Gracing the table

This is how our dining room table looks this week. (Please ignore the wrinkles; we're talking real life here.) We've finally reached and maintained our goal of a clear table where we can easily sit to eat each night (it had become a terrible dumping ground in our first months of parenting). I've been having fun using my beloved vintage tablecloths again, and arranging seasonal centerpieces.

Once I'd put poems all over the house, I remembered this little pink book I'd started several years ago (there, between the salt and pepper shakers). It's a collection of graces. I was on such a roll with the poems, I got all inspired to revive this collection, too.

Andi and I have moved pretty far from our religious upbringings, and are working on defining our own beliefs in a way that we can share with our children. It's important to us both that we give thanks at meals, but without dogma attached. So we began this little collection of graces we like, drawn from a wide variety of sources and traditions: songs we learned when we were camp counselors; favorites from our childhood; children's books; a recent library request; anywhere we come across grateful words we find beautiful and meaningful. As with the poem cards, we're finding that having them right there on the table where we'll see them is helping us to remember old favorites and learn new ones.

Here's my favorite new discovery, by ee cummings, an old favorite:

"I thank you God for most this amazing day;
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes."