I’m not a gardener. I like the garden, but take a laissez faire approach to the plants.
In contrast, of course, to the garden wildlife, whom I talk to and fuss over and feed liberally with bird seed. Usually, the handy ‘no sprout’ mix. Usually.
But sometimes things spring up. Just this morning, I stopped to admire a tall grass with a fine round head that had tiny variegated leaves. What I didn’t notice what the plant growing next to it — a plant I ignored as ‘just another weed’. Half right.
OK, I know you all know this. But this is the best rendition I’ve come across.
(thanks, Alice)
Those of you who know me well had better sit down before reading the next (unprecedented) sentence:
I was really pleased with myself tonight.
(gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever said that before)
Tonight was a special edition of Music Night, in honour of this week’s mattins: Chant for Beginners.
With no choir, we are having to adapt the pattern of mattins, but we still need to chant something. So the goal tonight was to help those who don’t know how to deal with chant at all to feel less frustrated by it.
And they said:
aha!
oh, I see
yes, I understand now.
Some of my favourite phrases in all the world.
But I really wasn’t sure it was going to work tonight. I have no business teaching chant. I can do it (sort of) but my understanding is more instinctive than articulate. So, I fret about it all day. I decided to go by a roundabout route (and not to reach beyond simple chant).
We listened to CDs of good anglican chant.
We did a ‘history of western music in 10 minutes or less’. We sang O Come O Come Emmanuel in unison, and tried singing it in fourths. We gave up and let the the CD sing it for us.
Then, we started chanting. Bless the American 1982 Hymnal, and its set out notation. We moved from one-word-one-note to the mystery of lots-of-words-one-bar. We sang the Sound of Music chant for the Venite. And then, we looked at a pointed version of the words.
I sang the tune they had just been singing. They read the words with the funny bar marks.
And they said:
aha!
O, I see.
I understand now.
And I thought:
Hurrah.
Thank God.
(well I got away with it this time)
Simple Chant for Sunday, along with some metrical canticles and some modern chant-like things.
But now that I’ve seen what we can do, it’ll be Neumes for New Year.
I have a web page that is used for scraps. At one point, it was a place for certain senior clergy to learn how to blog. At another point it was a draft site for the church web page. Tonight, I was using it to show a friend how she could tidy up her church’s web page in 30 minutes.
As I played with theme options, suddenly a tag cloud appeared.
Remember there is not much text on this site — just the remains of old conversations and random church web page info. But still, what a wonderful tangle of tags:
(those of you with orderly minds, who get frustrated with the random and obscure, do stop reading now.)
wonderful exchange 