Good and bad spiritual reading, and choosing amongst many paint colors!
The sun is shining in this brilliant way most mornings lately, as we head to daily Mass, unless it’s actually raining, which it has been, a lot. So when it does shine, I have to snap a pic!
Book Corner
I’m going to update my Spiritual Reading post to include the Newman Sermons I’ve mentioned here, as well as this book, The Friendship of Christ, by Robert Hugh Benson. (affiliate link)
Benson has always been on my favorites list, but recently I’ve made a connection with St. John Henry Newman, in that way each has of delving into an aspect of the spiritual life and taking the reader to the point of utter abandonment to God (where, like it or not, we will ultimately go).
Both of these authors keep confronting us with our self-love, so often disguised by a genuine, if misguided, desire to be better, to live up to God’s promise; they wish to help us confront and reject, rather than pursue, the desire to be “dynamic” and “the best version of ourselves.”
I would say that most if not all spiritual guidance today falls into this motivational trap of dynamism, purporting to offer Christianity as a more effective way to reach the goal of self-actualization, rather than the purgative way necessary to be trod before we can be, simply, friends of Christ. We desperately want intimate companionship with Him, but it’s so easy to be misled by people who don’t understand what this means, as Leila Miller says here, because they are not rooted in the wisdom of the Church through the ages.
I was struck, as I’m re-reading The Friendship of Christ, how often Benson uses the word shame — a word not in the vocabulary of today’s spiritual writings.
Where current spiritual trends keep us hungering for signs of God’s nearness, Benson warns us of the inevitable resentment that occurs when we seek such things for their own sake and are inevitably disappointed (since Christ will withdraw) in His desire for us to seek Him alone.
One passage struck me the other day, out of many deep and spiritually nourishing observations: Benson says, “… how, without such withdrawals, is progress possible? How is our hold upon our friend to be tightened unless now and again it seems as if he were slipping from our grasp? How is real faith to throw out its roots and clench its fibres into the rock, unless the desolating wind of trouble at times threatens to uproot us altogether?… To hold our lips to that cup which our savior drained… should surely be enough to make us hold our peace, for very shame.”
Kitchen Progress Corner
Was excited to come home after a day away to find this vent for the gas stove had been installed (and the stove is on the way yay! not that there is a floor to put it on, waahh):
The ceiling is done!
And the wainscoting with bead board as well.
Next up: plastering! And then painting! And a floor and windows…
This is my inspiration photo for color (I posted about this Swedish decorating book recently but don’t remember where, and also here).
It’s not a kitchen, but it does have cabinets and walls the way a kitchen does. I have found few if any images of kitchens where the cabinets are the “trim” color and the wall is the “main” color. Usually in a yellow kitchen, the cabinets are yellow and the walls are white.
But I’m nervous about committing to such a strong color for cabinets. I always have to keep in mind that we probably will downsize in a few years (currently the renovation fits into our “five-year plan”). Will buyers want yellow cabinets? Will I??
I did love the color on the ones we had. They were Hawthorne Yellow (Benjamin Moore) — third from the right, below. Right now the trend is to a much more brown, mustardy yellow, but I do love the brightness. The black is there to represent the soapstone counters.
The narrow one on the left is Concord Ivory, and seems closer to the two other darker yellows, but actually is not that far from the Hawthorne Yellow (old yellow of my kitchen).
That cabinet door was from the old kitchen and had been kept in the closet (you will remember that we took some doors off, but didn’t want to throw them away in case a new owner wanted them, not that we were ever moving). So it’s pretty new looking, or at least represents how the paint looks when it’s not super fresh (it always darkens, so swatching is tricky).
Here is the kitchen before:
You can see that the Concord Ivory, which seems much darker (browner) on the chip and on the swatch, is not too far, really.
I have the samples there by the fireplace because I am pretty sure I want soapstone counters, but am considering marble as well. However, I think (as I discussed here), marble, so beautiful in itself, is very hard to match to any white that isn’t just white or gray, and certainly yellows are really tricky with it. So easy to make everything look cold, and my kitchen is already actually cold for so much of the year! (Though it will definitely be brighter and actually warmer when this reno is done.)
Of these colors I’ve swatched here, the shorter wider one is actually the trim in The Chief’s office! Which is so funny — I was asking Bridget how we chose it (she did the painting in there), and we couldn’t remember. But “San Mateo Beaches” is not a name you would think of for an 1860s New England study!
It looks great though, with the off-white walls and the blue of the bookcase interiors.
I should take better pictures but oh well!
What else did I want to say…
Having all those samples (I think I have 12 altogether!) has revealed to me that I actually do know what colors I want. They are pretty darned similar in their respective categories! The challenge is to pick an off-white that isn’t just… white, which most of them tend to read in that space.
Soon I will graduate to painting the runners up on the bead board, so stand by. Thrilling, I know!
Training Your Eye Corner
Most of us have a home that is somewhere on the spectrum of “ordinary-and-fine-to-pretty-nice” — not super fabulous Cotswold Swedish French Tuscan Nantucket Country Cottage/Manor and certainly not Perfectly Decorated to a T. But as I have said often enough before, the virtue of examining the style of the former is that it trains our eye.
Robert Kime was a decorator who wasn’t out to do anything weird to call attention to himself as a decorator. He didn’t even think of himself as a decorator, even though he designed the interiors of royalty!
He actually talks about the mysterious quality that objects of (often ordinary) beauty can have and how we can come to spot it, in the video you will find on this page. Some of his things are certainly valuable, but he makes a point of saying that they are not so valuable that we couldn’t come across some of them ourselves, or something like them in our own context.
We too could collect things “and put them in a room and make them feel special.” Probably not as many gilded things, and, well, not as many things! I wonder who dusts them all…
But still, his aim was to make things comfortable; he said a room “should have interesting things to look at.” That it should be fit for a life. Echoes of Roger Scruton there… Anyone can poke around in a junk shop or hunt down vintage items that are made of real materials; we all have little objects we brought back from a trip, however local (even the shells and rocks the children can’t help hauling home!) — let’s make our homes redolent of our memories and imaginations.
bits & piecesYou can read the obituary of Robert Kime here, or if you are not a subscriber, here. The photos in that piece are super grand. On his website there are more approachable ones. I think we can take his process and make it our own, when we need to figure out what to put in a room! We can at least be liberated from the thought of things needing to match.
As you know, I’m on the hunt for some decorative tiles. This one company I follow has historical tiles and also is launching a line of reproduction ones (which is good, because the historical ones are as pricey as they are gorgeous). I loved this post on their IG that describes the process of hand-painting the tiles!
Speaking of ways of doing, I recently came across the idea of “tree hay.” Turns out it’s an ancient way of feeding livestock. This video seems like it could be boring, but it’s actually so interesting! It’s a look at the history of pollarding and coppicing trees to feed animals and allow them to self-medicate and -supplement. The whole family could watch this: Tree Hay, a Forgotten Fodder
An important read: The Bad Divorce by Elizabeth Marquardt
from the archivesIf I had a kitchen, I’d be baking some breadAsk Auntie Leila: Using affection to discipline (spoiler: don’t)Not an LMLD archive, but have you visited my “Bad Pinterest Board” recently?
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