I’ve been really enjoying expressing myself through art lately. It’s fun especially because I never drew much, and never thought I was an artist, but I always wished I could be. Turns out all you really need to do is just draw, and not worry about whether you’re good or not. If you’re drawing, you’re an artist! You too!
Does anyone else find the question at the end of Summer Day a bit stressful? “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” I love that poem. But on days when the migraines have me on my back, it taunts me. What do I plan to do? What am I doing? Watching West Wing reruns and lying on ice packs, on a beautiful summer day. Not even being idle and blessed and strolling through the fields like Mary. “What else should I have done?” I feel like there are a lot of answers for me. A bike ride. A visit to a friend. A book to read. A story to write. Or something to bless others.
Ack, this post is just the same as most of my Wrestling the Tigers posts. I am wasting my time, wasting my life, sitting here under the weight of an enormous, merciless beast.
And the answer is still the same: Focus on the moment and what needs to be done. Do what you can and don’t worry about what you are not doing. Enjoy the times when you do feel well enough to go out and observe and worship and play, like this, and this, and this.
Still, it’s really hard not to feel like I am wasting my wild and precious life.
Very interesting study! http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1#.TlAFtC1WF-A.facebook
The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.
The more women in a group, the higher the group scored on their tasks –brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles, and solving one complex problem.
Another great quote from the article:
What do you hear about great groups? Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.
That last bit reminds me of 1 Corinthians 12. “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”
I’ve probably posted this before, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Gilead is one of my top 25 favorite novels of all time. This passage is about prayer and nature and the way the world can overwhelm you with its beauty. John gently interrupts his father’s prayer to point out the wonder around them, but the prayer and the wonder blend into one, and lead to redemption.
Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where the east was because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I would have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.
My father said, ‘I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.’
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.
