Sunday morning, a sunny Spring day. Oatmeal with honey and dried cranberries, orange juice, chai tea. Grab my camera and take a walk. Come along! We got some rain the past two days. Now the colors are so bright!
Steve and I got into another “relationship talk”. The sun was shadowed by a passing cloud, and I saw this lone female duck, head tucked under her wing, standing on one leg. At that moment, my soul was hiding and this seemed like the perfect illustration.
We passed a church where families with well-dressed children crossed from their cars into the open doors. I remember getting myself and four children up and dressed tidily and bundled off to choir and Sunday school week after week. I miss the expectation of meeting people, the habit of seeing and being seen. I don’t miss the bickering between the kids, the passive teenaged resistance. I do miss the bagels and lox and chocolate croissants. I definitely miss the singing.
Junctions. Life paths, habits, structures, changing, evolving, maintained and unkempt.
Useful and interesting, I suppose, but I really want to be graceful, too.
I suppose my biggest fear is that I am neither useful nor graceful.
There’s another way to think of myself, though. Instead of the Western idea of being an artifact, something made by a Maker, I could adopt the Eastern way and imagine myself as something grown and growing.
Thinking, pondering, musing on my self, my vision, my viewpoint, my place in the vast universe. Steve grabs the camera from me and shows me his vision. It’s different from mine. I think it’s kind of Zen, kind of quirky. Very Steve.
I’m back home, sharing my thoughts with a congregation of bloggers. Did anyone bring bagels?
scillagrace 
I love your illustrations for this post Scilla !! especially the spikey one! and you are both useful and graceful in my eyes… mind you I am a long way away so maybe I can’t see so well 😉
The Eastern way sounds good to me…
Great relaxing Sunday post — a nice addition to my leisure hours of a lazy Sunday =)
Thanks! Glad you stopped by. I wouldn’t want to keep you from reading Pablo Neruda, though (as I see you enjoy him greatly, as do I)! I also recommend the poem “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens.
Those spiky thorns grow right out of the trunk of honey locust trees. I guess it’s defending itself against squirrels who would love to climb up to the branches and eat the pods. Pretty neat trick, I think!
Ouch.. they do look lethal… Oh and by the way I rather like Steve’s minimalist view !!
Me, too! He surprises me.
Your photos are beautiful and really compliment your reflections. Nicely done.
Thank you; I appreciate your visit!
I like the greens & blue of your church spires photo and I love the geometry of the train trestle. Lovely images. I’m curious what it means to you to be graceful. I think of grace as the stuff of blessing. It is kind of ubiquitous, but there are those that notice it more than others. I think you are doing a terrific job of not just noticing but also of pointing it out for others. I think that’s pretty useful.
My definition of grace from my first post reads: elegance of manner, action, form, motion and moral strength. Is that something one can work toward or is it bestowed by blessing?
Elegance. There’s a word that connotes subjective judgment. When you set up a standard of any kind, then you must work toward it and assess your achievement as you go. The grace that is bestowed by blessing is of a different order. It can be an awkwardly inelegant, bumbling revelation. Grace is the beauty in chaos AND its emerging orders of elegant complexity.
You, my dear Tuesday’s child, are full of grace. It is important that you see it your own way, measure it however you do, and put your energy into expressing it more & more clearly to all around you. That’s called being fully yourself and is a worthy goal to strive for. Good on ya, sister!