5 favorites: surprise discoveries in May

--1--

stitch fix

When my Mom visited in April she mentioned I might like this personal shopping service.  I signed up then and there, have already received my first shipment and can hardly wait for the second.  I did not take the time to take pretty pictures of the shipment or the pretty clothes inside.  For other bloggers' great photos click here, here or here.

I told my kind-but-quizzical husband "It's like Netflix for clothes!"  Well, it is.  Sort of.  

And while I'm a bargain basement shopper (read: "Good Will") for most of my clothes I like the idea of supplementing my wardrobe a piece or two at a time with quality, curated items.  

[While I don't receive any compensation for this blog review the post does include a referral link that gives me credit if you sign up and schedule your own style fix!]

--2--

body pump

Add this to the long list of things about my life that surprise me.  I'm not only taking a group exercise class (yay for the YMCA!) but it involves lifting stuff, a lot of times in a row.  

And I love it.  I'm trying to go twice a week on my lunch break from work.  It's a long lunch break and I hope my employers will continue to be gracious.

Read what my friend (and inspiration) Katie had to say about her own surprise relationship with Body Pump.

--3--

yoga

I'm participating in group exercise.

With the word "holy" in the title of the class.

On a yoga mat.  

In Austin, Texas.

Wonders never cease.

And I'm so grateful for the generous hospitality our instructor Sara provides.  I am a total beginner and haven't stretched this much since high school cheerleading days.  I never realized how good it would feel to incorporate breathing and balance with strength.  My body is soaking it up after too many years of neglect.  

I also underestimated the power of physical movement to provide physical rest and quiet.  The final moments of each class are reserved for us to do nothing but lay still, breathe, pray, rest.  Healthy for mind, body and soul.

--4--

Groovebook

A couple of months ago I joined 21st century and purchased an iPhone.  Around the same time I stumbled on this photo app and wish I'd had a smart phone and GrooveBook app for the 22 1/2 years I've been a parent.  

In short:  you can download the app for free and then get your phone photos made into a photo album each month for $2.99. (That includes shipping!) Really, it's that easy.  

If you're interested in trying it out, feel free to use my coupon code to get your first GrooveBook free: MURPHY1287

The photos are not the best quality I've ever printed (the photo paper is a bit thin) but what with the price, the simplicity of uploading from my phone it's a worthy trade off for me. Did I mention the photos are perforated so you can take it out of the booklet and use however you'd like?  Also, you can choose to have the book sent to someone else or order more copies (at the same price) for friends and family.

Really, it's a no brainer.

--5--
West Austin Studio Tour

I've never been able to attend one of the annual East Austin Studio Tours and barely noticed that the part of Austin west of I-35 had their own event (this is the 3rd year) UNTIL, well it's a kind of long story. But it involves a power outage in my neighborhood last Friday night in which everyone stood around in the street outside my neighbor's house, sharing beers and gossip.  And that's where I met Scotty Stevenson whose backyard meets our backyard at a chain link fence.  And that's when I found out Scotty is an artist and that he was #39 on the West Austin Studio tour.  When I walked over Sunday afternoon I found 2 other locations in the tour on my very same street:  Chris Chappell and Yost Custom Wood.

Y'all.  This is one talented city block.  

You live in Austin?  There's still time to check out what artists in your neighborhood are hosting open houses during the West Austin Studio Tour.

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A good find week for us all, dear ones.

For more Five Favorites, visit Moxie Wife!!

A Chronology of Paying Attention (17): the time we got mac & cheese for a wedding gift

Apparently I've not written much about my high school years in this blog. I seem to be skipping from middle school era to marriage and motherhood.  Let's be honest -- that era was pretty short.  Today I'm re-sharing a post I wrote as a follow up to to the short essay I wrote for Think Christian in response to Chipotle's viral ad.

................

source

Twenty-two years ago -- and only a few months after our wedding day -- my husband and I knocked on the door of a church acquaintance’s apartment.  She’d invited us to join her and her three sons for dinner.  It was her wedding gift to us.  We were touched.  

We’d never been to her home before but we knew a good bit of her story.  Her on-again, off-again husband lived in prison.  Each time he got out he promised to sober up, quit the drugs and be her man.  Each time he left her jobless, pregnant and broke.  

Since her quiet invitation following service one Sunday I’d tried to imagine what dinner in her home would look, feel and taste like.  She weighed probably less than 100 pounds herself and I wondered what sort of food she had to offer.

We arrived to her hot kitchen, children and their toys cluttered bare floors.  She stood over a pot on the stove, stirring bubbling water.  On the counter a blue and gold box, cardboard lid ripped open, stood our entree:  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  

Frankly, I was relieved.  We knew this food.  It gave us something in common. Turned out the entree was the entire meal, we sat where we could find a seat, television blaring and enjoyed creamy noodles and awkward conversation.

It's one of the best gifts I've ever received.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

5 favorites: good finds online + Natalie's handsome nurse

Before sharing the list, a favorite image from the week:

My daughter was hit by a car one week ago today.  We are grateful beyond words that her injuries (a severe knee sprain) are not worse -- even though we don't yet know their full extent.  One of the many silver linings in the aftermath was the -- umm -- very attractive nurse who took care of her in the ER.  Hopefully this photo gives you enough of an idea while still protecting his identity.  Also, he may or may not have actually wiped tears from Natalie's face at one point.  This part of the story has allowed us to give Natalie quite a bit of teasing.

Five Favorites: good finds online 

-- 1 --

Phaedra's New Liturgical Art Commission at Diary of an Arts Pastor: "In a sense, I have begun to think of our whole lives as a kind of long Lent before a new and brilliant Easter, that day when Jesus returns as King. In this time in-between, you and I are invited to see our lives as perhaps brightly sad, rather than endlessly happy. Here in the regular course of our often not-exciting lives, we hold our hearts out to the Spirit, who knows all things, including the depths of our hearts, and we take halting steps towards the day when Jesus shall make all things new, despite our unclear paths and hearts that frequently grow faint."

-- 2 --

On Craftsmanship: The Only Surviving Recording of Virginia Woolf's Voice, 1937 at Brainpickings: "They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change."

-- 3 -- 

The Official Ranking of Prince George's Best Facial Expressions at BuzzFeed:  So this little guy's been around for a while and I've been missing out on all sorts of adorable!  May God bless his little exposed life.

-- 4 -- 

More than half the world's population lives inside this circle at We Come From the Future:  "What's truly noteworthy about this visualization is how clearly and effectively it conveys an astonishing truth about the world." And that most of the land inside the focal point is actually not land, but water.

-- 5 --

Grass, Water, Cows from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo: "In Argentina, beef is a way of life. But over the last few decades, the traditional methods of raising cows on grass has faded away, only to be replaced by the feedlot model. At Las dos Hermanas Ranch, they maintain the old ways of managing the grass, the water and the cows. "

The Perennial Plate

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A good find week for us all, dear ones.

For more Five Favorites, visit Moxie Wife!

A Chronology of Paying Attention (16): my family line of honeymoon babies

Apparently I've not written much about my high school years in this blog. I seem to be skipping from middle school era to marriage and motherhood.  Let's be honest -- that era was pretty short.  Today I've excerpted a post I originally titled Flying a Kite in a Hurricane and posted in August 2008 and again at Micha Boyett's One Good Phrase series:  One Good Quip (You Trust God to Keep You Safe at Night, but You Still Lock the Doors).

three generations of wedlock -- all 3 of us brides giving birth to our first baby about 9 months following the moment this photos were taken

My parents' parents didn't talk about sex. My parents began the conversation, but either they weren't speaking above a whisper or I wasn't listening. I managed to have my first son three days shy of nine months from the first time I ever had sex. When he was born I still wasn't sure I'd ever had it. I didn't care. I flew the kite of that beautiful baby boy for all the world to see.

We have a history of honeymoon babies in this family. It's pretty much legendary now. Possibly all this hushing up about sex has something to do with it. So I called my mother-in-law, the medical professional, from my honeymoon hotel room. Possibly we should know something about birth control, we thought. Of course, it was most likely too late by this point. Brian and I had spent about a half hour discussing it once during our engagement. He'd heard somewhere that the Pill could be dangerous so I blundered my way through my first ob/gyn visit and left holding some oddly-shaped doo dad that I was too embarrassed to let the family doctor know I hadn't understood the first thing about. (that thing is supposed to go where?)

During my growing-up years, the oldest child of six, my parents continued silently in their quest to limit the number of mouths they brought into existence. My dad's pastor/pauper paycheck and my mother's exhausted bouts with clinical depression probably had something to do with this. As far as I know now the only people offering advice were radical feminists and post-war baby boomer pious surbabanites. Not a lot of help. God kept sending them new kites of their own to fly. 

There comes a point when kite flying in stormy weather scares the hell out of you, but sometimes you know you're not the one controlling the string.

On the verge of being a mother myself, I had my first experience with mixing theology and sexuality. Experience is probably a gentle word. More like got bashed over the head by it. It was the era of the Pro-Life Political Movement and the Homeschooling Revolution and Operation Rescue and all that. 

The rhetoric blustering around me was heavy on the ideology, light on the theology. In this fear-filled cocoon, the Church had taught me that sex could be shameful.  Not only was losing one's virginity the unpardonable sin, paradoxically so was limiting the number of one's offspring. 

Soon enough we'd figured out how to "plan" baby number two, all without the aid of chemicals (or weird-looking doo dads), thank you very much.

Now I had self-righteous rhetoric on my side and I felt like I'd stumbled into the right "camp". Sometimes, you just get lucky and the storm's blowing the other way, you know? 

But idealism about family planning doesn't mean a speck when you've spent the day laying aside your every need as a human being to meet the needs of the arrows in your quiver and the nights sleep-walking from marriage bed to crib to toddler bed, only to end up slumped over a nursing infant and waking up thankful you didn't smother it to death. 

Idealism did not last through the storms of reality for me. And then I had baby number four. I'd been married six years. I was 26 years old. We'd been making a real salary for less than a year. I was tired.

So we, Brian and me, got interested in science real quick-like. The information was easy to come by, even before Google. Of course, we covered Theology, too. It consisted of getting sage advice wrapped in euphemisms from my grandmother and mother. The same women who didn't talk about sex were full of wisdom when they saw me teetering on the edge of the looney-bin. I am grateful to them to this day. 

You trust God to keep you safe at night, but you still lock the doors. 

I was more than relieved to agree that this must be true, even if it wasn't terribly deep. When you're teetering on the edge, sometimes a quip will do.

So we blundered and bumbled and stumbled our way through these ideas and truths about what it means to enjoy sex and to create children and to avoid creating new children and in the middle of all that uncertainty and shame and hushed and unspoken questions, I was schooled in the deepest theology of all:  that God is sovereign and full of grace and forgiveness. That it is not my wisdom or understanding that brings out the best in God. His expectations for me are surpassed by his delights. 

I do not deserve these four divinely created images of the one true God -- Andrew, Alexander, Kendra and Natalie. I do not deserve to be living in joy and harmony with my amazing, unplanned siblings and their own burgeoning families.

I will hold the end of the string - flying the beauty and hilarity of this gift of family that came down as lights from Heaven.  I'm hopeful for my own kids to know better than Brian and me the Church's better nature, the language of welcoming life founded in the nature of the Giver of life.  All of this while retaining a child-like trust that refuses to take our ideals too seriously.

And, in the middle of the blustering hurricanes, I will laugh as Abraham and Sarah at the holy absurdity of it all.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (15): mourning friends

there was the time you called me up and met me with your tandem bicycle 

we rode eight miles back to your house then

picked out all the rocks in the yard by your swimming pool

because your father wanted it.

only then we collapsed on the grass

and I cried next to you because he had broken up with me.

there was the time your uncle died

and I couldn't find the Polish church and almost missed

you singing at the funeral

but I walked in right in the middle of the song.

when you sat back down in the hard pew

next to me I held your hand

because I didn't know what else to do.

there was the New Year's Eve our house

caught fire and my babies' clothes

all smelled like smoke.

you said come over and bring your laundry.

you took the bags from me at your front door

and told us to sit on your couch and take a nap.

you covered us in the red and blue quilt.

there was the Sunday night at church

i was so mad  i banged the door handle 

to leave the room in the middle of the meeting.

when I came back to my seat even though I didn't want to,

you reached your arm back through the crack between the

maroon and metal chairs and touched your hand to the top 

of my shaking knee. and then i sat still.

there was the Friday morning we drove to your

parents' house instead of sitting at the dining room table

in Endwell to pray.

we brought sheet music and you brought out the 

hymn books and we tried to find all four notes in the harmony

while we stood around your mother's bed.  she smiled at us and 

craned her neck to the spoon your father held out with ice chips.

we played her piano and the toddler plunked extra notes.

that was the last time I saw your mother
before she died.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

Five Favorites: Books I Read in April + great online finds this week

a favorite image from the week

beautiful Passover Seder with dear friends

Five Favorites: my 2014 reading list

-- 1 --

11  A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor: (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. 40 pages plus photocopies of the author's journal pages) 

The more I read about her, the more dear she becomes to me.  These earnest pages of prayer were recently discovered among Flannery O'Connor's papers in Georgia.  I thinks the impact might be similar to the response we gave to the posthumous words of the likes of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Hebrew King David - doubt, anxiety and fear are a normal part of a life shaped by love for God and others.  With Ms. O'Connor they also come with a love for writing:

"Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work. I have the feeling of discouragement that is. I realize I don't know what I realize. Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted."

-- 2 --

12  Staying Put: Making a Home In A Restless World by Scott Russell Sanders: (Beacon Press, Boston, 1993. 194 pages) 

I don't quite remember where I discovered this title, but I enjoy reading those who value the meaning of place. Sanders writes from the perspective of one who has lost and now found the peace of living in place with a family he loves, finding peace in rootedness.  While I enjoyed the book, I found myself wishing the author would occasionally take himself a bit less seriously.  

-- 3 --

13  The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine, photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson: (W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. 142 pages, including full-color photographs)

April put me in a gardening mood. I spent more time reading about gardening than actually working in one, but we managed to get a small plot in the ground. At the time of this book's publication award-winning poet and master gardener Stanley Kunitz was planning his 100th birthday.  This book was lovingly conceived by those who admired his long years creating beauty in words and soil.  A lovely, relaxing read even though I occasionally felt sad for one so well-acquainted with beauty to seem so unfamiliar with it's true Source.

-- 4 --

14  St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton: (Image Books Doubleday, NY,NY. 1990. 158 pages)

Both Saint Francis and G.K. Chesterton are enigma to me -- in all of the most appealing ways.  The two -- one in his saintly excess, one in his saintly ascetic -- are perfectly suited literary journeymen.  Frankly, I can't follow all of Chesterton's turgid description but I soaked it all in with pleasure anyway.  As for the paradoxical monk, I'm glad to know him through the distance of centuries.  And hope to be just a tiny bit more like the best parts of his love for peace and the creaturely sacredness of our world.

-- 5 --

15  Adventure of Ascent: Field Notes from a Lifelong Journey by Luci Shaw (InterVarsity Press, 2014. 174 pages)

A warming Saturday morning read that, at times, felt more like a front-porch conversation with a woman in my grandmother's generation.  Luci Shaw is one of the writers I hope to emulate -- not in word only, but also in deed.  I'm glad she wrote this honest, yet hope-full, reflection on the act of aging toward inevitable death -- her adventure of ascent.  

A few favorite passages:

"Sometimes these changes feel volcanic and worrisome, as when my bladder doesn't heed my command to hang tight and I'm caught, embarrassingly, rushing for the nearest public bathroom in town and leaking along the way. Is this to be expected, and what am I to do about it? 

Oh, I know. Talk to my doctor about this or that prescription for "overactive bladder," a euphemism suggested to help one feel less mortified about bodily urgings: it's my bladder, not me, that needs help."

..... 

"Yet with Job, with Handel, I am learning to affirm, 'For though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God' (Job 19:26, as rendered in The Messiah).  I can hear the composer's tune in my mind. Is this what we can look forward to? No limited horizons, no more hearing loss, bloody noses, partisan politics, obstacles, canceled flights, stink of sweat, time limits, cracked bones, methane gas, sagging, underarm hair, global warming, wrinkles, aches, flue, yellowing teeth, floods, adipose tissue, tumors, tsunamis, cataracts, betrayals, myopia, hurricanes, irregular heartbeats, diverticuli, road rage, dementia, spider veins, erectile dysfunction, purple bruises, developmental defects, moles, anxieties, thinning hair, shame, delusions of grandeur, scars, lost socks, bald heads, unfulfilled dreams, longings for truth, oil spills, contracts, credit cards, debts, highway gridlock, meanness of spirit, discords, deserts, doubts, blizzards, deadlines... 

Dead-lines?"

*Go to my Book Pile page to see my reading lists from previous years.*

.....

Other good words online this week

• The iconic Boston bombing photograph isn't about my legs -- it's about a rescue by Jeff Bauman at The Guardian: "One year later, I've still only seen the Wheelchair Photo once. But it still proves that two losers can't beat three heroes."

• Bans on Sharing Food With the Homeless Persist at  Reason.com:  "Serving the needy[] is something we should reward, not criminalize..."  (This baffling issue is one I wrote about for Think Christian.)

• Easter With Flannery O'Connor by George Weigel at First Things: "O’Connor’s sense that ours is an age of nihilism—an age suffering from by a crabbed sourness about the mystery of being itself—makes her an especially apt apologist for today: not least because she also understood the evangelical sterility of the smiley-face, cheap-grace, balloons-and-banners Catholicism that would become rampant shortly after her death."

• Let's Not Get the Hell Out of Here by Timothy George at First Things: "Within the framework of redemptive history, it is also a chance to tweak the beard of the Evil One and remind him that his kingdom has been rattled: He is un roi prétendu. Despite the devil’s worst doings, God still reigns, Christ is risen, love conquers, and hilarity happens."

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A book-filled weekend for us all, dear ones.

For more Five Favorites, visit Moxie Wife!