New Spring Reading Vlog & Lenten Reflections

Wishing you all a very joyful and blessed Easter!

Christ is risen! Happy Easter, friends, or “Buona Pasqua!”

When I was studying abroad in college, I was lucky enough to visit Rome during Holy Week with my friends, and we got up early on Easter morning to go to Mass in St. Peter’s Square. We must have made too much noise as we clattered down the breezy central stone staircase of the old building where our hostel was located, because we could hear a little old lady shouting at us in Italian while we were still a few flights up. We tried to very quietly creep down the rest of the way, but as we came to the big front door opening into the fresh Italian spring morning, she was standing there ushering us out, smiling broadly and wishing us a very loud and enthusiastic, “Buona Pasqua! Buona Pasqua!” And now every Easter I think of her, and whenever I say “Happy Easter,” I mentally add on a hearty “Buona Pasqua! Buona Pasqua!”

My tulips putting on their Sunday best just in time for Easter.

Today’s new video, alas, does not include any Italian sunshine, but it does include the first beautiful days of spring at my farmhouse. I love how everything is coming into bloom - even just driving along the highway, there are glorious flowering trees and forsythia raising shining yellow swords to heaven. My hyacinth have come up just in time to celebrate, and my tulips are about to flower. There’s been such lovely weather, I thought about putting up my hammock…but it seems like that might be tempting fate! I settled for tea under the trees in my rocking chair with some Elizabeth Goudge.

I finished The Bird in the Tree and have moved onto The Herb of Grace, which might be my favorite out of the Dameroshay trilogy. It’s hard to decide, all three books are so beautifully knit together. I’m thinking I’ll make a video just about the Eliot saga once I’m finished with my reread. Elizabeth Goudge certainly knows how to describe the beauty of nature and spring and new blooms…

About her the great trees soared upwards, stretching their branches against the sky like arms held up in adoration. They were like living creatures, those trees, and so were the myriad flowers that grew about her feet. In their color and scent they were as an army that praised God; the ground was singing bright with them.

My April calendar girl presides over the rest of my April TBR pile.

Elizabeth Goudge and my Blessed Is She journal have been excellent companions throughout this Lent, and I’m feeling refreshed after my “digital detox” and break from posting. In my vlog, I mentioned it’s been nice to spend less time on the Internet and more time in the “real” world during Lent. I’ve been thinking more about that, and while the sentiment is basically correct, it’s also a simplified way of describing the complicated phenomenon that is the Internet.

What we watch, read and share on the Internet does have implications in the “real” world. We can be transformed in both positive and negative ways by our experiences on the web, and because it’s still a relatively new invention in the span of human existence, we’re still puzzling out the possibilities and consequences of its use.

Maybe cooking is a good metaphor for understanding our online lives. If you carefully attend to what you’re doing and use wholesome ingredients and the right methods, you can concoct a masterpiece, a dish both delicious and nutritious. But if you just fall in with whatever ingredients come to hand, if you don’t pay attention, you end up with an uneatable, even poisonous mess, and you might well get burned in the process. It’s easier to see when you’ve made a mistake in the kitchen; triggering the smoke alarm, for example, will tip you off. But online it’s often easier to muddle through with a sort of mental indigestion that we probably caused ourselves.

Both our own human nature and the nature of the algorithms that major online platforms tend to adopt do not typically encourage us to pay attention to or to seek out healthy content and ideas. That’s the point where unreality sets in. We get swept up into problems, assumptions, jealousies and mindsets that we absorbed online; but that, if we took the time to examine them, don’t have much bearing on our real, tangible, everyday lives. And in the midst of our absorption in this “unreal” online world, we don’t see the very real, individual, irreplaceable, unique people, problems, and possibilities that are right in front of us, waiting for our attention.

Listening to my very “real” small phalanx of hyacinth, “singing bright.”

When you put your shoulders back and look up from your phone, when you stand up and step away from your computer, that’s real life. When what you take from the Internet helps you cultivate more goodness and beauty in your tactile reality, that’s when the Internet is being used well. That’s when you’re really cooking.

And with that, I am off to an Easter buffet and some long-awaited chocolate cake!