getting out the plow (I mean brush) and slowing down

Thanks so much for the comments sharing your ideas. Truthfully, that so many of you thought that what I need is to SLOW DOWN came as a bit of a surprise to me. I feel the need to hurry up. To go go go. To get out that plow. Perhaps that's why I've been feeling so off lately.

Am I slowing down? I don't know. I've been taking breaks to just sit and read, something I've been terrible at. It's not easy to set everything aside, but I'm working on it. I've also been making a point of cutting flowers for the house. Always flowers.

I know that isn't really new for me. While the roses are in bloom, I've been trying to always have a single fragrant flower on my bedside table and on Matthias'. Takes almost no time to do. I usually have other flowers around, mostly just a handful of roses or a bit of whatever happens to look pretty at the moment. I usually do it quickly and without much thought. Yesterday I was inspired to put together a white arrangement for the dining room and was slow and deliberate about it.

And today I pulled together all sorts of random flowers for a "what's in bloom" sort of arrangement that's bursting with color.

When I took the old, faded roses outside to make room for the new flowers, I simply threw them onto the deck to deal with later. When later came around I noticed something.

They looked so pretty where they'd fallen beside my little fairy. It's noticing those little details that gets lost when I'm in a rush.

This weekend is the air show in Cleveland. 14 years ago we moved up to Cleveland during the air show weekend. Hearing the planes practicing always makes me a bit nostalgic. Yesterday I looked up to see if I could see any of the planes practicing. I could hear them. When I looked up I didn't see any planes, but I did notice something totally unexpected in the sky. A bald eagle. Here. I didn't believe it at first. I have never seen one in Ohio. This one was soaring right over my house. If I hadn't been sitting outside drinking my morning coffee and enjoying a few stolen minutes with a book, I would never have seen it.

But slowing down and savoring still seems a bit at odds with my trying to get more done. It makes me mad that laundry and vacuuming sometimes must take precedence over painting or sewing. But that is life. What you want and what you don't want are always mixed up together.

I did manage to finish a painting of some peppers.

And painted a Japanese anemone flower.

I love how magical my work space looked while I was painting and I like how the flower turned out, too.

So, I am a work in progress. Always. Not a surprise, really, and yet it is. Do you feel that way, too?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend and a magical blue moon, hope you get a glimpse of it tonight!

playing, dreaming, doing

Hello there. How are you doing today?

I've been having fun playing with Hipstamatic.

It's fun to switch around the films and lenses.

And I'm digging the black and white.

And enjoying taking random pictures of just about anything.

Having to wait for the photos to develop, never knowing just what I'm going to get can be frustrating, but also a lot of fun.

I'm still struggling with trying to manage my time. I'm completely astounded again and again by how quickly the days pass while I seem to be moving in slow motion. It doesn't help that lately I've had a few days of feeling icky and some days of being in completely wretched moods (I even slipped and fell in a parking lot, scraping up both my knees). Is the universe trying to tell me something? Am I doing a crap job of listening?

I am full, full, full of ideas and dreams and I'm trying to buckle down and DO instead of just dream because although dreams are a good thing (remember this post?), they are not enough. I think about an Irish proverb that my friend Karen shared on her blog months ago:

                  "You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind."

Time to get out the plow.

Wishing you a beautiful, Joy-filled day today!

dew and bees

In the morning in the garden when everything is covered with dew, I've been finding bees slumbering in the flowers.

I imagine them at the end of the day, heavy with pollen and sleepy.

The day has turned cooler and the sun has faded as darkness falls and the sleepy, heavy bees can't make it home.

They cling to the last flower of the day to wait for the sun to return, to wake them and dry the dew from their fuzzy bodies. Is it a pleasant way to spend the night, I wonder.

Monday Joy

Hello, there. How have days been treating you? Here we've been having gorgeous weather and I've been trying to enjoy it, going for walks, spending time in the garden. My house is feeling super cozy with the return of my furniture and other belongings and now that the temperatures have been cooler, I've actually burned some candles lately, too. As much as I want summer to last, I will also be glad to welcome the arrival of fall. But not too soon; I'm not ready to give up my roses just yet.

My studio has been coming along. I'm trying to be patient, knowing that things will come together and that eventually everything will be organized and easily at hand, surrounding me and inspiring me in my creative nest. Because that is my plan. For my space to be organized, but for everything to be RIGHT THERE. I need to be able to see my beautiful fabrics and yarns and paints and papers in order to be inspired by them. I've also been reminding myself to continue creating even if my space is chaotic. With that in mind I worked on some painting. The first in a LONG time. It was hard to overcome my inertia. And a bit scary. But it was also delightful to be painting in my studio.

I'm feeling very rusty, but hope to move past that by doing more painting.

I need to figure out a way to organize my time so that I'm regularly doing a bit of everything I love to do. Because in truth, I have been horrible at that lately. I abhor the idea of a strict schedule, but maybe that's what I need. Anyone have any suggestions on how to fit everything into a mere 24 hours a day?

One of the things that I've been horrible at is keeping my daily Joy lists. I packed my handmade notebook into my purse for the trip to the farm and there it stayed. I would think of it and then be distracted by something else. The small ritual of paying attention to those things that bring me Joy each and every single day is something that I've been missing. It's become an important way for me to live, paying attention, awake to the beauty of life, grateful. I wrote a Joy list for today:

• my studio
• painting
• my cozy house
• the dogs
• my garden

I'm hoping that your days have been full of Joy.

slow

Do you find it frustrating when things are going slowly? As much as I like taking things slowly, things like drinking coffee in the morning or walking through the garden taking photographs or savoring a beautiful book or magazine, most of the time I'm in a hurry. I want things done RIGHT NOW. No matter what those "things" might be. This time it's my studio.

I want it set up and organized so I can get down to business. But I've hit a bit of a wall with that. I need space (furniture) to store all my materials because boxes and baskets in the middle of the floor doesn't exactly work. The shelves that I had been using (stolen from the sun porch) had to move back to the sun porch and are now housing some of the (7, 8, 9 boxes, I can't remember) of books I brought back from the farm. Yesterday I drove all over the place popping in thrift shops as well as big box stores and a couple "fancy" furniture stores looking for storage options. I have an ideal in my head which is proving impossible to find. As I was sitting in traffic I was overwhelmed by a wave of melancholy. And I realized that what I really wanted to be doing was drawing and painting, not driving around and shopping. Did I draw or paint yesterday? No. I came home and did more organizing and cleaning and then it was time to make a late dinner and not long after that, time to go to bed.

(With new, clean sheets and roses on our bedside tables... not bad at all).

This morning in my inbox I found that the "quote of the day" was another hint that I need to step back and reassess things.

"Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity."
                                                    --Jean de La Bruyere

Yes, I want to exclaim, "what?!?! Tomorrow is Friday already??" I guess I've been making less than stellar use of my time. But I've been cooking with yummy garden produce (thanks, Mom!) and I took a walk through Lake View Cemetery with Matthias and the dogs, taking lots of Instagram photos.

Maybe I should have been doing more "productive" things, but soaking up the beauty of the cemetery and enjoying the nearly perfect weather we've been having seem like pretty good things to be "wasting" time doing.

And so, it comes down to balance once again. Balance between productivity and slowly savoring. Balance between needing to be organized and (temporarily) ignoring the chaos. But most of all I need to remind myself (yet again) to SLOW DOWN. Will I ever learn? Maybe.

Until then, I will just enjoy my in-progress studio and the beauty and Joy that are already infusing the space. I'm loving my new color (Behr's Sweet Apricot) and discovered something else to love about it this morning.

That glow on the bedside table and the window frame? That's not the sun. That's the glow from the peachy walls of my studio. Yep, it took me forever, but I think I found the perfect, Joyful color for the walls.

whirlwind

This past week has been a blur. Finishing up painting my studio and taking a trip out to the farm. And now I'm back and it seems hardly possible that we drove for over twelve hundred miles and moved a whole truckload of stuff back into our house. It was great to see my family and it was great to see the farm (my mom has done amazing things there in this past year) and it's great to have the last of my stuff back, but the trip went by too fast.

Here are a few views from the week:

peek into my studio in progress

driving through the town where I grew up on the way from my parents' city house to the farm

greeted by the farmhouse

The old apple tree is laden with apples and Mom's veggie garden is tremendous this year.

We harvested goodies to bring back with us:

And we even found some time to play.

But not enough.

Hope you were able to savor many Joys in the last week and that you find many to savor in the coming week as well!

the beauty of imperfection, or Joy in the garden

Sometimes when I walk through my garden all I can see is how imperfect it is. I have some very beautiful roses right now, flowers that are almost complete perfection, but there, beside that stunning blossom is a shriveled flower and over there are yellow leaves and there's some black spot and, oh, look, a caterpillar ate those leaves and there are holes in those petals and look at that munched bud...

I like to take my photos so that all you see is the perfection and that is fine. That's what we all do. But it's not entirely honest, is it? I love to look at blogs and magazines and design books, immersing myself in the beautiful images. Don't you? Whether it's simply eye candy or inspiration or curiosity or to escape the doldrums of our lives. But recently when I was looking at some photos on a blog I started feeling something uncomfortable. I'm not sure if it was jealousy or envy, but looking at the photos of beautiful gardens I wasn't enjoying it anymore or looking for ways to incorporate fun ideas into my yard or for possible plants to add to the mix. I was looking at the photos and thinking, why can't my garden look like that?

When someone comes into my garden I usually say something about how much work I need to do in it, or mention how weedy it is. As if I need to apologize for its imperfections. I love my garden. It is a daily source of Joy for me. Is it perfect? No. Should it be? I don't think so.

Maybe if all I did was garden (or if I paid a gardener... but, really, what's the point in that?) it could look perfect, but my time is divided by many interests and that's the way I like it.

So, after looking at those photos and feeling those uncomfortable feelings, I went outside. First one flower and then another caught my eye.

I grabbed my camera and I started shooting. And looking. My garden is beautiful. Yes, there are weeds and yes it is messy and yes there's brown grass (from lack of rain and from dog pee). My roses have black spot and just about every plant could use some dead heading and trimming, but surrounding me is a GARDEN, not a photograph of a garden.

A garden is a living, breathing entity. It evolves and changes and as much as we try to reign control over it, a garden is going to do its own thing to some degree. Plants will die. Weeds will invade. Surprise flowers will appear. There will be droughts or too much rain or not enough sun. There will be diseases and damage from bugs and wild animals (and not so wild animals). It will be too hot or too cold. There will be shade where there wasn't before or sun where there used to be shade. But there will be flowers and fruit. There will be birds and butterflies. And it will be magic.

MAGIC. Think about it.

I didn't deadhead my lavender plants after their first bloom and they are looking pretty scraggly. I kept thinking, in the back of my mind (where I keep that enormous to-do list) that eventually I should get around to trimming them up nice and neat. And then one day I saw the goldfinches. They were eating seeds from those spent flower heads. What would I rather have, a neat and tidy garden or one colorful with birds?

Life is imperfect. Life is messy. Life can sometimes be ugly, but it can also be beautiful. Beautiful and magical and full of Joy. What do you choose to focus on? The scraggliness or the presence of goldfinches? The blackspot or the roses?

Embrace the imperfection and look around you with fresh eyes. There is so much beauty and Joy and magic to be discovered. Discover it!


p.s. I've put my Joy list over on my Facebook page. Why don't me join me there?