the roundedness of things

At the end of the summer A. and I made a guide to filling our days, something we did a long time ago to fill those pockets of time together with good things. Our list for September included: more porch dinners, visiting friends in Asheville, biking the downtown trail, singing on the kitchen floor, church vacation and finding spike ball friends. There were plenty of things we didn't get to (going to the swimming hole, picnicking in the gardens, etc.)—we'll have to carry those over to October, which is now, somehow, just around the corner.

After a three-week hiatus, I really am just in the mood to cook, cook everything! Tonight we made these sorrel pesto rice bowls, and I want to make this banana bread with muscovado and chocolate. I also want to get some chard from the market to make chard with chickpeas, lemon, and tomatoes.

I have just started working with a 4x5 view camera, and it is everything. There is just something extraordinary about throwing a dark cloth over your head and staring at a reversed, upside-down image on the ground glass—something I have never felt with a digital camera, or even a 35mm camera.

A poem out in the world, and Frank Ocean's Blonde all the time.

These words, which A. sent my way:

"When Jesus warned, 'everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,' he spoke, apparently, of two alternative mistakes and not only one, a false self-promotion and a false self-humiliation, both in need of correction. The reality that exposes false pretensions catches up with us, not only to throw us down from heights of importance we have arrogated to ourselves, but also to dig us up from bunkers of insignificance we have hollowed out for ourselves. Hiding like Saul among the baggage, we shall be dragged uncomfortably before those who expect something of us. Perhaps, after all, there is truth in the suggestion that the two failings join hands behind the curtain, that modest invisibility is not very different from boastful self-promotion. Whether publicizing oneself or shrinking from publicity, one hopes to avoid the candid gaze that sees through one's self-image. What is required is that we know ourselves as we are known. To refuse self-knowledge is to refuse to find ourselves in the world God loves, to refuse to love ourselves." 

(Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, Volume II, 54-55)

[singing on the kitchen floor, a favorite activity, 35mm]