Unplugged

We got rid of our cable this weekend.

I can't tell you how ecstatic that makes me. No television. Zero.

Don't come to our house if you want to watch the big game. We'll be a big disappointment, because all we'll do is offer you a glass of wine and try to talk to you.

I'm a lover of silence.
I'm a lover a good conversation. 
I'm a lover of just being with people.

I think, sometimes, television, Internet, iPads, iPods, cell phones, and whatever else I might have forgotten--take away our ability to sit in silence; we never fully engage, we're never fully present to those around us.

I'm guilty of this too. So guilty.

My daughters see this. They see me on the computer type, type, typing away. The other day I saw Hadley pretending to type on our closed laptop. Little sponge, she is.

I love silence, conversation, engaging; yet my girls don't always see me seeking it.

Can I find God on my laptop? Sure. I've found him lots of times. Many of you help me see him through your writing. Can I find friends on my laptop--sure can. Maybe, though, I can really celebrate this unplugged experience by doing the whole email/facebook/blog thing only during naptimes. Read the girls more stories or run around the garden a few more times instead. Be present to them the entire time they're awake.

We've embraced a no television policy, where the girls are concerned. It's part of the reason the television is officially unplugged. That, and we seldom watch anything in the evenings.

Most evenings you'll find us enjoying wine on our back deck, talking about life, or God, or how we'd fix the world. If those pesky mosquitoes get too fierce, we come inside and watch a movie, or Arrested Development on DVD, or Modern Family on Hulu.

But--in sitting in silence, I think we can find God, see God, even hear him speaking. Being fully present to other people--I think we find God that way too; there is God in all of us, afterall.

Too often God gets drown out, or at least watered down when technology gets in my way; I miss the simple beauty, the gifts, the fellowship, the intimacy he's just layed out there in all it's splendor for me to notice.

In this modern age very little that remains is real. Night has been banished; so have the cold, the wind, and the stars. They have all been neutralized; the rhythm of life itself has been obscured. Everything goes by so fast and makes so much noise, and people hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its color, its smell and the way that it shimmers when the wind caresses it.... ~Gaston Rebuffat

A small addendum to my words here. Thank you for your grace.
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Counting my gifts with Ann today:

756. Girls walking in their mama's shoes.

757. Hibiscus in full bloom.

758. Girls pretending to talk on the phone to their papa when he's away.

759. Zinnias.

760. Smelling zinnias.

761. Tassels on our sweet corn.

762. Sunflowers.



763. Playdate with Whitney.

764. Authentic conversation.

765. Celebrating Max's two years.

766. Party fun.