quiet saturday...

It has been wonderful to be home all day. Sometimes I get so caught up in seeing everyone and doing everything in my short breaks that I forget the important things: praying, walking, breathing, resting, reading, serving, etc.

I took a walk this morning and had a bowl of Acai with granola at a little cafe by my house. Then I spent time studying humanity with Dorothy L. Sayers and exploring the ideas behind guerilla art. A strange combination, but it worked well. Both books deal with the ways we as humans relate to our vocations and surroundings. You can go through life on auto-pilot, working at a job and never seeing the pattern made by the cracks in the sidewalk, or you can choose to engage. It's not easy to keep your mind and heart and sight active.

In the introduction to Sayers' essay, Mary McDermott Shideler explains: We are all equal in our creaturehood, whatever our sex, color, age, background, or abilities. But we are all different in the functions we were created to perform, as different as water from stones, and engineering from imaginative fiction. Therefore the primary task in living, for any human being, is to find and do the work for which he or she was created.

Keri Smith writes about street art as a way to enrich the world around us: In an urban environment it becomes necessary to form a direct connection with the landscape, with aspects of the natural world, or with a greater community. Creating street art is one way to foster that connection. By adding to the landscape I am reclaiming it as my own--I am now an active participant in how it operates and a partial creator of its complex language. ...For a moment I am taken out of my known world and presented with an alternative, one that is unexpected and daring, one that makes me thing about the space a little differently. These little gestures...reawaken a sense of connection to the environment by pointing out something I might not have seen, but adding a new image to the world that is unexpected, or by presenting an alternate point of view.

My other grand Saturday achievement, aside from finishing the fourth Thursday Next book, spending more Christmas money on itunes, and a lot of baking, was to learn a song on the guitar. One of my 2008 Goals [in addition to monthly-plus acts of guerilla art] is to be more musical: play piano more frequently and learn more than a couple of chords on the guitar. It seemed appropriate to start out with a simple homage to my favorite movie, Stranger than Fiction. Only two chords, yes, but it qualifies as a real song. Come on, it's in a movie. Totally legit. [see the moviegoer, by walker percy, for more information on the idea that film legitimizes or 'certifies' something for modern humanity]

Sometimes it takes a whole Saturday to prepare your heart and mind for Sunday. I'm sad that it's my last day at church for a while [grad countdown is 4 months and 5 days!], but I'm excited to worship.

I think I hear the timer for my poppyseed cake going off...