Mid-Month: Mayhem or Mastery? ( #AtoZChallenge )

 

      Made it to the mid-month part of the Challenge!   

      Mid-month means we are halfway through this April's A to Z.   How you doing so far?   I've been seeing some great posts as well as some interesting creative thinking.  Personally, I'm still working on my posts, but I have been managing to keep up with the daily schedule.  Mixing up blogging with my day to day routine has been challenging, but--hey--that's why we call this a Challenge.

      Some of you might be going through mayhem trying to keep up with everything, but then that might be the story of your life.   This Alphabet Challenge is a test of your ability to organize and to see a project to its conclusion.    A successful April might be a shining reflection of how you manage your life.  Or it might be just the learning experience you've been needing to get your life work and goals together.

       So, what's it been?   Mayhem or mastery?  Don't stop now.  You can do this and you can do it well.  It's just writing and blogging.  You've made it to the middle of the journey so no point in stopping now.  Not when you've gotten this far.   

         Let's keep up the momentum!

What's been your biggest challenge so far this April?    If this is your first A to Z, is it pretty much what you had expected?    If you're an A to Z veteran, how's this year's Challenge stacking up to previous years?   

L is for Letters and Memories

Some of you blogging about history and genealogy might be familiar with this genre: A few years ago I started binge-reading published letters and diaries written by women who lived in turbulent times (WWI, WWII, 19th century revolutions and civil wars, etc.). They are a fascinating read, because they rarely focus on the large events of history - they tell us about the day to day life and struggles of individual, average people. These collections are a stunning testimony to RESILIENCE. Holding on to hope, taking care of each other, surviving against all odds. I am lucky enough to have some of these letters and diaries saved from my own grandparents who lived through WWII. They are precious, important stories that should not be forgotten.

Living in turbulent times, it is good to remember the people who lived through all kinds of hardships, and left their testimony, not as history texts, but as stories told in their own voice. They give us hope, teach us empathy, and tell us a lot about what resilience looks like.

If you have book or blog recommendations on this topic, please share in the comments! And don't forget: what you write now, might become similarly precious for people in a few decades... 

K is for Kintsugi

I was looking for an appropriate word for today, one that would fit well with our theme of Resilience, and came upon the word kintsugi, about which Wikipedia tells us is "the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum." The Blogger's Best Friend ™ goes on to say "As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise."

Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The bowl above has had more than its share of damage over the centuries, and each time it was repaired by using a mixture of gold and lacquer to stick the pieces back together. You'll notice it also had a number of chips around the edge of the bowl that have been patched with the gold lacquer. There was no reason to discard this piece of pottery because it was fractured, when it could be repaired in such an elegant fashion.

The principle of kintsugi, where nothing is discarded if it can be repaired, applies to everything, not just pottery. What are the things in your life that have been broken and repaired?