Sledding in the Big City

Things are looking quite wintry around these parts this weekend.

The view from our condo is pretty magical.

Snow like this makes us want to run out and play. 

Sing it Again

Six inches of heavy wet snow has fallen this afternoon.  Chicago natives are breathing a sigh of relief that winter seems to be looking more normal. Our Christmas tree is dropping its needles at an ever increasing rate.  With my belly pushing against the buttons of my pants and leftover scraps of wrapping paper littering the condo floor, I feel that happy contentment of a holiday well spent. Snow is falling outside, the girls are playing at a friends’ houses, and I get to take a few hours to see the much anticipated Les Miserables.

I loved every 157 minutes of it.  I know critics dismiss the film as overly emotional, bombastic, amateurish, an everyman’s cinema version of an already overly dramatic musical, but what do they expect???  It is musical theater, people!  Don’t order a pizza and then complain there is cheese on it.  The genre defines the art.   Love it or hate it, musical theater is meant to pull on your heartstrings with loud, big, emotional music and plot.  Les Miserables does not disappoint.  It has all the love, the angst, the sorrow, the arm raising, chorus singing, grand-scale producing, emotionally delivered songs any good musical worth its weight in intermission snacks can deliver.

I admit my relationship with Les Miserables is not entirely neutral.  By the tenth grade I had the whole musical memorized.   I’ve seen the production on stage more than once.  Under the starry eyed cloud of adolescent love with a singing thespian in my own high school, I saw Les Miserables when it came to Atlanta.  With Cosette and Marius singing in the background I felt the first flutters of teenage love. Caught up in an idealized view of the theater at my private school and a teenage sense of self importance, I was quickly under the spell of Les Miserables and its songs.  It was only later that I realized the story of Les Miserables is much less about Cosette, Marius, or Eponine, but rather much more about the experience of redemption and grace in the life of Jean Valjean.  

Ultimately, I think this is why this story is so appealing.  We see a man “standing in his grave” receive forgiveness and mercy.  We see another man, Javert, obsessed with proving his own righteousness, with making the world ‘right’ in his own power, and unable to receive grace.  The contrast of these two men, the chase of the self righteous pursuit of justice verses the brokenness of a man whose life is changed by grace, is as stark as the way their lives end.  Seeing them sing at the same time in a melodic argument of dramatic tension gives the audience an emotional hanger on which to hang a universal struggle.  Why is it so hard to forgive?  Why is it so difficult to be forgiven?  How can forgiveness change us?  Can broken relationships ever be mended? How can our receiving God’s forgiveness free us to live for others? Is there a reason to live that is bigger than myself?  These are the questions that Les Miserables makes accessible to people of different ages and experiences.

I am glad the theater was dark, because I like to think no one saw me singing along with almost every song in the film.  I didn’t think there was a bad actor in the bunch.  Anne Hathaway has gotten a lot of attention for her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream,” but it was Eddie Redmayne’s performance of Marius and his delivery of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” that brought tears to my eyes.  Russell Crowe does a praiseworthy job of playing Javert, but I really like Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean.  I like it when a story spans different seasons of my life, and the characters with whom I identify change as I grow older.  Like Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I’ve read several times in different seasons of my life, Les Miserables has spanned the decades.  With each new reading or telling of the story I find myself sympathizing in different ways with different characters.  What stories keep telling themselves to you?  How do they change?  How have you changed? How is that reflected in the way you hear the old stories?  

A White Christmas!

The first snow of winter finally fell this morning...

making a coooold but beautiful Christmas.

Merry Christmas Eve

 

Merry Christmas!

The Cross Behind the Stable

What is there to write about what happened in Connecticut yesterday?  What should we feel as we watch surreal images cross our computer or television screens.  I have vacillated today between numb emotional distance to wanting to squeeze my children tightly with tears.  Suffering happens everyday around the world to innocent children.  We read about it in magazines and papers, watch documentaries, and maybe send a check to a distant child in Africa.  But yesterday's events seem so profoundly strange and painful because of their familiar proximity. They seem like they could have happened in our own backyard.  The town, the school, and even the little children seem so eerily similar to our family's 'safe' life here in the Chicago suburbs.  My gaze has lingered on my girls today. I watch their little profiles, their giggles at the Christmas tree, and I wonder at the painful horror of this world that has robbed other parents of this joy.

One of the most helpful things I've read is an article by New York Times journalist Ross Douthat titled "Loss of the Innocents."  You can read the whole article HERE.  He leans heavily on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Ivan's argument against God.  He invokes Ivan's argument asking,

"Why should [man] know diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?." 

Many of us have asked this very thing today.  Our eyes fill with tears as we look at our own children, love them with a love that hurts,  and struggle to feel mocked by evil in the seeming randomness of a terrible act.  Writer Douthat is helpful in reminding us that God revealed himself in story, a story of human suffering, a story in which he himself entered as a helpless child.

He writes,

"In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence.

In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.

"That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death." - Ross Douthat

My New Magazine

This is a little shout out to my Aunt Esther to say thank you for giving me a subscription to a great magazine. My first issue of Poets & Writers arrived in the mail today, and I've already put several new books on hold at the library as well as made plans for writing classes in Europe (okay, not that last part, but let a girl dream).  There is a wide range of great articles covering many different styles of writing.  From Chicago's own graphic artist Chris Ware speaking about his new graphic novel  to poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, this magazine has a little something for everyone.   Many of you may have already browsed through an issue, but in case you haven't...check it out (HERE ).   Stocking stuffer idea for the one who doesn't mind you stealing back their present?

Movie Time

For a literature loving, history dabbling, movie going dilettante, this year’s holiday movie line up is something to make a girl downright giddy.  From  Lincoln to Anna Karenina, The Hobbit to Life of PI, the Great Gatsby to Les Miserables, history and literature are hitting the big screen.   

In my comfiest jeans and cozy wool socks I have a date with myself for the matinee (more like 11am) showing of Anna Karenina.   Settling into my seat I prepare myself to have an open mind about the film based on Tolstoy’s novel.   Knowing there is absolutely no way 900 pages of characters and plot can be squeezed into a two hour film I set my hopes low.  Maybe some good costumes and beautiful Russian scenery will entertain me for a few hours.  I promise myself I will not get frustrated if Anna is portrayed as a victim of love and her oppressive culture rather than the complex moral being Tolstoy weaves.  

Folks (insert your best Stephen Colbert imitation here), this is my English teacher plea.  Please read the book before you see the movie.  The movie will give you all the wrong ideas about the book.  Reading the book, though, might actually help you enjoy the movie more. The movie was made by people who seem to love the novel and want to highlight significant parts of the story, but there is no way this story can be translated to a two dimensional screen.

The major characters included in the film are  well cast with some great actors. Jude Law's performance as Anna's husband is excellent.  In fact, he is a much more powerful actor than Aaron Taylor-Johnson who plays Vronsky,  the object of Anna's desire. Maybe this is on purpose.  I am surprised by how many subtle nods are made to significant passages in the novel (Levin working in the fields with the peasants, Anna on the train with the paper knife, Kitty in the carriage, Karenin forgiving Anna, the peasant with the black face).  Blink and you'll miss them or, at best, they will seem like meaningless visual adornment. Meaningful allusions seem disconnected and random without the knowledge of the fuller story behind it.  Scenes such as Levin’s revelation of Kitty's character as she cares for his sick brother only become rich with the background from the novel.  But then again, this is often the case when books become movies.  

The absolute WORST part of the film is the artistic rendering of the story in an opera house.   The story is rich enough with characters and landscape without confusing the audience by setting the whole story in an opera house.  This theatrical approach is way too visually confusing. It distracts from rather than enhances the characters’ internal struggles.

One of the BEST parts of the film is the use of the train throughout the story as visual imagery and foreshadowing of Anna’s moral and mental decline.  Don't miss the black faced peasant who crosses her path right after she meets Vronsky for the first time.

Gary Morson, the Northwestern professor who regularly packs classrooms of over 300 students to hear his lectures on Anna Karenina, writes that “great works of literature are characteristically written or read as both situated in and transcending their time.” He goes on to say that “the very nature of great works is that they outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation” (Morson, Anna Karenina in our Time).  They transcend their time by identifying human struggle and longing common to all times.  Is there a God?  Does he forgive me?  Will He ever stop?  Can others forgive me?  Can I forgive?  Is the course of my life due to my own choices or to fate?  For more thoughts from Morson on Tolstoy’s novel see some old blog posts (here or here).

And while we are on the subject of works of literature transcending their time, let’s talk a minute about Les Miserables coming out on Christmas Day (watch the trailer).  So, I’m just a wee bit excited about this one.  Just today the Huffington Post released a mixed review of the movie (HERE).  One critic called it “bombastic” saying, “As the enduring success of this property has shown, there are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it's good.”  I guess I’m part of the large emotionally susceptible segments of the population because I’m ready to swallow it up.  From the minute Anne Hathaway’s voice belts out "On My Own" in today’s preview I have chills all over. Bring it on.  A crystal clear voice rings out over the cinema, "I dreamed a dream of time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living.  I dreamed that love would never die.  I dreamed that God would be forgiving.  But the tigers come at night with their voices soft as thunder..."  

I hope, my friends, you are enjoying the holiday season.    Hopefully, this little blog is not dead but merely gasping for air.  My writing joints are a bit rusty after a month away.  I need Dorothy with her tin can to loosen me up.  Maybe writing again here now and then will get the juices flowing again.  

And I wish you happy movie going in this fun season of good movies old and new.  

Halloween 2012

Happy Halloween!

Fall Fun

 Seasons are a great thing.

Town and Country

  Of the last five weeks of school only ONE has been a full week. The other four?  Truncated by...

First day/half day

Labor Day

Rosh Hashanah

Yom Kippur

It is one of those Chicago North Shore things that surprises me every fall. Public Schools are closed for Jewish holidays.  This four day week could become a nice habit.  I love having a day during the week to play with my girls, explore Chicago, or go on an adventure.  It makes me wish we could take a day every week to do our own hands on education.  Who knows, maybe we could?

Last Monday was Rosh Hashanah.  We did the town.  The girls and I spent the whole day in the city mostly exploring The Field Museum which is Chicago's Museum of Natural History (and home to the most complete TRex in the world!).  I didn't take many pictures.  Think rocks, mummies, giant sloths, wooly mammoths, stuffed mammals brought to Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair, and dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs.

Today, in what the girls declared "needs to be our Yom Kippur tradition"

we did the country.  We drove an hour North to the Illinois-Wisconsin state line to a beautiful apple orchard that was lush with ripe apples.  This farm was not an overpriced prepackaged "experience of the country" for city people (no hayrides, no corn maze, no cotton candy, no frills).  With a humble sign and a few retirees handing out bags and collecting cash this orchard was delightfully simple.

Rynn climbed trees.

Eleanor ate multiple apples trying to make her two very loose front teeth fall out.

Grace's New Home

Tomorrow morning

at 9:30 

our church will gather for worship at our new church home!

Whitefoot

"She lived at the center of the world.  This is one of the things every mouse knows.  Wherever she was, she was at the center of the world.  That one lives at the center of the world is the world's profoundest thought. So firmly was this thought set in Whitefoot's mind that she did not need to think it. Like humans, she lived in the little world of what she knew, for there was no other world for her to live in. But she lived at the center of her world always, and of this she had no doubt."
 -Wendell Berry, Whitefoot, A Story from the Center of the World

Did you know Wendell Berry has a children's book?  It is a little book, a mere 59 pages, with small sketches of a little mouse interspersed throughout the pages.  The plot is simple- a little mouse builds a home in a place she thinks is safe for her children.  One night, in a strong storm, she is swept up into a mighty flood that sweeps away her home and Whitefoot herself into its cataract of open water.  Most of the story is the description of her survival, but it is also the story of her transformation.

"She changed from a small, huddled animal who might as well have been asleep to an animal altogether awake."

As the flood subsides she is dropped into a world previously unknown to her. This new place becomes her new "center of the world" for that is where she is.  Berry concludes his simple but profound tale with these words,

"At the center of the world, on the silted and soiled floor of the woods, among the shadows of the moony night, she went about her still-unfinished task of staying alive."

This month marks five years since I began this blog.  Five years of documenting life as I have seen it from inside this little, increasingly aging, body that is Caroline.  My center of the world has moved from Portland to the North Shore of Chicago and three different houses/apartments in those fives years. Like Berry's little Whitefoot, my viewpoint is small.  I see the world through my circumstances, and only in rare moments do I have the courage or self forgetfulness to see it through another's.  Most of the time I live caught up in my own perceived "center of the world," for that is where I am, going about my "still-unfinished task of staying alive."

I've been contemplating putting this blog to rest. In many ways it seems to have lived its course.  I don't feel as motivated to write as I used to. In the deluge of information that increasingly absorbs all of us, I have wondered at the point of continuing to splay our life in type and picture on the internet.  There has been so much going on in our lives in the past five months about which I cannot speak publicly that any creative energy for those things about which I can speak has been depleted.

The Lake

This afternoon I did what I do almost every day.

I walked to the lake.

 Lake Michigan has the power

to calm

to invigorate

to cheer.

It is only a few blocks from our apartment.

Today it looked like the Atlantic Ocean.

Some kite surfers thought so too...

I caught this guy with my phone...

Last weekend the remnants of hurricane Isaac said goodnight 

in an magnificent lakeside sunset.

(photo courtesy of a church friend)

And not long from now...
it will look like this!

Our First winter 2010-11

Kick Off

First week of school down.  First week a success.

When did my children get so old?

I think I am in denial that they are growing up.

 Then I see- on Rynn's 4th grade school supply list-

a 4 gig flash drive.

  I barely know how to use my own flash drive.

 I was so ready for routine, for a bit of alone time, and for school to begin. 

But now that they are gone each morning the quiet feels a little strange.  

Our summer beach bag- filled with half used tubes of sunscreen, a few stray pool toys,

 and a small pile of sand from Lake Michigan-

 gave way to soccer cleats, water bottles, and shin guards today.

Despite the 99 degree temperatures summer feels officially over.

But the girls are so happy to be back,

 and we are excited for another amazing year-

 our third!!- at Central Elementary School.

A Family Scrapbook

In one week our summer will come to an end, and the girls will begin 2nd and 4th Grade-

their third school year in Illinois. Hard to believe.

Everyone is ready for school, and the cooling Chicago temperatures are a harbinger of fall days to come.  But the summer has been rich with blessing, space, and most importantly- family.  

Below are some snapshots, mostly taken with iPhones or the children's cameras, 

of some of our dear ones.  

The summer began at Folly Beach, SC. 

In a house that sat on a tiny strip of island we looked out over the marsh from the back deck and the Atlantic Ocean from the front porch.  Ooo... I love the Carolina low country.

Nana (my Mom) and Eleanor doing Crossword Puzzles on the beach

Slideshow

This post is a bit of an experiment.  I'm trying to figure out new ways to share photos with a slideshow. There might be a few heads cut off and definitely a few out of focus pictures.  Most of the photos are from our afternoon horseback riding outside of Steamboat with Jason's parents and my Dad.  A little warning... if John Denver isn't your thing you might want to hit mute before you play.

First Family Backpacking Trip

After many summers backpacking together

Jason and I, for the first time, 

took our girls where no cars can go.

"A Pinecone Fairy" by Eleanor

With a couple of children's  REI rental packs we hiked into the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness.

We camped in a meadow by a lake and snuggled in sleeping bags during a rainstorm.

A Vacation Read

 Dystopian teenage literature is typically not the genre of fiction I'm throwing in my bag for a vacation. I couldn't even make it through the entire Hunger Games series. I tried, really I did, but I just couldn't stomach it past the second book.  So I was a little skeptical when a few people recommended Veronica Roth's teen thriller Divergent.  A recent Northwestern grad who attended our church during her college years, Roth wrote the New York Times bestseller in her spare time during her senior year.  By the time she graduated from college she had a book deal with Harper Collins. A year later the book was on national bestseller lists including the New York Times, Indie Bestseller List, Publishers Weekly, and NPR's Best Books of the Year!  The second book in the three part series is titled Insurgent, and it is being met with equally rave reviews.  Fans are anxiously awaiting the final book in the trilogy scheduled to be released this Fall (read more on her blog).  There is even talk of a movie being made (Read More on that). 


The story is set in a futuristic Chicago where the world is divided into five factions- Candor, Abnegation, Erudite, Dauntless, and Amity. Everyone must choose the faction to which they will commit their allegiance...but there are consequences. It is the kind of page turning thriller that actually has a rich vocabulary and a philosophical background.  Throw in a little romance, some action scenes, a small dose of 'coming of age' angst, and you've got a book you won't be able to put down.  The story clips along at a pace that will keep you reading whether by the pool or in the car with two children on a seventeen hour road trip! 

Rocky Mountain High

Steamboat, CO

Today

Day-blind Stars

*Thank you to my friend Caitlin for your beautiful post today  (Here).  I'm shamelessly posting this poem after reading it on her blog.  The poem says everything I wanted to write about tonight in much fewer words!*

The Peace of the Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Hiking in the Colorado Wilderness
 Summer 2011

As I read Wendell Berry's poem several times I can't help but note the similarities that it has to Psalm 23.  From despair to rest and freedom, from fear of evil to a table of feasting and grace, the journey of Psalm 23 is one by quiet waters through the very shadow of death.  There is rest and yet yearning, waiting for light while coming into peace.  This is the reality of our lives.  We live in the tension of 'day-blind stars.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about using the Psalms to give us words to pray.  Part of his writings have been compiled in a little book called Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible.  It is a mere 65 pages, but it is so helpful in directing our hearts to find words to pray from the Psalms.  Bonhoeffer, whose life ended in execution at the hands of the Nazis, knew first hand the growing despair of the world around him.  Yet he could say "If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart.." (14).  Bonhoeffer has helped me to remember that there are words even when we have no words.

Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd, 
I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters, 
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.


Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me,
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.


You prepare a table before me 
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me 
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.