“Monks have secrets worth knowing, and anyone who has ever been to a monastery knows that monks (who pray often and a lot) sustain themselves in prayer not through feeling, variety, or creativity, but through ritual, rhythm, and routine.”
~Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery~

I can already tell I’m going to love this book. I haven’t been reading much, it feels hard these days. My brain feels oversaturated and I don’t know if it’s just the tiredness of winter or something else, a worldly, phonely, malaise. They talk all the time about how our phones are destroying our attention spans and making it harder to read actual books. I’ve really never felt anything like that till now.

School probably is part of it. Any time sitting down feels like a betrayal of my duties, and yet, duty continues to call every day. I don’t mind it, I truly don’t, no matter how much I let it slip every so often that housework, clothes, meals remain an unending task. I walked around the upstairs this morning, noticing each of the rooms and thought, “It’s really not bad. The house isn’t that bad.” It really isn’t, it truly isn’t.

There were houses in town that suffered damage from the storm. Thankfully, from what we heard, no one was hurt. My sister texted this morning with pictures from her in-laws property. They live in a wooded acreage and there were downed trees everywhere, huge trees bent in half, fallen, or mangled. Thankfully too their home was not affected. My sister partial to trees–the oaks–wept when she saw them.

My back is doing better since the last time I mentioned it. I called the doctor on Monday and got a prescription for a muscle relaxer. I stayed home Monday night from class but by Wednesday evening felt well enough to go to the high school home ball game. Thursday I was up and walking around again and today could do normal modified house chores including getting the dining room extra-clean for company tomorrow.

One of the boys stayed home and helped me. The rest of the kids were with Dad for the camp work day. They had a small group this time, with the only other ones there being the maintenance man and one of my son’s school friends. But it was enough to get the cabins swept, the boats put out, and the main utility closet cleaned. We had lunch in the dining hall where blazed already a warm fire.