I made this today. It required hand-sewing… which I am not very inclined to do, but it’s nice. I got the pattern from this book. I checked it out from the library, but I would love to have my own copy. There are some pretty darned cool things in it.
And I finished this prayer rope that I’d been working on for a while.
To Do:
Find an apartment
Finish Clarinet Quartet piece
practice guitar
practice trombone
make clothes
alter clothes
make purses
finish knitting projects
Organize music
Computerize pep band music
Read:
The Brothers Karamazov
The Sacrament of Love
The Perfect Wrong Note
Soprano on Her Head
Grant unto me, O Lord, that with peace of mind I may face all that this new day is to bring.
Grant unto me to dedicate myself completely to Thy Holy Will.
For every hour of this day, instruct and support me in all things.
Whatsoever tidings I may receive during the day, do Thou teach me to accept tranquilly, in the firm conviction that all eventualities fulfill Thy Holy Will.
Govern Thou my thoughts and feelings in all I do and say.
When things unforeseen occur , let me not forget that all cometh down from Thee.
Teach me to behave sincerely and rationally toward every member of my family, that I may bring confusion and sorrow to none.
Bestow upon me, my Lord, strength to endure the fatigue of the day, and to bear my part in all its passing events.
Guide Thou my will and teach me to pray, to believe, to hope, to suffer, to forgive, and to love.
Amen
I have been wanting to repot this jade plant that I received from a couple I used to go to church with in Topeka. It started out very small and got very large. The original plant is in the bottom right photo. When I first got it, it was about the size of the top right photo. All of these plants have been on one pot for the past year kind of growing on top of each other. I’ve wanted to separate them for some time, and today I got the motivation and time to do it.
You’ll also notice in the top left of the bottom right photo is another jade plant that I took as a transplant from the rest of the plants earlier. It’s amazing that sometimes even new plants can grow from just one leaf! I’m trying that with another pot as well. The plant has been laying on its side for a while, which is why, you’ll notice, all the leaves are pointing sideways instead of up.
Anybody want one?
Hummus
1/2 lb. chick peas (garbanzo beans), freshly cooked
1/2 c. Tahini sauce
1/2 lemon, squeezed
1 clove garlic, crushed
salt, to taste
dash of pepper
I used dried beans, so I had to cook them for 2 hours and then I drained them and put them straight into the food processor, and chopped them up. Add the rest of the ingredients and combine. I added some more lemon juice and water (but you really should keep the water that you cooked the chick peas in) to get the consistency I was looking for.
Unleavened Griddle Bread
1 c whole-wheat flour
2 c white bread flour
2t salt
1c + 2T water
veggie oil for cooking
Mix flours and salt together, leaving a well in the middle of the bowl. Add water slowly and mix, dough will form. Knead for 10-12 minutes (the hard part). Leave alone for 15-30 minutes. Knead for 1 minute. Divide into 8 balls. Roll each ball out and cook in a skillet, with oil, on medium heat.
Spiced Aubergine Salad
1/2 eggplant, sliced
5 T veggie oil
1/4 c red wine vinegar
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 lemon, squeezed
1/2 t ground cumin
1/2 t ground coriander
1 cucumber, sliced
2 roma tomatoes, sliced
salt & pepper, to taste
parsley to garnish
Lightly oil eggplant and cook on medium heat in a skillet. Combine the rest of the oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, lemon juice, cumin, coriander, salt and pepper in a bowl. When the eggplant is done, chop slices into quarters and put them in the bowl with the dressing. Mix and let chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours. Then add the sliced cucumber and tomatoes and mix. Sprinkle parsley over the salad.
I made a bag for my knitting needles today. My grandma gave me the fabric a long time ago.
I thought it was time to make another crafty blog. Especially since I’m in a crafty mood. It’s spring break and I haven’t knitted a whole lot this semester. I’ve been busy with school, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to get ‘caught up’ or ‘ahead’ of the homework game this week. I’m just taking a breather.
I went to the store today to buy some yarn that fits the specifications of some patterns that I wanted to make. Most of my yarn is acrylic… which I know now is not the best, especially if you want to felt things or have interesting textures. The best thing acrylic is good for is afghans and stuff like that. So I decided to make a brown/orange/white one.
I knitted the body of a purse yesterday and now only need to put the handles on, which I can do now that I have the right size of double pointed needles. The pattern is in One Skein. I think I might sell these things online, through my mom’s site that she’s starting.
So I bought some wool for felting bowls. Also in One Skein.
Some ribbon yarn for purse making. The pattern is in Glamour Knits. By the way, purse frames are hard to come by. I found this site, but I’ll have to get a whole bunch of them to get them cheaply enough. All the other websites that I looked at were more expensive.
These are also some more patterns that I would love to make from that book.
The next awesome book that I checked out is Annie Modesitt’s Romantic Hand Knits.
I don’t know when I’m going to have time or the money to buy all the skeins it will take to make these, but I have to try sometime. I also have to try making these hats. I have no idea how, but it’ll be fun.
I’m not sure I can do all this over spring break. Maybe I’m overzealous. Did I mention that I have like 10 books that I want to read over break?
In the tense modern life which we live, the problem of managing time is an all important one. I am not going to try and convince you that you have plenty of time and can pray if you want to; I want to speak of managing time within the tensions, the rush of life. I will spare you any description of the way in which one can make time: I will only say that if we try and waste a little less of it, there will be more of it. If we use crumbs of wasted time to try to build short moments for recollection and prayer, we may discover that there is quite a lot of it. If you think of the number of empty minutes in a day when we will be doing something because we are afraid of emptiness and of being alone with ourselves, you will realise that there are plenty of short periods which could belong both to us and to God at the same time. But what I want to speak about is something which I believe is more important. It is the way in which we can control and stop time. We can pray to God only if we are established in a state of stability and inner peace face to face with God, and these things release us from the sense of time – not objective time, the kind we watch – but the subjective sense that time is running fast and that we have no time left.
First of all I would like to draw your attention to something which we all know and we all discuss. There is absolutely no need to run after time to catch it. It does not run away from us, it runs towards us. Whether you are intent on the next minute coming your way, or whether you are completely unaware of it, it will come your way. The future, whatever you do about it, will become the present, and so there is no need to try and jump out of the present into the future. We can simply wait for it to be there, and in that respect we can perfectly well be completely stable and yet move in time, because it is time that moves. You know the situation when you are in a car or on a train and you sit back, if you are not driving, and you look out of the window; you can read, you can think, you can relax and yet the train moves, and at a certain moment, what was the future, whether it is the next station or the last station to which you are going, will be present. I think this is very important. The mistake we often make with our inner life is to imagine that if we hurry we will be in our future sooner – a little like the man who ran from the last carriage of the train to the first, hoping that the distance between London and Edinburgh would be shortened as a result. When it is that kind of example we see how absurd it is, but when we continually try to live an inch ahead of ourselves, we do not feel the absurdity of it. Yet that is what prevents us from being completely in the present moment, which I dare say is the only moment in which we can be, because even if we imagine that we are ahead of time or ahead of ourselves, we are not. The only thing is that we are in a hurry, but we are not moving more quickly for this. You must have seen that more than once. Someone with two heavy suitcases, trying to catch a bus, rushes: he is as quick as he can be, he runs as fast as the suitcases allow, and he is all intent on being where he is not.
- from Beginning to Pray by Metr. Anthony Bloom
The tragedy of our times lies in our almost complete unawareness, or unmindfulness, that there are two kingdoms, the temporal and the eternal. We would build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, rejecting all idea of resurrection or eternity. Resurrection is a myth. God is dead.
Let us go back to Biblical revelation, to the creation of Adam and Eve and the problem of original sin. ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1.5). The commandment given to the first-called in Paradise indicates this and at the same time conveys that, although Adam possessed absolute freedom of choice, to choose to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would entail a break with God as the sole source of life. By opting for knowledge of evil – in other words, by existentially associating with evil, by savouring evil – Adam inevitably broke with God, Who can in no way be joined with evil (cf. 2 Cor. 6.14-15). In breaking with God, Adam dies. ‘In the day that thou eatest thereof,’ thus parting company with me, rejecting my love, my word, my will, ‘thou shalt surely die’ (Gen. 2.17). Exactly how Adam ‘tasted’ the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not important. His sin was to doubt God, to seek to determine his own life independently of God, even apart from Him, after the pattern of Lucifer. Herein lies the essence of Adam’s sin – it was a movement towards self-divinisation. Adam could naturally wish for deification – he had been created after the likeness of God – but he sinned in seeking this divinisation not through unity with God but through rupture. The serpent beguiled Eve, the helpmeet God had made for Adam, by suggesting that God was introducing a prohibition which would restrict their freedom to seek divine plenitude of knowledge – that God was unwilling for them to ‘be as gods knowing good and evil’ (Gen. 3.5)….
The fate of the world troubled me profoundly. Human life at whatever stage was unavoidably interlinked with suffering. Even love was full of contradictions and bitter crises. The seal of destruction lay everywhere.
I was still a young man when the tragedy of historical events far outdid anything that I had read in books. (I refer to the outbreak of the First World War, soon to be followed by the Revolution in Russia.) My youthful hopes and dreams collapsed. But at the same time a new vision of the world and its meaning opened before me. Side by side with devastation I contemplated rebirth. I saw that there was no tragedy in God. Tragedy is to be found solely in the fortunes of the man whose gaze has not gone beyond the confines of this earth. Christ Himself by no means typifies tragedy. Nor are His all-cosmic sufferings of a tragic nature. And the Christian who has received the gift of the love of Christ, for all his awareness that it is not yet complete, escapes the nightmare of all-consuming death. Christ’s love, during the whole time that He abode with us here, was acute suffering…. This is how it is with the Christian: for all his deep compassion, his tears and prayers for the world, there is none of the despair that destroys. Aware of the breath of the Holy Spirit, he is assured of the inevitable victory of Light. The love of Christ, even in the most acute stress of suffering (which I would call the ‘hell of loving’), because it is eternal is free of passion. Until we achieve supreme freedom from the passions on this earth suffering and pity may wear out the body but it will only be the body that dies…
We may say that even today mankind as a whole has not grown up to Christianity and continues to drag out an almost brutish existence. In refusing to accept Christ as Eternal Man and, more importantly, as True God and our Savior – whatever the form the refusal takes, and whatever the pretext – we lose the light of the eternal…. When we choose Christ we are carried beyond time and space, beyond the reach of what is termed ‘tragedy’….
The soul may return to this world. But the spirit of man, having experienced his resurrection and come near existentially to eternity, is even further persuaded that tragedy and death are the consequence of sin and that there is no other way to salvation than through Christ.
-from ch. 4 in His Life is Mine by Archimandrite Sophrony
The weather shifts from cloudy to clear and then back to rain: thus it is with human nature. One must always expect clouds to hide the sun sometimes. Even the saints have had their dark hours, days and weeks. They say then that “God has left them” in order that they may know truly how utterly wretched they are of themselves, without His support. These times of darkness, when all seems meaningless, ridiculous and vain, when one is beset by doubt and temptations, are inevitable. But even these times can be harvested for good.
The dark days can best be conquered by following the example of St. Mary of Egypt. For forty-eight years she dwelt in the desert beyond Jordan, and when temptations befell her and memories of her former sinful life in Alexandria beckoned her to leave her voluntary sojourn in the desert, she lay on the ground, cried to God for help and did not get up until her heart was humbled. The first years were hard; she sometimes had to lie this way for many days; but after seventeen years came the time of rest.
On such days stay quiet. Do not be persuaded to go out into social life or entertainment. Do not pity yourself, seek comfort in nothing but your cry to the Lord: Haste thee, O God, to deliver me! Make haste to help me, O Lord (Psalm 70:1)! I am so fast in prison that I cannot get forth (Psalm 88:8), and other such appeals. You cannot expect real help from any other source. For the sake of chance relief do not throw away all your winnings. Pull the covers over your head: now your patience and steadfastness are being tried. If you endure the trial, thank God who gave you strength. If you do not, rise up promptly, pray for mercy and think: I got what I deserved! For the fall itself was your punishment. You had relied too much on yourself and now you see what it led to. You have had an experience; do not forget to give thanks.
-The Way of the Ascetics by Tito Colliander
