The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
John 1:9, ESV
Dear friends,
Cold rain is pounding the earth as I write this, the table candles flickering against the darkening skies in a lighthearted game. I gravitate to the window, squinting to focus through the dim light. The trees are nearly bare, and the last of my plants are dying. The air smells of cookies, a second batch this week. One daughter is painting, and the other will be home soon with her day’s heralding. My sons have returned to school. My daughter will soon follow. It will be five months until we are all together again. I throw on a cozy sweater and head back to this draft. Winter is here.
January is a natural time for tending our inner worlds, both the souls in our care and the homes and bodies that keep us. Winter weather provides us little comfort, but it does offer simplicity and a desire to address the cobwebs and clutter of our lives. This weekend, I will take down the Christmas tree, garland, and stockings. I will rearrange furniture and clear the corners and floors of their seasonal dust and miscellany. I’ll wash the linens on the now empty beds. But what of the mind? Ours and our children’s? How do we clear the dusty thoughts and cluttered thinking beneath the activity of our days? How do we nourish our minds to love the Lord more fully this year and nurture the same in our children?
As I worked through my annual reflection questions and hopes for the new year the last two weeks, I have kept returning to Charlotte Mason’s three instruments of education: a discipline of habits, a life nourished by ideas, and the atmosphere of ideas that rule our lives.1 While our reason is not the totality of our being, God made us thinking people with agency and appetites. The ideas we feast upon consequentially influence the habits and atmosphere of our homes, whether we intend to them or not. At the start of a new year, a new season, and a new school term, January invites us to tend to those ideas, recognize the ones working against us, and orient again toward what is true, good, and beautiful. This is not a one-time practice but a timely one to refresh our soul roots, nourishing our appetites to learn to love and crave what is good. This is true whether the good is a vegetable, a book, or a relationship.
Although the specific choices and habits of our lives will vary, I wanted to share below how I am cleaning out and tending to the ideas in my own life as you keep the ideas that rule your own.
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