Rambling towards Mooreeffoc

For some reason I have been so tempted to rename my blog Exceptio Probat Regulam. Don't ask me why -- it doesn't even seem to fit, really. I found it in Newman's Apologia Pro Sua Vita -- it is Latin for "the exception proves the rule". I just like the way it sounds! I am a bit like my 7 year old -- I pick up on some new word or phrase and then it runs through my head for days. At least, Exceptio Probat Regulam is better than "Many Cheerful Facts about the Square of the Hypotenuse" which is the other phrase that has been accompanying me everywhere these days.

I renamed my blog In a Spacious Place back in December and then recently found there is already a blog named A Spacious Place -- sigh. It refers to a different Psalm, since mine is based on Psalm 30 and hers is based on Psalm 18, and the title is a bit different -- but still. I feel a bit like a name thief.

Back to "exceptio probat regulam" --maybe it does fit a bit. We do seem to live a bit that way. We have a log home... and eight computers hooked to each other through a local area network. We are remote from civilization in miles but can access the World through the web at the click of a mouse. We have drying clothes strung on our loft railing because our dryer hasn't functioned for almost a year, yet we have books -- and computer games -- everywhere. We have a gas-guzzling Suburban but our family fills every seat and it's our one car. Both of the parents freelance at home. Our income varies wildly from year to year, and it does not seem to really matter to anything that counts. We do classical unschooling. WE live in a part of California where you can drive an hour and move from sequoias and cedars and snow down to dust and heat and farmland.

I think this is why we are all Chesterton fans around here. Chesterton spent his life looking for the strange place called "Mooreeffoc."..... in other words, the paradoxical, the mystery in the prosaic everyday, the thrill of discovery in the banal and everyday places of life. As Tolkien writes:

Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

My daughter uses this Chesterton quote as the tagline for her blog:

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale."

So true, and this is another one
(and look -- I think it's a chiastic structure! how cool!):

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered;
an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."

Ask Bilbo Baggins! That could sum up what The Hobbit is about in one line!

I strive for a "Regula" but I cherish the "Exceptions". Every natural object has a certain identifiable order but all have some unique feature which separates them from the others of their kind. All my friends and family -- I cherish the common ground I have with them but delight in their differences, that amuse and interest and enlighten me. Often it is not the order in my day that makes it memorable, but the deviations -- the extra inconveniences and adventures. I think all this is a reflection of our Lord, who made us all so diverse within a given order, and surely intended it that way.

Mooreeffoc would make a good blog name, too, I'm thinking. Probably has been done already. Yep, I knew it.