Edith Schaeffer, Susan Schaeffer MacCaulay, Charlotte Mason, and Me (HaH Chapter 4 Drawing)

As if to prove that ideas do have consequences, I came to the idea of drawing through Charlotte Mason and I came to Charlotte Mason through Edith Schaeffer's daughter, Susan Schaeffer MacCaulay.

As with all things artistic in our family my husband has all the talent. His nature notebook will be something to pass down to the children and grandchildren. Mine is just an example of doing it anyway.  In fact, when I first thought about reading this chapter, I thought it would be a non-starter for me. What could I say about drawing?  Then I remembered the nature notebooks. Over the years I came to firmly believe in the value of drawing and looking at nature. Drawing is a way of seeing, like a metaphor.

Here are 3 pics from my nature notebook:

 And here are a few from Tim's. Even his handwriting is nice.

The accumulation of nature notebooks reminds me of the good things that have happened in our home over the years. I am so thankful we tried in spite of obstacles and often lack of talent. I think our nature notebooks might be my favorite family artifacts.


Favorite Drawing Resources:


 



And my new favorite nature notebook compilation blog:

Nature Sketchers

Hidden Art Chapter 4 Linky

 

 I will let you in on a little secret. I am headed to the beach for a week in a few days.  Reading this chapter reminds me that I must pack my nature notebook-the one with only 3 entries in a year.

 

Talent-Schmalent: Music in Our Home

Music. I love music. I have not been given one iota of musical talent but I still love listening to music and enjoying the talents of others.

In spite of my own weakness in this area, my husband is gifted. He has a beautiful voice and he plays the guitar, so our house was not totally devoid of the joy of making music. In fact, we have great memories of group sings when we lived in Greenwich, NJ and several of our friends could sing and play guitar. Lots of hippie Christian singing. "I was driving in the front seat...." (Love Song)



My very first curriculum fair purchase was a basket of those kindergarten instruments. I spent $100.00 on this noise-making ensemble and we learned to hide the basket when we had company. What was I thinking?

For years I tried to turn us into some sort of singing family minus me. We had these Homestyle Harmony tapes. Sometimes Tim would sing publicly with the boys and a couple of times this turned out to be beautiful but it all ended one year when we tried singing a Whiter Than Snow/White Christmas rendition at a Christmas concert. We were so bad none of the kids would ever try a group sing again and that was the end of matching shirts too.  My mom did try sending matching yellow shirts that Easter but my kids almost never forgave when a lady in the row behind us squealed, "Oh, look at all the yellow duckies."

Over the years the boys played harmonicas and recorders and finally piano and guitar.

Timothy inherited my grandmother's ability to sit down at the piano and play any tune he had heard once.  He also took lessons from a very strict teacher. He needed that to balance out his gifted ear. While other people often were amazed when he could sit down and play amazing renditions of songs, I was amazed when he could read difficult music. For years we fell asleep listening to him play the piano in the hall. I miss those days. 

Nicholas, Benjamin, Nathaniel and Andrew have all taken up the guitar but Andrew has carried that to new levels using Jam Play and You Tube. Our neighbor is a gifted guitarist so he helps Andrew too.

And then there is that time of day when we get out our family hymn notebooks, close the windows, and sing hymns during MT. When we finish going through the hymnbook this last time, those days will be over but we will still sing together as a family during get-togethers (the Gloria Patria), Reformation Day (A Mighty Fortress), Christmas car trips (Silver Bells), Christmas Eve (Silent Night), radio sing-alongs and living room dance parties.

I tried to introduce the children to classical music and at first it seemed like maybe it hadn't 'taken' since they all liked a weird array of musical styles including, at times such awful music as Barry Manilow and Kenny Rogers, but all of the children have grown up to continue to listen to classical music and for that I am thankful. You can enjoy Lynyrd Skynyrd and Handel!

The Hidden Art of Homemaking Chapter 3 Linky

Photograph by Emily

I am listening to Barber's Adagio for Strings this morning.

 What are you listening to?

The Hidden Art of Bearing Children in a Culture of Death

I am reading John Senior's The Death of Christian Culture.

I bought it to have his book list on hand: The Thousand Good Books.

Senior was a Catholic writer and the mentor of James Taylor of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education fame.

In spite of the fact that I am not a Catholic I am finding this book to be the clearest treatise on culture and Christianity that I have read. I found the following passages especially profound on the subject of motherhood and the general demise of respect for life. He uses a story of the trial of an abortion of a deformed child as the backdrop for his observations. In light of the recent Gosnell trial, I found Senior's thoughts helpful.  It is also pertinent to our reading of Hidden Art too.

"It is like walking up an escalator, or swimming with the current – to beget children, to love children, to encourage their growth, to ease their sufferings, and to suffer oneself with them even to our death. How could they have said, “Kill her, kill her!” And the court concurred, the mob roared its approval, and “joyous bedlam reigned”? No child was ever so deformed as that mother, those doctors, that court, and that crowd. And now the universities and the mass media feed poor girls honey and barbiturates day and night, injecting all the bitter, anti-Christian doctrine of lethal liberation, killing warm, admiring, youthful hearts, to leave the husks of lesbians and amazons who hate to cook and sew, whom no young man can love, for whom a child, if it occurs, is called a parasitic growth, scraped into a refuse pail, and rendered into soap."

"But the chilling truth is that industrialism brings on a paralyzing gluttony and greed in which the quality of life is quantified. Paradoxically, you cannot afford to have children in the affluent society. The world has never been so rich and wretched as in these air-conditioned Edens where another child would sap the payments on the second car. There is no population bomb today. Quite the opposite: the question is whether industrialized society can reproduce itself at all."

Chapter 2 Linky for Hidden Art

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

I thought this poem nicely illustrated the idea of hidden art.

Chapter 2: What is Hidden Art?

Picture by Me. Hidden Art and Emily have inspired me to try and capture the minor areas of beauty in my home.

"I would define 'Hidden Art' as the art which is found in the minor areas of life." Edith Schaeffer


I loved this chapter. I loved this chapter. 

I loved it because I am not especially artistic or even creative. I love beauty but I have never been able to do much in ways that are typically considered artistic or creative.  I love being a homemaker though. I love bringing truth, beauty and goodness into the lives of my family through food, books, ideas, music and environment.  Homemaking is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life.

I love how realistic Edith is. This is not some pie-in-the-sky ideal of beauty where we are required to prove our bona fides by cutting off our ears. This is about finding beauty in our messy lives with our messy priorities.

"To develop 'Hidden Art' will also, of course, take time and energy-and the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for us: what to do, and what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else."

Never said a better word, dear Edith. A mother generally lays her head on the pillow each night with the list of things undone playing in her mind. Edith says that is life.

 We all do things and don't do things.

 "Of course something is being neglected every day. That is the finite bit of humanity asserting itself."

This short chapter is a pep talk for contentment. 'Hidden Art' is something good. We should not turn it into something that makes us peevish and, as Edith says, Eeyore-ish.

With that in mind, what minor areas of life do you find hidden art in?

What is something you did today to make your environment a better place?

What made you smile today?

Can you tell us an example of an object 'd art n your life today?




Do tell!!

Here is mine:

A few years ago, I met an Internet friend in real life. She gave me a bar of lavender soap which she had brought back from France where she lived for a while. That soap is so pretty I cannot bring myself to use it. It sits in my bathroom window and I love it. I am sure I should cast  my soap upon the waters and trust that more soap will come my way but IT came from the actual country of France and it reminds me of a friend and it makes my bathroom pretty. When I bought a new shower curtain I kept the color of the soap in mind. The shower curtain is green toile and the soap is lavender and my bathroom is very pretty when it is clean.

(Linky will go up in a different post on Tuesday morning. You are not restricted to posting on Tuesday as this post illustrates. Just add your post to the Linky when it is published. That is what I am going to do.)

Cottleston Pie

It is raining. Praise the Lord it is raining. Our house is a mess and the floor is sticky.  I am almost getting tired of baseball but the Covenant regular season is over and soon the Chatt. State season will end.  Andrew's last regular season games are Monday and Tuesday. All I have to do is get through the tournaments. The rest of the summer will be Alex's All-Stars....and several sons playing adult league (sorry but I can't take those games. 9 inning games in August?) and Andrew's summer league.  I am so happy baseball is an outdoor sport.

I am enjoying all of your posts very much and I am committed to reading every one. If I were a better multitasker I would be able to keep up with comments better. I often read them at the baseball field where it is hard to comment back. But be assured I am reading. This next week is going to be a killer for me with a big family celebration on Saturday for which I must put down my book and start cooking and maybe washing sheets and stuff like that.

I am trying something new in my exercise program. I went through a month long plateau in my weight loss until recently losing 6 more pounds. It is so frustrating that the weeks I exercise more I lose less or gain. It is a mystery. No comments please about muscle weighing more than fat. It has been hard for me to figure out how much to eat when I am exercising and I suspect I do not eat enough.  Recently while reading on Dr. Mercola's site I decided to try HIIT workouts.   First I took a week off from all exercise, then I started my HIIT routine. On two days a week I run the 8 reps suggested by Dr. Mercola and on two days I do 13 weight machines at high intensity. I only do 12 reps for each machine and I aim to make the last 2 reps nearly impossible. I lift slowly and pause along the way.  Hopefully this will help me. For now it is just an experiment but it is hard to figure out how to eat because I do not get a lot of  extra Weight Watchers points for these exercises since they take me quite a bit less time than my former workout but I am hungrier and I suspect that while I am not burning up as many calories during the exercise, I am burning up quite a bit more during the following 24 hour period. We shall see.

Now that I am not obese, my new weight loss goal is to NOT be overweight .  I am happy to say that the size 10's I just bought a few weeks ago are already too big on me. When I bought them they were a bit snug but Emily insisted I not buy 12's and I am so happy I listened to her. I still have fat arms which make me look big in pictures. This is discouraging. I am afraid I will always have fat arms. The truth is I thought if I got down to a size 10 I would be skinny but I am still shaped like me just a smaller round me.  Still it is so nice not to have to buy clothes in the plus sizes. It took me 2 years to go from an 20/18 to a 14.

Finally, I would like to tell you about a new homeschooling resource. My friend, Beth Harvey, has started a study center: The Harvey Center for Family Learning. Beth has a vision for moms and children. Beth held my hand for years as I learned Latin on my own and tried teaching my own children. I am very excited about Beth's vision because she has a balanced view of education having homeschooled 3 very different sons. Beth has also recruited some of the smartest women around to teach and her prices are affordable. If you need someone to hold your hand then check out The Harvey Center.

All or Nothing: Hidden Art

"Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding" I Corinthians 10:12

Photograph by Emily Rollins

As we begin our study I want to remind us all of one of my favorite Edith Schaeffer sayings, "If you want all or nothing, you get nothing."

As we explore the art in our own lives and look at what others are doing there is a temptation to be discontent. That is the last thing I want happening in this study. Hidden art may be hidden in ugly places.

This study is a place to share your successes and I look forward to seeing some amazing things but it is not a place for comparison. Do not let someone else's talent or view make you unhappy with your own.  In fact, I especially look forward to hearing how you found beauty and art in unexpected places or hard places, poor places where money was lacking.

One of my greatest concerns in this Internet age is the pressure young women face. The whole idea of branding can make us wonder who we are?  Even Pinterest can create sadness as we long for things and places and lives we do not have. Our friend's expression of her talent in creating amazing birthday parties can make our small family celebration seem obscene. We need to find a way to appreciate the talents of others while accepting the talents that God gave us.

You will never have it all.  Over the years I have had to accept that I cannot DO as much as some women. I quickly fall apart when life gets too complicated or busy. Because of that trait, I learned to stay home more than most people and because I learned to stay home to preserve my sanity, I learned
 that my children benefited from being home and having time to read and think and play.  My weakness produced fruit. Fruit that I like.

I am also not a good cook. Oh, I know how to make a delicious meal for my family. I know how to pick the best recipes. I just don't know how to put down a book and head to the kitchen. I greatly admire those women I know who faithfully cook for their families every single night. I greatly admire women who throw themselves into feeding their families. I used to do that more than I do now but I have accepted that I cannot do it all.  I have my priorities and you have yours.  To our own master we stand and fall.

Tell us where your hidden art lies; it will be a joy for us to behold but don't let the talents of others cause you to feel inadequate. If you are inspired to try something new-great!!!  Inspiration is good; comparison is bad.

You can't have it all, I promise.

"But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor." Galatians 6:4

Hidden Art Bookclub Begins...

Picture by Emily Rollins

The Hidden Art of Homemaking

 I was not expecting this much interest in the book club but I am happy to have so many wanting to read The Hidden Art of Homemaking and discuss it.

The rules are simple. There are 14 chapters in the book; we will try to cover 1 chapter a week. For those who have not gotten their books yet some of the chapters are very short so you should not have any trouble catching up.

 If you have a blog then use the Linky to post a link to your blog post for the week. If you do not have a blog you can join the conversation in my comments and/or the other links' comments.

You can also link to your blog posts on the Pinterest board. Mystie did this and it works well.
Pinterest works two ways. One is that you simply follow the board to see what people are posting. Two, I send you an invite and then you can post to the board. If you followed the board already I tried to send out an invite to you but I am sure I have missed a few so email me if you would like an invite to post on the Pinterest board.

Today you can add links to your post on chapter 1 The First Artist.  Renee suggested that we all introduce ourselves. Please do that in the comments. I can tell you the older women who read this book 20 years ago are very excited that the younger women are here to give us a fresh look at these things and also it is fun to remember how we applied this years ago compared to how we apply it today. Younger women, bear with us.

I am looking forward to reading your posts. I may have to do it at the ball park but I will do it.

Also you can post multiple times in a week if you have ideas which spring from the chapter. I hope I will. Your posts or comments can be rehashing the chapter or just using the chapter as a springboard for other ideas. Both kinds of posts are helpful.

So go ahead and introduce yourself.