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August Buddy Reads 🌞🌻🌿

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Happiest August everyone! 😄♥️🌿 I realized I’m starting a lot of online buddy reads and continuing a few, too! I absolutely LOVE talking about reading 😉 (if you hadn’t noticed before 🤪) and so I thought I’d check in!

1. Dynevor Terrace by Charlotte Mary Yonge – my Victorian reading friends are huge CMY fans and I so enjoyed reading Pillars of the House with them last year. I’m still not a CMY super fan, but the conversation is lovely.

2. I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger – I’m so excited to read this fourth book of Enger’s as apart of my Leif Along this year. This a brand new book from my favorite modern author who happens to be a Midwesterner, too! ♥️

3. The Peterkin Papers by Lucretia P. Hale – sweet , family-ish tale. Excited to read a lighter story for balancing out Kristin Lavransdatter. 😅

Of course, I’m continuing with The Cross and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I’m also dipping into a lot of home education books for refreshment and encouragement. 🌿♥️😁📚📚📚📚 How about you? Any books you are really looking forward to this month?

Wednesday Wonders 🌿💜🌿

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Listening… I’m rereading (listening) to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury in anticipation of facilitating discussions in our co op High School Literature class. I’m excited to see what the kids think of this one! 😄♥️🌿

Reading…some Voxer friends and I are beginning the third book in Kristin Lavransdatter tale, an epic Norwegian fictional story following one woman’s life during medieval times. Fascinating, beautifully written, but a torturous story in some respects. It will definitely be a favorite of the year for all the religious and moral questions it raises, the immersive setting, and gorgeous nature passages. The story itself is heartbreaking. 💔 I’m so enjoying reading it with a few other ladies and discussing. I’m also continuing on with my Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reread.

Watching… I’m on a bit of a YouTube detox, but I hope to watch some Booktube soon. I’m especially looking forward to this one! Jenna dives deep into what she reads. FYI: haven’t watched yet so can’t vouch for content! 😂😉

Noticing… the way that light glints off things. Little pockets of beauty everywhere.

What are you listening to, reading, watching, or noticing? 🌿♥️🌿💜🌿♥️🌿

Wednesday Wonders

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Listening… I really enjoyed Episode S6E85 Morning Time for Moms, Part 4, with Christina Baehr, here. I couldn’t figure out how to directly link. Christina is a cozy fantasy author and homeschooling mom who chatted with Cindy Rollins. Thanks to my friend, Kate, for telling me about it!

Reading… Know & Tell by Karen Glass. I was desperately in need of a refresher on all things Charlotte Mason as I plan our upcoming homeschool year. I’m entering my 15th year of homeschooling. I’m so thankful to God for His faithfulness. 😭♥️🌿

Watching… This YouTube channel about Charlotte Mason homeschooling.

Noticing… raindrops on hollyhock buds, endless blue skies, and the way the barn swallows swoop around me when I’m on the mower. Not to mention the smell of freshly cut grass! 🥰🥰🥰

How ‘bout you? What are you listening to, reading, watching, and noticing? ♥️🌿📚😍

•gentle•

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Beauty reassures us that goodness is still real in the world, more real than harm or scarcity or evil. Beauty reassures us of abundance, especially that God is absolutely abundant in goodness and in life. Beauty reassures is there is plenty of life to be had. I believe beauty reassures us that the end of this Story is wonderful. The French impressionist Matisse “repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.”

Beauty is such a gentle grace. Like God, it rarely shouts, rarely intrudes. Rather it woos , soothes, invites; it romances and caresses. We often sigh in the presence of beauty as it begins to minister to us-a good, deep soul-sigh.

John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back, p.33

•most•

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Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most.

Abraham Lincoln, emphasis mine

•handfuls•

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Novelist Katherine Anne Porter wrote, “Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist-the only thing he’s good for- is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.”

from Jean Fleming’s Pursue the Intentional Life

•penny•

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“There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-and this is the point-who gets excited by a mere penny?”

“It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is simple. What you see is what you get.”

~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 17, emphasis mine

What pennies are lying around just waiting for us to pick up? ☀️💕🥰☕️🌿🍄

•hallelujahs•

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Heartache comes in spoonfuls all day long. You get used to heartache, I suppose, because you know there just might be a hallelujah around the next bend.

Barbara Mahany, Slowing Time , p. 113