Poetic Knowledge Chapter Three /second half

What jumped out at me in this part of chapter three is this quote,"So, with the loss of poetic knowledge from serious consideration in modern theories of knowledge, it follows also that the proper notions of leisure and education are lost along with the proper conditions in a society for mirandum; for "wonder (from which all knowledge begins)does not occur in the workaday world," either from the modern idea of work (living to work, instead of working to live) or in modern education that has turned even play into a kind of work that it is usually conducted as a means to learning something else rather than as an end in itself." {and no, I wouldn't want to diagram that sentence!} I have been reflecting on time a lot while re-reading this book. Over the course of twenty plus years of homeschooling it is good to look back and see what was accomplished. The best was the time our family had to be a family, to relax with each other and spend true leisure time together. The second best was the time to read all those classics of children's literature that I somehow missed as a child. to wander and wonder with Pooh, not just once but again and again! Narnia, Toad Hall, Avonlea, were all new to me. I am still working my way through the Lucy Maud Montgomery oeuvre!

It has been insightful watching my daughter with her newborn son, that time out of time with a new baby. What Madeleine L'Engle calls Kairos as opposed to Chronos. At the end of A Circle of Quiet she writes," Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God we have kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata, are in kairos.
I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad at the bottom left-hand corner of a check, or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by my name; Madeleine.
The baby doesn't know about chronos yet."

That's were we are. Living in kairos while chronos relentlessly moves us forward--marriages, births, deaths. It's the heart breaking beauty of homeschooling, learning along with our kids, watching them grow up but not away no matter how far they travel. I bet the Greeks have words for that too.