Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

A dramatic first paragraph. Salman Rushdie The Moor's Last Sigh.

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Scene is seen. Here’s a maximilist and visual opening paragraph.

The Moor’s Last Sigh  Pg. 138
”Once a year, my mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the Gods. Her white hair flying around her in long loose exclamations, her exposed belly not old-bat-fat but fit-cat-flat, her bare feet stamping, her ankles a-jingle with silver jhunjhunna bell-bracelets, snapping her neck from side to side, speaking incomphrehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt, for the perversity of mankind.  
Salman Rushdie

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. A description of breaking out of writer’s block

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Harriet Vane in the silence of Oxford.  Something comes “back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days.
The singing voice, stifled long ago by the presence of the struggle for existence…began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, like the great carp from the depths of the pool, swam up out of her dreaming mind.”

Worship

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Worship is one of the best things in life–turning your eyes upon Jesus, looking full in his wonderful face. Seeing the Lord high and lifted up, with the train of his robe filling the temple with glory. Forgetting yourself in focusing on him.

Star-breather. God breathes Stars. Psalm 33:7

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Star breather. God breathes stars.

“By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.” NIV Psalm 33:6.

“The LORD merely spoke, and the heavens were created. He breathed, and all the stars were born.” New Living Translation. Fabulous!

Can people shift on the Extroversion/ Introversion scale

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I wonder if people’s personalities change through the decades.

I was definitely an extrovert when I was younger, but after two decades of marriage to an introvert find I am changing.

Though I enjoy people, getting to know people, talking to people, I also find a lot of energy, and happiness, even bliss from being alone, reading, thinking and writing.

Each time I take the Meyers-Briggs, I find I am further on the introversion scale.
So I guess one strand in a happy life is to keep the right balance between introversion and extroversion for your temperament.

Characterization which somehow gets the essence of a person.

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Look at this passage from A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

 “There was undeniably a feline quality to my mother–never in the sly or stealthy sense of the word, but in the word’s other catlike qualities:a clean, sleek, self-possessed, strokable quality.  In quite a different way from Owen Meany, my mother looked touchable; I was always aware of how much people wanted, or needed, to touch her. I’m not talking only about men, although–even at my age–I was aware of how restlessly men moved their hands in her company.  I mean that everyone liked to touch her–and depending on her attitude toward her toucher, my mother’s responses to being touched were feline, too.  She could be so chillingly indifferent that the touching would instantly stop; she was well-coordinated and surprisingly quick and, like a cat, she could retreat from being touched–she could duck under or dart away from someone’s hand as instinctively as the rest of us can shiver.  And she could respond in that other way that cats can respond, too; she could luxuriate in being touched–she could contort her body quite shamelessly, putting more and more pressure against the toucher’s hand, until (I used to imagine) anyone near enough to her could hear her purr.”

A new favourite form of relaxation

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I am generally someone who finds doing something relaxing, and “relaxing” by doing nothing stressful. However, as the busyness of my life increases in lock-step with my age, I keep discovering new ways to thoroughly relax.
Here’s one: Come in from a busy day, have a nap while thinking myself to sleep, wake up thoroughly refreshed, read papers online, think, blog. I find random desultory thinking, writing and blogging deeply relaxing.

Another thing I find very relaxing is google. I love following stray ideas, and keeping on learning more and more and more about odd and stray things.

My favourite form of relaxation, however, is prayer!

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now, A.E. Housman

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File:Newark cherry blossoms.jpg

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands above the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.