Temporary Discalcement

I feel like “temporary discalcement” could be a band name. But that’s not the point of this post.

My trusty sandals. Still wet from my morning walk to studio.

As I may have mentioned in passing, I’m spending my summer living between two houses, spending almost exactly half the week at each place. One is home-home. The other is just a house where I’m renting a room for the summer. I travel every week, and I’m always back at my house for the weekends, so I’m constantly figuring out ways to pack lighter and faster and tighter. The first thing I did was to ditch the idea of packing shoes. If I decided I were going to pack shoes, I’d have to actually choose which shoes I was going to pack, and I’m way too fond of my shoes to have to decide. So I just wear my sandals everywhere–they’re flat and comfortable and got me through a week’s worth of walking in Italy three years ago.

It has rained almost non-stop for the past two weeks. The first week I was living like this, it was sunny and hot. I don’t like hot, so I am happy about the coolness and the opportunity to wear sweaters and long sleeves, but man… my feet are SOAKED. ALL THE TIME.

This whole situation is giving me a lot of respect for the discalced religious orders. I really, really hate having wet feet. (Wet, icky feet are even worse–and sandals let in a lot of crud, so that happens way too often.) But I’m learning to deal with it and offer it up. Now my joke is that I’m a third-order discalced, even though I’m neither a religious nor a third-order and I’m fairly sure a discalced third-order doesn’t exist. It’s still fun to think about though.

And so, on this cold and grey and rainy day, I close with a picture of my umbrella which I took because it looked pretty darned awesome.

Wow!

With Eager Feet is not quite two years old yet but today we hit 5000 views! (I’m fairly sure a chunk of those are from bots but whatever.)

The center of the house

According to Frank Lloyd Wright, the hearth is the center of the household.

According to a quick Facebook poll I took recently, the kitchen is–or wherever food is prepared. One person suggested the TV room, but the overwhelming response was the kitchen.

I’m inclined to agree with kitchen, primarily, simply because my family gathers in the kitchen to cook and eat and it’s directly on axis with the front door when you enter, so we frequently entertain in it as well. Also, the kitchen is where most families eat dinner, and eating together–maybe not as a whole family [1] but still in some kind of group–is a very common thing.

However, I see the argument for the TV room. At the house where I’m living for half the summer, we gather in the TV room to watch things and chat about them. Since beginning my time in this house, I have seen lots of things I wouldn’t hunt down myself: like Game of Thrones [2] or Mean Girls [3]. However, we did watch My Neighbour Totoro one day and that was pretty awesome. Nonetheless, I really enjoy getting a chance to just hang out with my housemates, even if I don’t often approve of their taste. But that’s a younger-generation thing to do, to gather in front of the TV, as far as I know. If we eat dinner as a house, though, we eat in the kitchen. It’s still a gathering place.

It makes sense for the place where bread is broken together to be the center of the house. In a sense, it’s the center of the Faith–the Eucharist [4]. House/family dinner is a chance for everyone to catch up with each other. The Eucharist is a chance for all the faithful to pray together, offering their prayers for each other. Because the Eucharistic Sacrifice exists outside of harmonic/monotonous time as we know it but is rather always happening at every moment, every time we witness it we are glimpsing the community of Heaven–and catching up with our heavenly Family. I can go to Mass on Saturday night and I will be praying with my friend who attends Mass on Sunday morning. We are united beyond time and space.

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1. It’s a sad thing that many families don’t eat all together any more.

2. My best friend from high school calls it Boobs and Dragons. I’d be more inclined to call it Boobs and Violence, since I’m only in it for the dragons and they really don’t show up often enough to make it worthwhile.

3. Avoided this like the plague because I’d had horrific experiences during middle school. Lots of cultural references make sense now but it wasn’t all that good.

4. I know it’s MUCH more than just breaking bread together–but the communal meal is still a valid aspect, albeit played up way too much by feel-goods.

Re-charging one’s “batteries”

One of my friends asked me the other day if I meditated. I asked for what purpose would I meditate? She said she didn’t know, if I ever needed some peace of mind or something. I said that if I need quiet time, I go someplace beautiful and spend time there. Pretty churches work best because then I’m surrounded by beauty and by God’s presence.

I discovered over this past year that I really, truly, desperately need to be regularly exposed to lots of beauty. The Catholic Center on campus is a little… well, it’s kind of drab and boring, like many Catholic Centers of secular universities. And while the Sacrifice is the same wherever you go, as a fallen human being, I often need external stimulation. My way of doing so is enjoying beauty.

For others, they may have different ways of “re-charging” and “re-focusing” whenever they need it. My theory is that so long as you’re within the Transcendentals–Goodness, Truth, or Beauty–you’re in good shape. So if your “thing” is working at a soup kitchen (Good) or reading up on apologetics (Truth) or spending time surrounded by icons (Beauty), or any variation thereof, you’ve found your way to talk to God.

A gorgeous German Gothic church from my home diocese

Burning off creative steam part 2

I decided to take another go at it! This time there’s a little heraldry joke in there (of sorts)… when a shield is shrunk and then imposed upon another (I forget the formal name, it’s long and fancy), it’s been “adopted” or kind of is subservient to the larger one.

Blowing off creative steam

So I came across this link on my Facebook feed earlier today and decided I’d take a crack at it myself, just for fun–and because I think the current logo is a little bulky and inelegant. I’m not intending to undermine the current graphic designer–just to propose something completely different so he can think about it.

I took into consideration the necessity to be scaled for multiple uses, as well as the idea that it will probably be embroidered on something–so I didn’t add any shadows. It’s entirely flat, and that’s on purpose.
Oh, and they’re the Scouts of St. George. I would’ve added a dragon but I thought it might be too detailed. Possible future iterations to come, as I get more ideas.

I think it looks a bit empty. Suggestions about symbols to add? I don’t want it to get too complicated or detailed–the fleur-de-lis is a little too flourishy as it is, and I think I’ll have to clean it up.

Exercising Patience

I’m taking a summer studio class. (This is important because it means my entire summer is full of formal architecture training.)

For this class, I’m analyzing a building (at least to start) to understand its context, history, typology, etc. And holy cow, Stuttgart is one heck of a confusing city–I can’t tell if it’s because I can’t read German (and it’s kind of an intimidating language to my Romance-language-trained eyes) or because it’s just a confusing city.

My Google Earth screencap of Stuttgart.