Let the beauty we love be what we do....

From Bonhoeffer: Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.

oh, that I would learn that.

and a poem quoted in Traveling Mercies:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened
Don’t open the door to the study
And begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
-Rumi


We go to the beach with the kids tonite, I'm still in the process of convincing them they'll have a good time. :/ well, the teenagers that is. The little kids are pumped. I just have to decide if I want to sleep in the sand, or on top of a vehicle. I've never slept on the roof of a car before, so that might be fun!

(oh, I forgot to tell everyone that when I went to my child's parade, I had already determined to avoid her and look like I didn't know her, since she's 13 and all. But she came up to ME and introduced me to her friends and asked me to hang out with them until the parade started!!! It touched my heart so much.)

One of my girls keeps failing a test that I'm not sure she is capable of passing because it's all higher level thinking about women's rights, police, water, electricity, community living. It's really discouraging. We stopped by the adult education office yesterday and got the bad news. She has to pass it if she's going to have a 6th grade certificate! (And I think you have to pass a certain level of school to get a driver's license, which she says she wants.) Here is an example of a question she got wrong, my slight paraphrase.

Which of these statements reflects the following:
A woman should have the same rights as a man.

1. A woman doesn't finish school because her husband tells her to stay home with the kids.
2. A woman agrees and supports her husband in every decision he makes.
3. A woman works in a mechanics shop and earns the same money as the men there.
4. A woman cooks and cleans because those are the only things a woman does.

Sometimes it's hard going out in public with teenagers as a "single" mom, yesterday they were very obviously nudging me towards a man working in the adult school office, and as soon as he walked out of the room saying "he's cute" etc. I can't take them anywhere :)


ok, back to babysitting, more cultural/life observations to come.