Handprints

Ava and I made a Thanksgiving card for Nicole, and Kaci sent us one she made with Eloise.

I love these precious hands and the precious girls they are attached to!!

This makes so much sense....

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology. And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid.

“And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

“The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?” -- Pope Francis

Weezy Time

I went down and took care of Eloise during conference time.  So fun to hang out with her!  She loves the park near her house.

New Ways of Thinking

It's all so much bigger than I thought.  It's more complex, though not necessarily complicated.  It's deeper, and wider and fuller than I realized.  God, and in a connected way, Truth, are so much more than I knew.

And I didn't just wake up one day and realize this.  It's been a gradual dawning...piece by piece, truth by truth, depth by depth.  I treasure simplicity, and I still believe in the simplicity of truth, but the edges are fuzzier and the depths...well it turns out they may be limitless.  Things don't wrap up as neatly as I thought, into tidy packets of certainty, but what I've lost in terms of surety and clean edges I've traded for breathtaking wide open spaces filled with seemingly endless possibilities.

I absolutely love

Friday Harbor!

We enjoyed a getaway on a groupon there in early October.  We stayed at the Earthbox Inn and had fun exploring the town and beach.

Some of the parks were closed because of the government shutdown, but luckily Lime Kiln Park is a state, not federal, park so it was open.

 We went to a lovely Thai restaurant before heading home.

 Ava got a rock skipping lesson from an expert....

 One of the great things about islands is that getting there and back is half the fun!

Paris

It's not always (or maybe even often?) true that highly anticipated experiences turn out to be as wonderful or even more so than the high expectations they created.

Paris sailed past the mark.

It really is a magical place, every bit as beautiful as anticipated.  The calm and largely seamless juxtaposition of ancient and modern, the serenity of the Seine that draws Parisians to it's banks all hours of the day and evening, the seemingly effortless elegance of Parisians, the warmth and friendliness we encountered everywhere, the breathtaking beauty of the gardens and the endless small touches of beauty everywhere you look, the deliciously simple food, the treasures of art right before your eyes....this list could go on for pages.

I was surprised by how deeply the cathedrals affected me.  I'd always considered myself a 'low church' kind of girl, and thought of the old cathedrals as maybe a bit ostentatious and...wasteful?  But the sweeping architecture, the simple furnishings, the intricate detail, the candles, the quiet beauty were very moving.  We must have visited 20+ cathedrals throughout our time in France and Switzerland, and I never lost the sense of awe upon entering one.  In some ways they were all similar, with a continuity of basic design, but each one was unique in it's detail and emphasis.  Most are still houses of worship today, so there was not a museum feel to them, but a living sense of worship continuing throughout the generations and centuries.


Before we left home I'd read 'A Moveable Feast" and 'The Paris Wife' simultaneously.  So one highlight of the trip was visiting the Shakespeare Book Company, a British bookstore frequented by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound and others.  I bought a copy of The Great Gatsby there.

Le Jardin des Tuileries and Le Jardin du Luxembourg were names I learned in french class when I was 16.  Now I have beautiful images in my own memory to go with the names.  Both so very lovely, and so well used by the Parisians.

All in all, this sums it up....

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” --Henry David Thoreau