I love Advent. I love new years, new months, new weeks, and new mornings all fresh and bright. But in Advent our mornings are dark - the sun rises late and sets early. Already the sky is streaked with purple.
This autumn has been a time of deep reflection for me, despite my lazy attempts to distract myself with social media and creamy lattes. The trends toward discordance in the world around me are draining and overwhelming..I can feel it influencing my mind and my heart. I see it creeping into my relationships with my children even - I'm less patient with them, my thoughts are elsewhere.
The day after voting for an acceptable candidate in a sea of hate-filled voices, I began again to reshape my life according to love. As Advent begins I am working to make this life more fully a thing of beauty. I've written our a rule of life for myself, one that pulls to prominence the people I love, the relationships I cherish, the order and ritual I need to thrive. A part of that rule is a sub-rule, a readjustment of my online presence: limiting social media time (my goal is to order my instagram and blogging time to be a peaceful and beautiful contribution to my way of life, while reducing my time on platforms like facebook to brief evening or weekend visits. I have friends there that I do want to keep up with, but the site itself tends to drain my time and interrupt the tangible interactions in life).
What do I want my time to be filled with?
I keep breaking this question down into tiny bites of thought. Partially because my children are always biting up my thoughts into tiny pieces with their contributions. Just now, Ilya brought me a painted parasol and my image of time being filled was altered to include the parasol, my sweet boy, and a coffee shop where neither he nor his sister could distract from my writing..possibly with a hazelnut latte beside me.
Generally though, my responses come in collected impressions: beauty, quiet times, order, simplicity - possibly touched with minimalism, play, conversations late into the night or on lazy mornings with coffee and grapefruits or danish, teaching gently, praying often, sewing, sweeping, reading..slow and simple and gentle.
What do you want your life to look like? To feel like?
How can we make these visions real?
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