I woke up early because I wanted to be able to write a post here. But, my children have this amazing ability to sense when an adult is alert and therefore, wake up to share their company. If it weren’t so annoying, this infallible instinct would be astounding.

I did finally manage to write an “introductions” post. I’m sure I will change it as time goes on, but for now, if you’d like to know a little more about me, it’s there. Next (when my children allow it) why did I call this blog “Emberings?”

Over the weekend, I finally finished a review of Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy on the Homely Hours. This was one of my favorite books of 2019 and one I wholeheartedly recommend.

One thing that is so lovely about blogging is that my posts showing up on a blogfeed doesn’t depend on me posting more often. For me right now, super frequent (frenetic?) posting on any medium probably means that I’m not being very faithful in my family life.

To end this random assortment of thoughts, I thought I’d share this quotation from Wendell Berry that I have been reflecting on lately.

“Contemporaneity, in the sense of being ‘up with the times,’ is of no value. Wakefulness to experience — as well as to instruction and example — is another matter. What we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up to date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical — a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having.”

Image: I love Carl Larsson. Also, the girl on the left looks just like my daughter.