random | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

In which a Single Tweet–140 characters–can make things happen

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote despairingly. And can tweets, 140 curt characters, make anything happen?

Yes, they can.

* * *

The precious jewels I hold in my heart, which change the way I see and think and live, are all tweetable.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Thoreau, Walden (134 characters).

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (135 characters).

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. Blaise Pascal sums up his deepest spiritual experience (31 characters).

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Gandhi, (55 characters).

Or Ann Voskamp writing of Hagar, dying of thirst within a bowshot of a well, There is always a well. All is well. (38 characters).

Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. C.S. Lewis (66 characters)

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver.”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” C. S. Lewis. 132 characters

* * *

And the ideas of the said King which mean the most to me, and are most life-changing are eminently tweetable.

Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 63 characters.

He who seeks to save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will find it. 114 characters.

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be measured to you. 125 characters.

Yet to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. 96 characters.

Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 125 characters.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. Trust in the Father, trust also in me. 101 characters.

* * *

Once we have done the hard work of thinking, our brain instinctively sums it up in a memorable “tweet,” I believe. Mottoes, goals, eureka moments, epiphanies: we unconsciously summarize these in epigrams. Short and sweet. Less is more. Brevity is the soul of wit.

Good politicians instinctively realize that “tweets,” aphorisms are the most effective and best-remembered part of speeches.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Churchill, 61 characters. (I guess that’s what George Osborne’s offering us!)

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. (140 characters) Churchill, 3^rd June, 1940.

And across the pond:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 110 characters Abraham Lincoln, Gettyburg Address

Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. J.F. Kennedy, Inaugural Addess, 82 characters

Read my lips: no new taxes. George Bush, 24 characters

Yes, we did. Preisdent Obama, 10 characters

* * *

And today’s tweets? Do they make a difference?

It depends on who you follow. But, I am guessing that a steady drip of tweets of wisdom, encouragement, and a Godward gaze from @nickygumbel, @johnpiper, @annvoskamp, @rickwarren, @maxlucado (to name some prominent tweeters) surely makes a difference to their readers. Or those of @richardrohrofm, whose most recent tweet is

When younger, I praised God as a worthy exercise and song. Now there is a kind of praising that instead–sings me and sings through me. Wow!

* * *

All these are largely positive tweeters. I wouldn’t long follow a largely negative tweeter: I can generate quite enough negativity for myself, thank you. The thought-provoking, true, optimistic, God-saturated, blood-rosy vision, is just as true as the half-empty glass, so why not contemplate that!

* * *

Our words count. Thinking hard to condense complex thoughts in a couple of sentences is work–and work worthwhile.

Tweeting is good practice for writers. It is training in Orwell’s maxims for good writing:

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use a long word where a short one will do. (104 characters) and in Virginia Woolf’s

Write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one means (83 characters).

It’s encouraging, isn’t it? We can express substantive thoughts, capable of changing the way we (and perhaps our regular readers) see and live and rejoice and trust and love in two or three sentences of 140 characters! In a tweet!

(Edited archive post)

First Things First, Pomodoros, A Schedule and Progress on New Year’s Goals

By Anita Mathias

Bookshelf BEFORE — Jan 20

Bookshelf — AFTER

C. S. Lewis famously said, “When first things are put first, second things don’t diminish, they increase. You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

Michael Hyatt spells this out this work-life balance.

“I think it is really important that one’s career come after God, self, spouse, and children. I have seen too many people sacrifice the other four on the altar of work. Usually when that happens, their work life crumbles, too.

Work can be a rewarding experience if you keep it from becoming an idol. However, if you don’t put it in its place, it can suck the life out of you.”

(From Hyatt’s ebook Creating your Personal Life Plan).

* * *

My current challenge is developing my blog while not neglecting the other important components of my life—my marriage, my parenting, my physical fitness and my home. (My spiritual life I rarely neglect for blogging. I cannot do without prayer and scripture—I slip into depression and lose focus.)

I would love beautiful art to spring from a beautiful life, a happy marriage and happy parenting. That not many have managed it is no reason not to try.

So I am planning one walk a week with Roy, usually on Mondays, and one family outing with the girls. We are going to watch The Winter’s Tale at Stratford on Avon this Saturday, and also walk around that beautiful town. And on Friday, Roy, Zoe and I are going to see Mr. Darwin’s Tree, a monologue/ “memoir” of Darwin’s life.

* * *

2 The Pomodoro Technique

Ann Voskamp, that splendidly productive woman, swears by the Pomodoro Technique. Basically, it’s work for 25 minutes by a timer; take a five minute break; repeat 3 times. After the fourth Pomodoro, 100 minutes of work, take a 20 minute break.

I am giving this a trial to see if it might work for me.

Disadvantages—Creatively, it takes me a while to settle down and start writing. I do a bit of reading, both books and online to build up momentum and have words coursing through me before I start. So a break in what I am writing every 25 minutes might be hard.

Advantages—

1. Sitting for long hours slows down your metabolism and your body kind of goes into shut-down, whereas moving every hour raises it.

2. A short break of 5 minutes can break the spell and give you perspective on what you are writing. And new ideas.

3. I might be able to work for longer because of the oxygenation the breaks give me

4. Adherents say the Pomodoro Technique sharpens one’s focus. Heck, anyone can do anything for 25 minutes.

5. It might be a way to get boring tasks like tidying up done without allocating a slot for them

6. It would give me a slot for things like weights and yoga, and apparently even 5 minutes of push-ups or surya namaskar has an incremental effect. You are stronger than if you hadn’t done them!!

7. I could use the 20 minute slot to do things that often drop off my day like gardening, or working on my procrastinated chore it.

So am going to try it. Will let you know how I get on.

Schedule.

Ann Voskamp has written a splendid post —25 ways to save your sanity in 2013—which gives us an insight into her holy, near monastic life!! and how she does it all—runs six children, a blog, writes a beautiful book, and remains a sweet, godly, Scripture-saturated woman. She is my role-model blogger in this respect. (When it comes to leading a disciplined, organized life, my role-model blogger is Michael Hyatt).

Now, if I tried all of Ann’s 25 ways to save sanity this week, I would, well, perhaps not lose my sanity, but certainly, exhaust myself.

But I will slowly work through her list, adapting what’s right for me and my life.

Here’s Ann on the importance of a schedule

“Forty-five percent of what we do every day is habitual,”

“To sing new songs, we need to pay attention to our rituals, the beat of our days, even more than focusing on self-discipline.”

She suggests thinking of the rhythms and actions of the day as a symphony, established note following note.

“Create your rhythm, a harmony of habits. Living in cacophony is more wearing than the hard work of practicing habits. “Laziness means more work in the long run,” writes C.S. Lewis. Flubbing away at whatever strikes our fancy leaves us in far worse dire straits than applying ourselves to the work of playing concertos.”

Our schedule “becomes our everyday liturgy.”

Incredibly, I don’t really have a fixed schedule, a symphony for my days, though there are things I do most days. But, perhaps, through trial and error, I should develop one which works for me.

Anyway, here’s how I have got on with my New Year’s Goals

Writing

On the first things first principle, I have been working on a little book (first draft done, and the whole book should be done next week) and a little bit on my memoir, and have had a good blogging week.

I usually put the blogging first, afraid that if I do it last, I won’t have the mental energy or focus to see it clearly. But I have realized that I don’t need to blog everyday, that the blog still grows with three posts a week since most readers don’t visit every day.

And yeah, since I started putting first things first, and working on the big book and the little book first, the blog has been growing. I have more time to think about, and more time to write my posts.

Wrote Common Grace: Or, Why God Loves Classical Music, Leo Babuata and Gretchen Rubin

And The Parable of the Bridge or “When to Say No to Insistent People”

Which did astonishingly well because of this

michael_hyatt_tweet

Wow, the power of the big guys.

Oops, got careless about applying my Triple-Dog Lock to lock myself out of Facebook and Twitter, and sadly Roy showed me a way to subvert AntiSocial by signing in as incognito.

	Time/week
	Dec. avg.	Goal: Jan 21	Achieved	Goal: Jan 28	Goal – year end
Writing	7h 10 min	19 hours	9 hrs29 mins	10 hours	35h

Social media	11h 17 min	3 hours 30 min	7 hours54 mins	3 hrs30 min	3h 30min

News, Blogs, Magazines	5h 21 min	3 hours 30 min	5 hrs2 mins	3 hours30 min	3 hours

2 Walking

A second week of ice and snow derailed my plans again, but since the thaw I have been making up for lost time.

Week of	Goal	Actually done
	(km)	(km)
Jan 7		29.6
Jan 14	33.6	13.6
Jan 21	14.1	16.4
Jan 28	19.69

I need to build up to 11 miles by September for my walking pilgrimage in Tuscany. Yeah, a bit behind, but using Kaizen, and building time and distance and soon, I hope, speed everyday, I hope to get there

2B Weight

Dreaded plateau, which I hope to break with increased exercise, and watching what I eat! Cumulative loss 3.4 lb

BEFORE- some overstacked

before- some not

3 Domestic Order

Here’s the bookshelf I have tidied, and here is the bookshelf I want to work on. Some bookshelves are overstacked, some are understacked, so I guess I’ll have to balance them.

I limit my clothes to whatever fits in two dressers, one tallboy, and one closet. So whenever I buy anything, I get rid of something, what Irene calls, “cutting off my nose to make more room on my face.” Once a year, I purge everything that doesn’t fit, is worn, faded, stained, or that I just don’t like and never wear.

This is the week for my annual purge. Here is my before picture.

The Parable of the Bridge or “When to Say No to Insistent People”

By Anita Mathias

Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday

I once co-led a slightly dysfunctional women’s group which studied The Emotionally Healthy Church by Pete Scazzero recommended to us by an emotionally unhealthy woman leading women’s ministries and the study ended in emotionally unhealthy tears and trauma.

And so, I did not finish reading the book, but this story lingers in my memory.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman tells the story of a man who had given much thought to what he wanted from life. After trying many things, succeeding at some and failing at others, he finally decided what he wanted.

One day the opportunity came for him to experience exactly the way of living that he had dreamed about. But the opportunity would be available only for a short time. It would not wait, and it would not come again.

Eager to take advantage of this open pathway, the man started on his journey. With each step, he moved faster and faster. Each time he thought about his goal, his heart beat quicker; and with each vision of what lay ahead, he found renewed vigor. [Read more…]

The One In/One Out Method of Achieving Goals (and Progress on NY Goals, Week 4)

By Anita Mathias

BEFORE (on Jan 14)

AFTER (Jan 20) — Roy tidied it by removing lots of stuff

So I’ve spent some time browsing around my blogosphere and social media world to ferret out my friends’ most common New Year’s resolutions.

And they are: Exercise more, read more, write more, be more organized.

Hmm. Eerily familiar.

* * *

What’s the common denominator in these?

More.

Exercising more, reading more, writing more, decluttering more will all take MORE time.

But our time remains stuck and unbudging at 168 hours a week.

So for all these excellent habits to come in—exercising, reading, writing, being organized—something has to go.

What?

Every I Will Do resolution must include a I Won’t Do or I Don’t Do resolution or it will be doomed to failure. For every hour we plan to spend reading, writing or exercising, we must subtract an hour from ?? TV, the black hole of the internet? Repetitive home-tidying? [Read more…]

An Immensely Abundant Universe. Seeds as a Solution to World Hunger

By Anita Mathias

Abundance (credit)

Barbara Kingsolver’s describes her marvellously productive garden in her memoir of a gardening year, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

We spent the July 4^th weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes.

In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o.

In Mary, we’d set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand.

In another month, they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.

This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvellous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden.

Fuelled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans full out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt.

Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer’s heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes.

The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us.”|

What an amazing description of abundance, fuelled by…nothing really, seed, soil, water, air…

Can anyone read this and doubt we live in an abundant universe, a benevolent universe blessed by God?

* * *

And yet, eighteen people die of starvation each minute, eighteen while I have written and you have read this.

Large-scale systemic failures, war and corruption, environmental plunder, degradation and collapse all play a role in this.

* * *

Our friends who worked with Heidi Baker described the widespread hunger in Mozambique.

Yet Mozambique, according to my research has rich and extensive natural resources, five rivers, heavy rainfall.

My friends described going through the bush with trucks of food, and people fighting like wolves for the food.

Would it not have been more effective to also distribute seeds?

Seeds: would that solve the problem of hunger on the micro-level, despite systemic problems of distribution, environmental degradation and global warming?

“Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels.

I do believe it.

I believe with Heidi Baker that there is always enough, both for the reasons she gives, and because of the abundance God has encoded in seeds: dozens of tomatoes, thousands of apples over generations from a single seed.

Vegetables can be grown in plastic bags or plastic bottles, or using hydroponics in minimal soil.

Teaching people to grow vegetables: on a micro-level, could this be a simple, overlooked solution to world hunger?

Pareto’s Law, The 80/20 Rule (and My Progress in New Year’s Goals)

By Anita Mathias

AFTER My book shelf, Jan 7, after housework.

BEFORE My bookshelf, Jan 1.

I am reading Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week with absolute fascination, partly because Roy and I have independently stumbled upon and are practicing many of Ferriss’s ideas and principles. (I plan to review the book later.)

Ferris discusses Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 principle.

Pareto, an Italian economist (1848 to 1923), realized that, in virtually every area of life: business, investing, creative work, social life, gardening, 80 % of benefits will come from 20 % of one’s time and efforts.

And conversely, 80% of one’s unhappiness or unproductive activity or self-thwarting will come from 20% of one’s actions.

Some applications of 80/20 or “The Vital Few and The Trivial Many.” [Read more…]

St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta, Malta; Caravaggio and the Knights of Malta

By Anita Mathias

Nave, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta. (sorry about photo quality — no flash or tripods allowed.)

St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta is impossibly ornate. It was the immensely wealthy Church of the Knights of Malta (chosen from Europe’s leading aristocratic families. Each family had to commit to give the Knights a third of their annual income, and all the Knight’s property upon his death). The Knights of Malta were warrior-medical-monks, originally formed to care for injured crusaders.

The gravestones which form the floor of the church are inlaid in the richest marble and porphyry in pietre dure. The ceiling is covered with frescoes.

It has eight chapels, each belonging to one of the eight “langues” or national groups which made up the Knights of Malta, and of course each tried to outdo the other. These were Provence, Auvergne, France, Castile and Leon, Aragon, Italy, England and Germany, who each lived in separate Auberge, like Oxford Colleges. (This European unity is now mimicked in the European Union, which is a great idea, in my opinion.)

The most moving part of the chapel was Caravaggio’s dynamic, brilliant, moving painting of the beheading of John the Baptist, which bought him membership in the Knights of Malta.

The Beheading of Saint John Caravaggio 1608 ()

However, not long after the induction which brought him delight and pride, his violent, ungovernable temper led him to attack another Knight, which led to imprisonment (without his paints). Being unable to paint led him to desperation and near-madness, and an escape. He was defrocked as a Knight of Malta in front of his masterpiece which he had donated with such pride, signing his name in John’s spilled blood.

He moved to Naples and died young after more trouble and more brawls (perhaps due to his mercurial manic-depressive temperament, perhaps due to the lead in his paints, which causes depression, personality changes and mental illness, such as plagued Goya and Van Gogh

* * *

And now some images, and observations by Roy

Here are some pictures: First, the main altar.

View of the altar from the right, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Moses with the 10 commandments. St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

View of the altar, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Any empty spaces on the walls and ceiling are covered with gilt.

Gilded emblems on a wall, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

One of many gilded ceilings in the side chapels, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

A gilded panel fills empty wall space, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

A distant view of Caravaggio’s crucfixition, through the archs of three side chapels, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta. (On the right, one of the very few depictions of women, but note the weapons of war, and reminders of death.)

The floor is literally coverws with tomb slabs, with reminders of mortality. Unfortunately, chairs and carpet runners laid out on the floor on obscure many of them.

One of the many inlaid marble floor panels depicting death, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Inlaid marble floor panel showing an elephant, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Floor panel, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

: St. John’s Insignia on the wall. St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

What Christmas Means to Me: By C. S. Lewis

By Anita Mathias

C. S. Lewis (credit)

What CHRISTMAS means to me…

(From God in the dock—Essays on Theology and Ethics by C. S. Lewis)

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business too have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone’s business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out — physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself — gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

2 Walking

2B Weight

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