onehouse

Onehouse update

I continue to do some more thinking about what a contemplative life means offline. I think I'll have some more blog type responses in the New Year. It is important sometimes to know what is just for you, to take the time to pause and let things surface without an audience. 

In the meantime, I share odd bits at the Onehouse twitter and have started a new arts and design blog called Hedge Society with some other friends as paying attention often brings many beautiful and hopeful things to us and we'd like to share those things. 

I'll have another 12 days of Christmas up soon. I am not participating in Advent or reading many things about the Christmas season but I enjoy finding 12 little thoughts each year. Long ago, in what seems like another life, I taught a senior high school Sunday School class. I asked the kids to be honest about something they felt bored with - something that had been emphasized so much that it had started to breed contempt. Each one of them mentioned the Christmas story. They could not find any way to breathe new life into the Christmas season as they had heard the story so many times that it just rolled off them.

 A noisy society, a noisy religion, fears space and silence. We put in song after song, sermon after sermon, lesson after lesson, convinced that the noise will signify more than nothing but it rarely does. It is like putting a pencil over and over again on the same spot on the paper - you end up destroying the drawing instead of producing a work of art. 

So some years you back away from all the noise and to your surprise, and ultimately relief, you begin to see the light. 

Twitters

I think my twitter followers got wiped out a few days ago when twitter was being weird and I pressed some button at the wrong time. So you may not be following Onehouse twitters anymore. At least I didn't set off some big mushroom cloud. Unless it was a portobello mushroom cloud. Portobello burgers for everyone! (Well, not you. I know you hate mushrooms.  You can have a big beef or chicken cloud. Okay, I'm not hungry anymore.)

Question of the Day

I'm thinking of closing this blog down. I'm just not that interested in writing here of late and am doing a lot of work on my other blog. I guess I could just keep it open for the next couple months, blog intermittently, and see if contemplative questions catch my attention again. Mostly like they will. So does anybody have an opinion on whether this should keep going or not? Email me if you do - k.onehouse at gmail.com

BTW, I'm reading Chittister's Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope. Excellent.

Back.

Yes, I'm still here. I was so very tired of the internet over Christmas, I could barely stand to look at the keyboard. I do have the last few posts from Christmas in draft form and I'll put those up sometime before next year. Now its back to work and soon some rambling along here.

And then...

And then she did final edits on someone else's book...must lay down.

Vampires and slayers, oh my.

Well, I am not sure there is anyone in this dusty little corner these days. I've been busy catching up on work after much of my October and November went to being sick. I finished off a magazine, wrote two arts grants, and tried to keep up on meetings and other duties. Frankly, I've enjoyed not blogging the contemplative this fall. I have felt my attitude change. These things are important but not IMPORTANT. They can be the foundation without me screaming "HEY! HAVE YOU SEEN MY FOUNDATION! NIIIIIICE CONCRETE!" which is well, boring.

I've read a couple of things that I like here and there that I will post but mostly this has been a short season of looooong work hours, continued sore but thankfully recovering gums, and given a chance to unwind, I'm more than happy to watch a little Buffy with some friends rather than blog about contemplative things.

Image journal

I'm not sure how many folks from Calgary visit the blog, but I'll be this event tonight:

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"Join Image editor Gregory Wolfe in Calgary on November 20 for his next stop on Image’s Canadian tour. Wolfe will give a talk at 7:30 p.m. at the Engineered Air Theatre in the Epcor Centre for Performing Arts, addressing the power of beauty to nourish our common life, communicate faith, and renew our culture."

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Image is one of the few christian oriented publications that I still read. They have high standards and actually use art and writing in a faith context. No bulletin cover shots of mountains with script writing verses on top here.

Whew.

Since arriving from Dubai a few weeks ago, life has been a blur. After a twenty four hour trip with no sleep (unusual for me) and a few bleary hours of sorting mail and unpacking bags, I was able to blink my way through my dentist appointment filled with x-rays and poking and prodding and a trip to the oral surgeon to set up an appointment to find out if my wisdom teeth had finally decided, "No we have decided we will not stay in for your whole life."

My first few days home I thought I kept hearing the ``click, click, click`` of Winston`s paws, a sound thoroughly embedded in my brain after six weeks of his white shadow following me wherever I went.

Then two days of working the Alberta Magazines table at the folkfest here in Calgary. It was like old home week with a friend across the way at the CUSO table, another friend of a friend at a table for an African education charity that she founded, and Deegy coming by on occasion with his beautiful little face. And, of course, the opportunity to talk about the beauty of magazines as alternative and independent press and an art form in and of themselves.

A few more days in town filled with errands, friends, and thankfully, some sleep and then off to Prince George to bring my seventy-one year old mother a new computer (my not-so old one..). Those days were spent visiting some old friends of my mothers including some always supportive folks who were a part of my father`s church when I was but a wee lass. They still tell me that they pray for us as part of Jake and Doreen`s family, that little bunch of five geeky kids that used to populate the hallways and foyers of our old baptist church.

Back home again after ten hours of driving through some of some of the earth`s most beautiful scenery (see it now before the pine beetle takes all the trees in what was once the ``Spruce Capital of the World``) to purchase a new computer, de-bloatware it, and reinstall all my data.

Some time and lunches with more friends, a lunch with my 12 year old niece today who is about 9 feet tall, and I feel like I still haven`t landed. But peace. Peace be still. Centering practice as thin as it is comes into play as the surgeon tells me they`ll be digging teeth out my bones next month. And on we go. Desert, mountain, forest, music, magazine, eating with or under the knife. The ordinary life.

Me and my little brain.

I was supposed to be back home on Monday. Home where the outside temperature hovers around the late twenties. Here. Dubai. Where the inside temperature is around 27 C and only because the air conditioning makes it so.

We decided it would be a good idea to stay a little longer to help with the house until a few things sort out. To complicate matters, a week ago i made an emergency trip to the dentist and am on antibiotics to cool an infection that needs to hold until I get home. Everyone think happy thoughts.

I'm doing a lot of reading and some writing - just not on the blog. I'm taking advantage of my brother's and my 12 year old niece's library. She kindly left me a huge stack of some of her favorite books piled neatly in my room.

There are a lot of things to struggle with in Dubai. Maybe I'll write about them here someday. One of the things I do like is the amount of news from this part of the world and very little from our little continent. It's great to open up the morning paper and see the sports section - soccer, tennis, rugby, cricket, some track and field, sailing. No NFL. No baseball. No basketball. It changes your brain a little. And my little brain can always use changing.

Listening Point

Our new group blog, Listening Point, is now up. Go ahead and read and/or/but/for/nor participate by sending us your posts.