prayers | silkannthreades

This post was inspired by Clanmother’s On the Road Book Club and her 2014 Reading Programme …..

and by The World According to Dina on the subject of landscapes, and the difference between looking and seeing………

and by my miscalculated comment to Ms Vickie Lester of Beguiling Hollywood that I would struggle to find time to review her book, It’s In His Kiss, because I only had about 15 minutes free, each day, in which to read.( Yeah Right! No wonder I wasn’t a maths scholar.)

SO, I thought I didn’t read much and that I didn’t have much time to read. But when I looked around me, this is what I saw.

Morning scene

starts with a read of The Press and a page of poetry. The Press comes with breakfast coffee; the poetry comes as a prelude to bed-making, always read as I sit on the edge of my unmade bed, facing the morning light.

: The Press

: Poem for the Day

: Why Brownlee left by Paul Muldoon

Somewhere, between doing the laundry and the breakfast dishes, I steal a moment with my current living room display book.

Portrait of a Garden

And, as the day progresses, I flit from page to page of books and magazines that arrive in the post or are delivered by hand of friend

: A New Zealand Treasure

: Oxford Today

: Friendly Magazines

: The Persephone Biannually

And when I need a change of pace, I read your blogs and write my own and catch up with reading that can only be done via my computer…Facebook, email, It’s In His Kiss, international news sites….

Evening falls,

new duties call and old ones unwind for the day,

and, eventually, some time closer to 2 a.m. than midnight, my head finds the pillow once more and I do my “15 minutes” of dedicated, purposeful, slow, daily reading.
Last month, I finished Common Ground and, this month, I began Heaven on Earth.

: Common Ground

: Heaven on Earth

Thus the day passes, from word to word, from page to page, from book to book, without much rhyme or reason, but quite nicely all the same, thank you.

Clanmother says that “reading is the catalyst for transformation”. Despite the random nature of my reading habits and choices, I find almost everything I read transforms me, in some way or another. I love the ideas and experiences that come to me through the written word.

I thought I read so little but, indeed, I read a lot

Little by Little it adds up to a Lot.

and that realisation transforms my view of myself in my home landscape.

My Reading Canvas; much richer and more substantial and varied than it first appears.

Thanks Clanmother, thanks Dina, Klausbernd, Selma and Siri, thanks Ms Lester.

ps There are some days when I truly don’t get any reading done apart from my 15 minutes at bed-time and there are other days when I barely manage that.

pps To add to Mr Muldoon’s statement/question “Why Brownlee left”, it occurs to me that Brownlee was needed to turn the earth in another corner of the world ie Christchurch. Who would have guessed? 😉

Towards the end of last year, I devised a grand plan for 2013. The aim of the plan was to improve my giving to friends and the community. I am blessed by wonderful friends who bring me all manner of gifts: fruit, jam, soup, stews, casseroles, cakes, curries, chutney, garden produce, magazines, books, clothes and even, one time, a pair of earrings. I like to give in return and I especially like to give baked goods, in particular home-made bread. I love to make bread. So my grand plan was to make a loaf of bread each day to give away. I made a good start but, after a week, the whole wheat flour and the bread maker machine decided to disagree, and I had so many bread failures that I gave up trying to feed the neighbourhood. Making a half decent loaf for my own consumption was barely manageable let alone for anyone else.

But I am nothing, if not a trier, so about ten days ago, I revisited my grand plan and returned to my bread making. Here are the results.

More bread

I had fun with my bread making, and, as I mixed and kneaded and waited for the dough to rise and to bake, I realised that a few lessons had risen out of the process, too; namely, my grand plan was not grand, but grandiose! Of all the bread I made, I was only able to gift two loaves. The rest was needed for my own household. Making bread every day might be fun but I would need super powers to make enough bread to give away a loaf a day. More importantly, I gained a new appreciation for the words “Give us this day our daily bread”.

We are so used to thinking of bread as that basic “stuff” that we always expect to buy at the cheapest possible price from the supermarket, that we have, I believe, forgotten the wonderful creation that bread truly is. We have cheapened bread to such an extent that we no longer see it as life-sustaining bounty which is brought to us by the hard work and effort of many farmers and diverse workers, as well as the skilled hands of artisan bakers and the humble hands of home bakers.

Bread, especially daily bread ( and, dare I say it, even supermarket bread), is a valuable, precious gift. Ideally, it is crafted from the best of natural and man made resources and brought to the table with a generous serving of love. No wonder it gets top billing in the Lord’s Prayer.

Now, for those of you who are gluten intolerant, I am posting this harvest arrangement as a token acknowledgement of the delights of corn bread and gluten-free bread alternatives 🙂