to know myself these days. I think I have been in somewhat of a deliberate haze for the past umm, I don't know how many years. I have been recording truths lately, facts that true about myself and my excema like: food probably effects me more than I would like to admit, I don't do well at homes where there are pets, when I am tired I scratch, when I am anxious I scratch, etc. It's amazing how clear things can become when I am able to separate out things from this general haze of perpetual anxiety/scratching. Beyond the things I listed there aren't too many other triggers for my excema. So, if I was able to focus on those a little more intentionally, maybe that would help. That would involve me not going to people's houses who have pets and possibly declining food from friends or making other food choices which is never easy. But bottom line, I do want to get a much better handle on this for the long run, not just for this present moment. I want to see what my life can look like without this consuming haze.

2. My counselor reminded me this is a journey and that I need to focus on the journey. I agree with her. I don't think there is necessarily a destination to arrive at. Things are constantly changing, joys are coming at me all the time as well as sorrow. With so many unknowns in life with all the mysterious ways that God works, I can't count on a specific destination I want to end up at. But I do have some goals. I want to not be so controlled by this excema, I want to work hard at things, live simply, pour into Archer, create, worship, have FUN...sometimes I feel like my life is lacking in the fun department. I want to laugh with laughter that comes from a soul that is free! I want to be free!

3. Third thing for the day. Archer was Nacho Libre last night. It was great, even if just my family and a few close friends saw it. It was actually a step of healing for me to create his costume instead of giving into the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed at not knowing how to make it, etc. Naaachhhooooooo!