August Musings

Busy, busy, busy. I always think my summer is going to be slow and relaxing, and that I'll be hanging out with friends and spending time at the little things I love, but that just never seems to be the case. Especially this summer. This has been the first where I've been working full time. Most of the time I'm helping at a small private ESL school, and once a week I'm a page at my local library. I enjoy working at both, but it is really hard to get up at 6:30 every morning. Almost painfully hard. But I really shouldn't be complaining, I'm so blessed to have these two wonderful jobs. As to the time that I am not working, here is some of what I've been up to...

HARVESTING

Dozens of buckets and bags full of our yard's apples and blackberries. We have so many this year that we can't even pick them all! Friends, family, come on over and help yourselves!

CREATING

Or rather, thinking of creating... I just bought a new mixed-media sketchbook, and I hope to spend more time on my weekends sketching and painting in it.

RELYING

So much on coffee. I have one cup every morning, maybe a bit more if I'm feeling particularly tired. It's my fuel for the day, and I have this terrible feeling that I'm becoming addicted...

DISCOVERING

That even though it's difficult for me to be working 9 hours a day, I like the steady schedule. I feel productive and motivated when I work this hard, and it is a good feeling.

READING

ABC Murders by Agatha Christie. I'm not entirely sure whether I like to read mystery stories or not - Agatha Christie's books are so good and so agonizingly suspenseful that I can't decide if the torture they put me through is truly worth it!

BEING
So beautifully content. Despite my complaints of being busy, I am actually having a truly wonderful summer, and am finding myself more and more content in life and in Him.

Be Joyful in the Good

 “Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.”

― Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI