daily life as life goes on . . .

We are in the midst of it.  Dust, mud, wood, nails, hammers, wires, paint . . .

Our basement was left undeveloped when we moved this house into town a few years ago.  This year we want to host a Christmas gathering for our relatives.  Space is needed.  Otherwise social distance will mean no distance at all.

My brother has been assisting us – and expert help is never to be shunned.  The walls are straight, the doors close and the ceilings actually look like they should.  There are bedrooms, a rec room, a storage room, utility room and of course a bathroom.  The flooring will be one of the next efforts – with laminate in the main areas and some special vinyl/rubber type flooring for the store room and bathroom.

My hope is that we can host more people as the new year opens up.  If you would like to travel this way – let me know!!

It seems most people are wanting to live with an uninterrupted life.  You can count on your schedule to unfold – as you have planned.  Except when it doesn’t.  In that case certainty needs to be replaced with clarity.

Clarity is seeing where you are at, assessing the current situation, and with those understandings in place finding a way to move ahead.

Clarity will allow for planning ahead, as long as you remain flexible and continue to seek clarity as you go along.  Blinding sticking to a plan can land you in the ditch.  Working a plan with regular snapshots of where you are at can help you to stick to the road that ends at your destination.

Sharing space or enforcing boundaries.

This idea comes from a lecture by Ray Aldred given at Ambrose University.  The First Nations people work together with others to share space.  A treaty is a way to work together.  Where this is overtaken by the idea of enforcing a boundary rather than sharing space, we become individualistic and, I would observe, often so power based that we miss the ability to live with many others in peace.

Some interesting thoughts.  Still working them through.

Gluttony is hypocrisy of the stomach; for when it is glutted, it complains of scarcity; and when it is loaded and bursting, it cries out it is hungry. (St. John Climacus – “the Ladder of Divine Ascent”)

Thus we have one marvelous early church member react to overeating eating as though it were an addiction.  Another recent statement (undocumented in the paper I read, but put forward with some certainty) was that gluttony in the tradition of the desert monastics related to the matter of variety of food, not so much consumption of food (Christian Century – September 28, 2021 – “Vocational Gluttony”).  Gluttony thus becomes a matter of the pleasure of the eyes and of the taste buds.  Temperance and sameness, on the other hand, were to be preferred.

The King James Bible mentions in Philippians (3:18) that “their god is their belly”, contrasting them to those who have a citizenship other than here on earth.  Not only do these belly seekers place appetite first (and probably many different appetites), but they brag about shameful things, and think only about life here on earth.

More than needed does not mean you cannot partake of the “more”, just that the “more” may not be what is needed and may even be harmful and less than what we were created to eat!

BTW – I love how some people characterize the double quotes we use around words we want to emphasize.  They call them “scary” quotes.