at home

I am always thankful for a new day. Today was a better day than yesterday, at least with fewer tears. We stayed home and just worked on schooling with the girls. I am thankful for the time spent reading through my dad's prayer journal from a few years back. He was such an amazing man, and I am blessed to have had him as my dad. I am blessed.

Since I hadn't put the mirror back up on the wall, I figured we could use it again for today's 365 shot.

"Home is not a prison, or even an asylum; nor is the case for the Home the idea that certain people should be locked up in it because they are weak-minded or incapable.... Those who believe in the dignity of the domestic tradition, who happen to be the overwhelming majority of mankind, regard the home as a sphere of vast social importance and supreme spiritual significance; and to talk of being confined to it is like talking of being chained to a throne, or set in the seat of judgement as if it were the stocks.... And we cannot assume, as both sides in this curious controversy so often do assume, that bringing forth and rearing and ruling the living beings of the future is a servile task suited to a silly person."

-G.K. Chesterton, 'Brave New Family'

beauty

Browsing Pinterest for some photo inspiration Emma liked this shot. While we didn't really aim to recreate it, she did like the old fashioned feel about it. So we searched my closet for some vintage finds. This jacket and blouse belonged to her great grandma. Beauty is a sort of timeless thing, we are drawn to it. We see the beauty of motherhood, of service, of a selfless person, of the princess in the fairytale, of love. Mother Teresa talked about seeing Jesus in the "distressing disguise of the poor." One of my prayers for the upcoming season of Lent is to truly look for beauty, for Christ, in the many sometimes distressing disguises that thinly mask the beauty just beneath.

I've quite enjoyed the bit of this book on the power of beauty that I've managed to read, and if I could ever plug through one book at a time (rather than ten) I would certainly like to finish it. The girls and I just finished watching this beautiful true story of an amazing man from the turn of the century who was able to see beauty in its many distressing disguises.

Chesterton Quote of the Day
  It's bonus day. Two quotes for you.

"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."

-G.K. Chesterton

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." 
-G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (19 April 1930)