Monday morning

10:45 a.m.

Quiet house again--but this time, with three children in it. It's a foggy morning, so the outside is cool gray and green.  I made a fire earlier, and those of us here are perfectly content to be quietly engaged with our various activities.

It's a "fun school" week for us.  I've made a list for the younger three with some vaguely educational activities: things like reading aloud to youngers, working on craft projects, playing their online typing game, practicing instruments, playing with wooden math manipulatives.  So Merry is writing a letter to a friend who has recently moved away. Happy is finishing her morning routine in the bedroom, and is singing to herself quietly.  Smiley is engrossed in a little craft I just picked up this morning from Terry, our wonderful school liaison. It's a Christmas craft--and I so don't care about seasonal appropriateness at this moment.

Sunny has not been a presence here for weeks now.  At the very beginning of this month she went along with her "special same age friend" Tegan and her parents on a roadtrip--Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming. The Tetons, Yellowstone Park.  It was an incredible opportunity for adventure, and I can't wait to hear all about it. She got home yesterday afternoon around 4--just in time for her to shower and us all to get to the 5pm service at church. Then we stayed for the church dinner after, and chatted with people we had just met and helped put away tables and chairs, and by the time we got home it was time for her to shower and get ready for bed (and for her sisters to shower her with presents they had made her), and we only heard snatches of her trip before ten o'clock was upon us and Mommy was demanding lights out and quiet.

Now this morning she's starting her first day of Girls In Engineering camp!  I don't remember how we heard about this, but she applied and was accepted to a FREE week-long day camp  held at UC Santa Cruz.  It appears to be geared for girls from the local Spanish-speaking communities, to get them interested in careers in the sciences.  UCSC is sending a bus all the way down to Salinas to pick up girls (about an hour away) and is stopping at several other predominantly Spanish-speaking communities on the way.  So the girls who attend the camp get free transportation, free snacks, free lunch--so cool!  I'm very glad such opportunities exist for disadvantaged girls--and that we are getting to join in too.  So this morning I got her up and ready and off to the pick up location, and we won't see her again until pick up at 3:30.  Then I imagine she will need a quiet time, and then I have a feeling there will be talking and listening galore until bedtime.

I have a list for me today: some computer research, book reading, cooking. Not actually all that much--I'm super tired today for some reason, and just want to be quietly productive.  But as I sat down with my tea and blogs this morning, I came across a couple of really interesting articles, which perfectly correlate with some of the things which have been in my mind recently.  So I'm taking some time this morning to write.  I'm a little gloomy in spirit today--I think my cell phone might have been stolen on Saturday while I was at the Laundromat, and I feel frustrated and isolated and a little violated.  (So, don't try to call me--email is my only link to the outside world at the moment.) 

My gloom inside is being matched outside--during the time I've been sitting here writing, the light outside has darkened, and the house inside is almost dim enough to need lights turned on.  But I'm not going to do that--artificial lights turned on when it should be daylight is one of the most depressing things ever.  I've felt that way ever since I was a child.  I remember days at Dr. Howard Elementary School that were so stormy and dark outside that the teacher turned on the bright overhead lights and pulled down the shades--perhaps the storm was drawing our attention away from the classroom activities, or perhaps he thought it was safer.  But the effect--of harsh, unnatural light against those long, yellowed roller blinds, with the blackness still seeping in on the edges--I've never forgotten.  Similarly, I remember those winter nights in my parent's home when the blinds in the breakfast nook were pulled down when we had dinner at 5 pm, and that feeling I would get of it being wrong somehow, and of feeling trapped.

Whoo!  Time to get up and move and listen to some good music. I'm not really this dark inside--no worries. But it's probably no coincidence that the mental images coming to me now are of the efforts we humans sometimes make to hunker down and be safe and cozy, in a way that seems an unconscious (and ineffective) denial of the darkness outside.  The inside--bright and secure--seems unreal, or perhaps surreal, while the outside is darkness--cold and growing, and feeling very real.

My world feels a little like that at the moment, even on the sunny days.  It's unsafe out there. Heck, it's sometimes unsafe in here.  But I'm not called to safety, or to sunshine.

I'm called to be transformed.

On a MUCH lighter and totally related note:  listen to the first 30 seconds of this for a good laugh.

And have a Good day, however you spend it.