DAILY BEAUTY {Benton}
If home tasks and daily chores are performed with joy and love, new beauty is seen. The artist in us sees color and shape. The poet in us awakens, and we may find ourselves aware of unexpected rhymes and rhythms. One lovely poem, the writer explained, ‘just came to me as I dusted.’ Others who work in this spirit of serenity find that they can write beautiful words that come to them, even with children and much bustle in the house.
A woman needs this intense appreciation of the beauty of a bowl of apples to be pared and grain of wood to be polished, but with it she must keep a sense of detachment, a feeling of sitting loose to possessions. She can have at one and the same time a willingness to let anything go if the need arises, and an awareness that nothing can take this moment from her.
—Josephine Moffett Benton, The Pace of a Hen: Fulfillment for a Housewife
• I stitched this little rose from a pattern on my grandmother’s linen napkins. •
December 3, 2013