Palm Sunday

One of the things I adore about being a mother is that I am queen of my own little world. I choose what comes in my home and what goes out of it. I can mold it to look the way I want. I can organize time the way I want. Though by no means does my little kingdom always perfectly reflect my dreams and aspirations for it, I am it's queen and with Trevor, choose which direction to send it on it's way.

This week I have decided that in my kingdom, Easter will be a major holiday, on par with Christmas.

I love Christmas. At Christmas, the whole world seems to celebrate together, to soften and gladden a little. Everyone recognizes it as a beautiful time of year, full of peace and joy. A whole month of the year is set aside to celebrate.

Unfortunately, it is also extremely commercialized, sometimes stressful, and not always celebrated sacredly. Because not everyone's focus is on the Savior at Christmastime, it can be easy to get distracted from the true meaning of the season.

Easter has, for the most part, escaped the public limelight. Oh, sometimes we get Good Friday off, and the Easter Bunny naturally makes a commercilized appearance, but on the whole, Easter has been left relatively untouched. Like Christmas, Easter has the potential to be wholly Christ-centric, but Easter doesn't have as msny of society's distractions to deter us from this pure worship.

I will be thinking this week of ways that I want to celebrate Easter in our family. I want there to be a build up, similar to (though maybe not as lengthy as) the month long buildup for Easter. I want to have an "Easter Spirit" in our home in the days before Easter. I want to have an Easter Season in our house. During Christmas, many of my most treasured experiences each year do not happen on Christmas day. They usually happen in the days before, as I'm pondering the truths of the holiday. In our home, I want us to have a similar opportunity.

As I come up with ideas, I'll pos them. I'm so excited for the upcoming celebration!

The Great Change

Last night on our date, after eating dinner, Trevor and I went to ASU. We were planning on going to look something up in the library, but found that because we're no longer students we couldn't even access a catalog, so we decided to just walk around for a while instead. The campus has changed so much, and it's absolutely beautiful. We hardly recognized parts of it.

It brought back so many memories, so many feelings, and to be honest, so many regrets. I kept thinking about all of the time I spent there, all of the classes I took, all of the papers I wrote, everything I should have learned, and it finally happened.

I wish I had not gone to public school.

This thought has been very long in coming. More than a year ago, I took a class that I have often called a "book club on steroids". We read classics together, discussed them, wrote papers on them, and even gave speeches. Of the other members of the class, Trevor and I were the only ones who didn't homeschool our kids and weren't planning on it. I told them that public education had worked well for me, but I was open minded about having my children homeschooled if I felt like they needed it. I wasn't outspoken, but I was definitely the minority.

I loved school. I felt like deciding to homeschool my kids was demeaning to the excellent teachers I'd had, and I didn't think that was fair.

But the teachers weren't the problem, it's the system. What is the value of a grade? In my opinion and experience, it does not reflect true learning or even effort, and in education these are the things that really matter. It doesn't accurately measure education, but it does have a huge potential to either discourage those who are working hard but can't quite get that A, or lulling people into a false sense of security about the quality of their education and learning. I fell in the latter camp. According to the public system, I was an excellent student; in retrospect I fell far beneath my potential in learning.

Of course I loved school: with the grades I received and how I tested, I had praise from every side. Unfortunately, I wasn't really learning, and I was not in the least bit intrisically motivated. It has taken almost three years out of the public system to be detoxified from it's effects and feel like I am learning for the sake of learning and actually retaining it.

I don't want that for my children. I don't want them to waste 12 years, or worse, waste 12 and then battle for the rest of their lives to recover from the effects of a distorted system. They need personal mentorship, intrinsic motivation, and a recognition of how to apply what they learn so it actually benefits them.

Now how do I do that?

The adventure begins...

EVMCO

The third and final quarter of EVMCO's (East Valley Mormon Choral Organization) first season has begun, and I am SO excited! Every time I go, I feel so inspired to be better, to work harder, and to refine myself, not just musically but in all areas of my life.

Two thoughts I have from tonight's rehearsal:

1) Our director, Brandon, talked about a harpist he auditioned this week. He said she played so beautifully that it almost moved him to tears, and she is only 16 years old. She has been playing for eight and a half years. When she walked in the room, you could see her purity and her focus on her face.

It totally struck me when he said, "I absolutely do not believe that it is a coincidence that this pure, radiant girl also happened to play the harp well. There is no doubt in my mind that as she refines her musical abilities and cultivates that beauty, she is growing spiritually". I think the same thing could be said vice versa: As she grows spiritually her ability to play increases.

Isn't that powerful? He's right! I can give this gift of the Spirit to my family in so many ways. True doctrine is obviously the most concentrated and important, but there are so many other supplemental ways to cultivate and bring the Spirit to them. I want to give that to my family.

2) I've been reading about types of Christ in The Lost Language of Symbolism, and so I've been thinking a lot about how all things testify of Christ. Today, Brandon was talking about vibrato and pitch (of all things) and I decided that what he was saying truly testifies of Christ.

In singing, when someone sings a note with natural vibrato, the true pitch of what they are singing is at the center, and the voice undulates in pitches slightly above and below this center pitch. When you're flat, the vibrato is unbalanced below the note, and when you're sharp the undulations fall more above the pitch, etc. Brandon was telling about a soloist in OCMCO (Orange County Mormon Choral Organization, our sister organization) and said that when they recorded his solo and looked at it on the computer in slow motion, his vibrato was perfectly balanced above and below the true center pitch.

He said that as humans, our ears naturally gravitate toward these true pitches (true A, B, C, etc). When we hear a voice with vibrato that perfectly surrounds the true pitch, it has a distinct ring to it that it is beautiful to us.

That is so beautiful to me. Christ is the True Pitch, who we gravitate toward, and when we center our lives around him, the result is beautiful. It rings.

It makes sense that singing would have so many witnesses of truth in it. We know there will be music and singing in Heaven, and I'm sure everything there Testifies of Truth. Maybe all beautiful things testify of truth in some way (or multiple layered ways) and that is what makes them beautiful. I want to find them all out! I want to be spiritually refined and in tune with this beauty that God has so graciously surrounded us with!

Essence of lemon

This morning when I was painting, I was intent on catching the lemony-ness of a juicy cut lemon. Every now and then, the smell of the lemon hit me, and I always came to myself with a start when I realized it wasn't from the lemon I was painting.

It was such a melding of art and reality; it felt like a poem.

The Color Purple

No, I haven't read the book.

Yes, I want to.

But shockingly enough, that is not what this post is about.

This post is about my new obsession with the color purple. Even more shocking, I know. The color the color purple (as opposed to the book The Color Purple). Me, in love with purple? Who'd a thunk?

Purple is sly and seductive. I've always been a Red girl myself, but I was reviewing my projects over the last few months and realized that purple has weaseled it's way into all of my favorite ones.

The apron I made for Reena for Christmas.

My lovely front bed of perennials.

My kitchen hutch, recently painted in a lovely shade of eggplant.

I knew I had it bad when I decided to paint my red desk...purple. It is the ultimate betrayal. Sorry, Red. I've moved on.

Lately I've been browsing through The Lost Language of Symbolism by Alonzo Gaskill. Very, very interesting stuff. This morning, due to my recent discovery that I had unwittingly fallen in love with the color purple, I looked up it's scriptural significance. For your reading pleasure, I will relate what I learned.

Purple, as some of you may know, has long been a symbol of royalty, power and wealth. This is largely due to the fact that anciently the only way to produce purple dye was to extract and skillfully combine the secretions of two different mollusks. It was difficult, rare, and therefore pricey. In the Tabernacle and other temples of ancient Israel, purple, along with blue, scarlet, and white, were the only colors the Lord specified be used for the fabrics in the temple and the Priest's clothing. In addition, Purple (appropriately) symbolized spiritual progression.

Interesting scriptural usage: In Revelations, the Great Harlot wears purple as an attempt to counterfeit the priest's clothing. She is also depicted drinking out of a golden cup, similar to the chalice a priest would use in a wine offering in the temples of ancient Israel. She wears an inscription in her forehead stating, "Mystery, Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and abominations of the earth". A priest would have had a miter with the inscription "Holiness to the Lord" on his head. So the whore sells sacred things for money, imitates the priesthood, and tries to steal the glory of God. Sound familiar? I guess it's always the same old story with Satan. Isn't that interesting?

Anyway...how tangential of me. I'm sorry. Back to the topic at hand...

Purple. So it's not as if I'm painting my walls or anything-- though Purple on it's best behavior, genteel and gray, would look lovely in my office-- but things are cooling down in my color world even as the weather is heating up.

Poetic Innocence

I've had a renewed fascination with poetry lately, and I think I attribute it to Rylan. His newly emerging sense of language is so beautiful. I love listening to the way he explain things with his simple, limited vocabulary. For example the other day when I was cooking dinner and the pot was boiling, he told me it was "jumping at the lid". Isn't that simple, direct and fresh? Everything a poem should be. It made me want to write a sweet, simple poem, a haiku or something like that.

Or the other day, we were looking at a painting of a city with a black skyline jutting into the white sky. He said, "Look, Mom, music!" I didn't know what he was talking about at first, but then I realized the buildings looked like the black keys of a piano, nestled in the white. That concept could fuel a poem.

I told someone in my family the other day that I wanted to write a series of poems using some of his phrases. They laughed, but I was serious. I've already started writing them.

In fact, if I ever post a random poem on here, with a portion in italics, the italics was Rylan. Maybe I should cite both of us as the authors. The only difference is, his brilliance is simple and effortless.

What I learned from Rylan about writing poems:
Sometimes limitations spur creativity.

What I'd like to try:
Find a way to limit my vocabulary so I can try to grasp at his fresh interpretations. Maybe just use one letter of the alphabet for all my verbs, another for nouns, and so on. Not only would that stretch my interpretations, but the ringing around of the same letters could be fun sounding, too.
Hmmm. At least for an exercise, that would be fun.

Language most shows a man...

...Speak that I may see thee. --Ben Johnson

This is my blog.

I have another blog for my family. There, I talk about my family: my kids, my hubby, their goings on and cuteness and all that good stuff.

I realized several months ago, however, that I needed my own space. I wanted a space to monopolize with my goings on: what I'm learning, what I'm thinking about, things that excite me, projects I'm working on. I wanted space to experiment as I write. I wanted to present a slideshow of my days, glimpses of what my life as a stay at home mom really is. Because, despite what you may hear, it's not just about the kids, and I have learned that every SAHM’s brand of Stay at Home Mom-ness is very different. There’s not really a way to lump all of it into one category, and if there is I want no part of it.

But despite my need to define and differentiate, I cringe at the thought of all this exposure. I like people to find me out subtly and slowly, through direct observation, without my filter. I’m typically not into self-definition for anyone else’s sake, and yet here I am, devoting an entire blog to little old me. I need it yet it terrifies me.

Because I feel so very much like apologizing and excusing everything here, I’m not going to. From here out, I will excuse nothing written in this space.

I don't mind people reading this-- If I did, I wouldn't put it on the web :) But for some reason, I feel the need to preface what they will read with a disclaimer. And so the title is the blog’s disclaimer. I feel the need to put myself out there, formed in words, so here it is.

I am speaking.