Keeping a Book of Centuries
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In My Notebook...

In my Nature Notebook...

4/3/2025

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​Cornell says vernal pools are decreasing.  I think about this as I listen to the Spring Peepers and the Wood Frogs. 
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In my Commonplace...

3/28/2025

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​"For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy-- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an on-going responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."                                                                   
                                                                                                     ~Jumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
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In my Book of Firsts...

3/24/2025

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Magnolia out  2025
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1888 Vincent Van Gogh
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In my Commonplace...

3/19/2025

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​“Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly.”

                                                                                             ~  attributed to St. Francis of Assisi
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In my Nature Notebook...

3/11/2025

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The calendar says 10 days more of winter but today it might be time to read the sky instead and reach for a kite.
​

Picture
Welcome, March Artwork: George William Russell
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In my Poetry Notebook...

3/5/2025

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Picture
Vintage Tomie dePaola
What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

​Written by Brad Aaron Modlin
Read by Pádraig Ó Tuama
​

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else

--something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy.
The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.


Editor's P.S. Don't be absent -- join our 100 Days of Keeping! 
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In my Poetry Notebook...

2/12/2025

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​Where I Come From
by Elizabeth Brewster

People are made of places. They carry with them
hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace
or the cool eyes of sea gazers. Atmosphere of cities
how different drops from them, like the smell of smog
or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring,
nature tidily plotted with a guidebook;
or the smell of work, glue factories maybe,
chromium-plated offices; smell of subways
crowded at rush hours.
​

Where I come from, people
carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods;
blueberry patches in the burned-out bush;
wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint,
with yards where hens and chickens circle about,
clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses
behind which violets grow. Spring and winter
are the mind's chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.
A door in the mind blows open, and there blows
a frosty wind from fields of snow.
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In my Nature Notebook...

1/27/2025

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​"The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned into sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we should all know?"  
                                                                       
                   ~  Robin Wall Kimmerer
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In my Picture File...

1/6/2025

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PictureKandinsky, "Winter Landscape" 1909



​                It's Epiphany.  What are you seeing in a new light?

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In my Music Notebook...

12/16/2024

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Third Advent
Picture
Tom Thompson, "Moonlight in Fall, 1914"
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<<Previous

    "Ideas 
    ​won't keep; something must be done about them."

     ~ Alfred Whitehead

     

    A Charlotte Mason education leads to all kinds of ideas! Join me in keeping one or several of the notebooks she prescribed and discover the Science of Relations and the Art of Mindfulness.

    Picture

    Laurie

    "Perhaps this is one of the secrets of life--to know 'glory' when we see it." 
     ~  Charlotte Mason

    Virtual Life?

    A wee explanation: this website was created as a way to amplify the daily surprise of seeing glory in one small life.  The notebook entries represented here are all selected from things actually lived and noted on paper in an effort to live the full life British educator Charlotte Mason so ably championed.  ​ 

    In Appreciation
    Images are linked to their original posts where possible.  They were chosen because I have found something of value there and hope my readers will likewise find a helpful resource as we explore the philosophy of Charlotte Mason together.  In the case of miss-attribution or if you desire your work not be linked, please let me know.

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  • welcome
    • About the Book of Centuries
  • in my notebook...
  • One Hundred Days
  • One Hundred Words
  • conversation
    • presentations
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