allowable pleasures

we are simple folk

Welcome back readers, and welcome, new readers –

This post was inspired by Lori, a friend who joins Marianne’s family every week for breakfast on Sunday (as described here). A couple weeks ago as she watched a twelve-year-old boy wondering whether to help himself to a second piece of toast and nutella, she encouraged him with a favorite saying of her own Grandfather Tom: “You will be held accountable for every allowable pleasure you failed to enjoy.” The second nutella toast was taken and enjoyed.

So we’re taking this opportunity to write about some of the allowable pleasures of our lives, and hope you are enjoying all of yours as well.

Norann - in Danthonia, New South Wales, Australia

An allowable pleasure that I enjoy is solitude.

Perhaps because I was born the middle child of a large family, or pursue the daily energy required to inspire a classroom of students, and enjoy the social aspects of both my faith and local communities, solitude is a precious resource that sustains me.

I enjoy being alone in many forms like walking and writing, but my favorite form of solitude is to sauna. I inherited a love for saunas from my European-born parents, who delighted in rounding out the work day with a walk to the community swimming dam and the adjacent sauna.

Here in our Australian community we have a simple, wood-fired sauna that is delightful in any weather, at all times of day, and in every season.

Our sauna is built as part of a boat-shed where generations of a swallow family mark their courting, nesting, fledgling, and migrating times. They seem to echo the ebb and flow of my life as my home hearth diminishes and my heart expands.

I do my best thinking here, and my deepest praying and grieving and celebrating here. The cycle of heat, icy water, rest, reheat, and repeat forms a rhythm of rejuvenation.

I love it in the early drought-y mornings, when the sun competes with the mist and there seems little hope for rain:

I love it at the end of day, when the swallows dance in the changing light:

I love it when the skies are a palette of promise:

Or when the night is afire with stars:

But best of all, I like the sauna for the regenerative space it provides.

As Henri Nouwen writes, “Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from others, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.”

Marianne – in Woodcrest, upstate New York

An allowable thing that I enjoy is flowers. I love their abundance, color, and lack of practical purpose (other than to bees). They are here to adorn our world, and “even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Two years ago when my daughter was in fourth grade, her class did a unit on wild flower identification. Starting in early Spring, she and I took the same walk through about a mile of fields and woodland every Sunday. The first week we saw ten varieties of flowers, the next, fifteen. Each week for about two months I would be sure that everything that was going to bloom had bloomed, and each week around a dozen new types of creeping plants and grasses had flowered – the delicate, fragile blooms of Spring. One thing you notice when you photograph flowers up close to identify them with a botany app (which we did so we could send a list to her teacher), is the preposterous beauty of every single petal.

Woodcrest has many skilled and dedicated gardeners, so every day when I walk to work I admire the displays of color

I have to walk past this garden to get to work

I have to walk past this garden – featuring a full rainbow of colors – to get to lunch in the community dining hall

One special garden in Woodcrest (and many other Bruderhof locations) is what is known as the “picking garden”, an institution that developed to discourage people from picking from the ornamental gardens. It’s full of flowers that are grown just to be cut for bouquets, and is carefully designed to have suitable blooms throughout the growing season: right now we are in the time of vibrant sunflowers and zinnias with chrysanthemums just starting to open. It’s lovely to be able to take a short walk with your daughter and bring home cut flowers for the table, or to give to a friend.

If you are my six-year-old daughter you will carefully deconstruct the bouquet you picked

Scenes from the picking garden

A June display

August brings the strong colors

I also enjoy this excerpt from the eighteenth century poet Christopher Smart, taken from his longer work “Rejoice in the Lamb”.

For the flowers are great blessings.
For the flowers have their angels,
Even the words of God’s creation.

For the flower glorifies God
And the root parries the adversary.

For there is a language of flowers.
For the flowers are peculiarly
The poetry of Christ.

Trudi – in Spring Valley, southwest Pennsylvania

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” — Loren Eiseley

An allowable pleasure that I enjoy is bodies of water. They can be truly magical. Vast oceans, delicate streams, thundering waterfalls, windy lakes, still ponds, flowing rivers, quiet swamps—all have unique beauty. For many of us, to gaze at the ocean is an allowable but somewhat rare pleasure, and to see something as magnificent as Iguazu Falls is just a dream. I have discovered that the humble beauty in a small stream near my house can prove very nourishing. I’ve seen the stream frozen and snow-edged in winter, and bright and bubbling in a spring-green woods. I’ve felt its cool water wash over my feet on a hot summer day, and now in autumn, the current catches the first fallen leaves and whirls them downstream, glinting red-gold.

September stream in Pennsylvania

The sound of water flowing over a rocky stream bed carries me to my home in Korea where the sound of the Pyeongchang River accompanied me on river-side walks. And I’ll never forget a time when I kayaked a stretch of river, hoping for a current to carry me along, but found myself moving almost not at all on a mirror-like surface. I certainly remember what a lot of work it was to paddle the kayak along (and wondering at my bad luck on getting that particular currentless section of river) but mostly I recall being impressed and quieted by the extreme stillness.

The moment described above…

Perhaps that’s where the idea of “peace like a river” comes from. I hope you discover the companionship and beauty of water. And when you lose one place, seek out another.

Things we’re doing

Trudi

I’ve been enjoying a new school year. My kindergarten class of the last year are now in the first grade. When I meet them I get shy smiles or a joyful “hello”. I love hearing what they’re learning and they love to tell me. I also meet some of them galloping around on the wooden hobby horses we made together this summer—they each painted their own. Our theme of cowboys and girls transported them into a world of prairies, starry skies, lassoes, dogies, and best of all, horses. We even performed a few songs and a simple dance for Spring Valley community. The kids’ enthusiasm captured the audience. (When I went blank on how to start one of the songs, they started it themselves—I wasn’t needed!)

Marianne

A few weeks ago I traveled with my 11-year-old daughter (the flower-identifier) to Yellowstone Park. This was her reward for winning an essay contest sponsored by the US government called “America’s Fieldtrip”. The purpose of the contest is to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States by giving children the opportunity to enjoy some of its most beautiful places. Winners could choose from a list of destinations and invite one parent on an all-expenses paid trip.

I’m proud of my daughter, and equally proud of Woodcrest School and her teachers: 6 of the 25 First Place winners in my daughter’s age group were from her class.

Needless to say, Yellowstone is spectacular and awe-inspiring, from its wildlife (bison, elk, wolves) to its “thermal features” (a phrase we heard several dozen times on the day we toured the geysers, hot springs, and fumaroles).

If you know any children who would enjoy a fieldtrip to a great national park, encourage them to enter the contest which is running again this fall.

Norann

I do not come from a card playing family. I married into one. 

But that didn't change my relationship with cards…until now. 

Since my mother-in-law “Mom” Nancy’s return to Australia in February 2023, she's been teaching me card games, and I've surprised myself by finding great enjoyment in them.

Most especially, “Spite and Malice”. 

Mom was taught this game by her dear friend, the former nun, Rosemary Breen (provide link to video interview), who learned to play this spiteful and malicious game with the nuns in her convent.

Mom and Rosemary play “Spite and Malice” almost every Wednesday while sipping gin and tonics and breaking into show tunes.

I’m the least competitive person you know, but here I am, with Mom, learning to make a spiteful move and wallow in malice.

That’s all for now folks. Enjoy the season you’re in!