The Sylvr Pen

Life at “the funny farm” (as a friend likes to call our place), just got funnier.

Meet our nutty new additions: Emil and Katie Kat.

Emil’s the mostly-black cat with the glowing eyes, bearing a dear deceased friend’s name,

and Katie’s the white-faced cutie, the more kitteny runt of the litter—

two of four strays for whom Happy Tails Animal Shelter sought homes—and just what our current conditions demanded.

The gardens were teeming with moles, voles, chipmunks, and mice, the yards and flower beds riddled with holes, our favorite plants undermined and dying. To the rescue: Super Kitties! Set loose from their confinement, in three days they eliminated two moles, two voles, two mice, a whole host of grasshoppers, and a garter snake! In fact it only took Emil five minutes to run down the ramp of their “cat palace” and find and seize a field mouse beneath the chicken coop.

But there’s a lot more to them than business. If I need a laugh break, I know where to head: out to the patio, where they’ll meet me, demand their pettings, and then start their crazy carousing.

They disappear beneath the arborvitae. The tree begins to shake, down low at first, then higher, and higher. A little black and white face peeks out of the foliage, five or six feet up, and suddenly a furry missile cannons out onto the patio and lands on four white-socked feet. Shortly later, a more muscular feline emerges high up on the house side of the tree and steps onto the roof to parade around a while. Oh, boy, I think, now how is he going to get down? Will we have to get a ladder? But Emil eventually reenters the arborvitae, and the tree-shaking scene plays backwards from top to bottom.

Up and down the apple tree limbs, in and out among bushes and under porches, pouncing on crickets and mini-mounds of moss, tussling with chair cushion ties, they jump and dance and set me guffawing.

Katie leaps high like a baseball star to grab a cabbage moth—and nabs it between two outstretched paws. She sticks her head in all the upright watering cans. Emil crawls inside the prone one to turn around (somehow) and poke his head back out the opening.

(Sorry I couldn’t get shots of all this. They’re just too fast for me!)

Laugh upon laugh. The best of medicine for boredom or blues.

Thanks to the Good Maker for the gift of crazy kitties!

Did you make your NEW MONTH’S RESOLUTION yet? Here it is, the 9th already, and I’ve been so busy, I forgot to make mine!

Yes, I meant what I said: new month’s resolution–even one-third of the way through a month, two-thirds of the way through the year.

Long ago I concluded New Year’s Resolutions are useless, maybe even counterproductive, and decided to make monthly resolutions instead. If I do well in keeping one, I make a new one next month. If not, I renew the previous month’s. Sometimes I renew a lapsed resolution from months or even years past. But sometimes, like now, I forget to keep up on start-of-the-month resolving!

So…what do I do now? Forget it for the rest of this month? Nyet, nein, non! What good would that do? Instead, I jump in late and, if I’m very late (the 9th is pretty tardy), I resolve for the present month plus the one to come.

What kind of resolutions are good this time of year? Any organizational ones, because in summer order tends to disintegrate. Determining just to spend 1o minutes early every day tidying things up, for instance, can lessen the summer’s chaos remarkably.  Any attitude-focused resolution can help temper the  fleshly reactions to heat, humidity, bugs, flies, and sunburn, and improve enjoyment of life tremendously. A few suggested resolutions of this kind:

– to think of five things for which to be grateful each day, duplicating none from previous days–and thank God for them. (I made this resolution for last March.)

– to thank God each day for something you don’t particularly like. (This can change your whole attitude toward a gripe. I mentioned this in the same post.)

– to rejoice in the Lord daily–or hourly: in Who He is and what that means in your life and present situation. (This once remained my long-running resolution, month after month, because it blessed me so much and, after all, applies a mandate of scripture.)

-Me, this month, into next? I am resolving to keep alert for any evidence of God’s hand in the hours of my day, any way His word speaks to me in a special, personal way, and to note it down in my journal so I don’t forget. I have gotten that old chiming clock of my grandfather’s ticking again down in the livingroom, its bonging easily heard  throughout the house, to bong every hour and remind me to pinpoint such evidence in the previous hour and keep alert for it in the next.

Have I “seen” His hand already in my day (which has now reached noon)? Wow! Have I! (Long story. It would have to be another post.) What great immediate benefit from one small short-term resolution!

So…”Happy Resolving!” to all who read. Reflect, resolve, and rejoice! (And share, if you benefit and think others will too.)

Forty days in a figurative wilderness ended four days ago…

a time of shut doors and stripped self-life, a sort of exile from the familiar and “productive.”

Yet rather than a thirsty desert, in shades of dark gray bleakness, rather than a place of empty longing for something brighter and better, my “wilderness” was the site of one of my richest, deepest, most spiritually intimate times with my Savior, Lord, and Friend.

It was the retreat I hadn’t taken,

the vacation I’d long craved,

the (mini) sabbatical of which I’d felt such need, so enriching and building and insight-instilling that I didn’t much want it to end.

Now that the calendar is getting all scribbled up and my days are getting filled again with activity, I long to stay there in that blessed “wilderness,” or at least to keep available for myself a corner of it where I can go to be with Him alone.

Where, after all, did Abraham find his deep communion with the Almighty? Where did Moses encounter the LORD and hear His voice? Where did he experience His glory? Where did David have those sweet times with his God? Where did Hagar “see” “the God Who sees me”? In the wilderness.

And so it has been with me. I thank God for His wilderness, and especially for His awesome presence in it.

And so, may I make an effort to keep it—and use it—even as I head back now to the crowded highway…

Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the [dove] is heard in our land (Song 2:11-12).

The snowdrops are up and blooming! Green shoots of chives and tarragon and oregano are poking up through the herb bed soil. The migrant birds are returning with their spring-and-summer songs. The sun shines bright and warm on my face, the sky stretches out blue, and the breeze blows warm. Hallelujah!

Here in the north, these things evoke a joy that tropical folks may not understand. A cold, bleak winter magnifies the joys of spring. Isn’t that just how this life’s trials will surely magnify the joys of our eternal Spring to come? Look in hope for Spring!