RAIN

Beauty is sun glinting off so many torrents of water rushing across the parking lot and down the sewer.  Rain water flowing through my sandals.

When You are a Badass Gardener

When you are a badass gardener, you put on your galoshes in the near dark of evening, tramp out to the east garden, and dig up the best of your late leeks.  Then you squelch through the yard, put away the shovel, and shake those leeks to get as much dirt off as you can before you bring your earthy self back inside.  And you wave your leeks around casting leek spells in the blue black sky.  Showering loamy leek soil in your hair and into the collar of your coat. This is why my jackets always smell like wind and dust and this is why the fish was delicious.

Today has been brought to you by HELL YES!

Too many to list, but:

1. Time

2. Dancing with my new bathroom duty friend

3. Singing the narwhal song

4. Reading a great book (Carter Beats the Devil)

5. Sharing parts of a great book with people who'll appreciate it.

6. Figuring out words I never bothered to figure out before

7. Cinnamon pinecone smell at Giant Eagle

8. Running to two grocery stores and doing two other errands in under an hour and a half!

9. Gardening with the kiddoes in December!

10. Teaching Nori how to add more brown matter to the compost and then watching her do it on her own, carefully.

11. Good tea

12. When my favorite Poptarts are in stock!!! 

Unfrosted Brown Sugar, baby.  Because up in here, we keep it real.

13. Knowing I'll be lucky if I get to eat one of them and being okay with that.

14. The way said Poptarts make me yearn for warm enough weather than I could take a toasted one on the front porch with a hot tea and a cold milk and a good book and sit out in the morning with the birds before everyone is awake.

15. Doing yoga this afternoon

16. Being where I am comfortable and at ease

17. Lots of good interactions with students today

18. Appetite is slowly returning a little

19. Any day I wear leggings is a good day.  Gosh, I'd live in these if I could.  

20. Walking around feeling loaded up with love and joy.  I glowed from store to store this evening, buying produce and feeling warmth radiate out of my pores and fingernails.  It was palpable to strangers, even; I could tell by the way our eye contact was different.  Footfalls springier and shopping carts more wieldy, made so by the extra goodness in the energy that propelled me on.  

I don't have answers to most of my most pressing questions right now, and that is a little scary, but the apprehension and uncertainty are dwarfed by the fact that wherever I'm going, I'm buoyed up by a God who has a plan for me and all my weirdness.  God can be confusing.  It's hard to always know His voice when it is calling.  But when I was walking through the grocery store today, I felt it loud and clear "Remember, GOD IS LOVE."  God I cannot always recognize, but Love?  Now that's something I can see.  Feel.  Trust.  So I let the love fill me til I'm overflowing, flow through me, pour out of me and I know that God is in that love and that He will lead me where I need to go.  

This love has been filling me, but today felt like some sort of floodgate opened.  In trying to tease out its source, it seems that the big thing is that I am finally embracing honesty.  Honesty fully.  Honesty about my dishonesty.  I was able to say some things yesterday and face bad things I've done, done with good intentions, but bad nonetheless because they weren't fully honest.  Honesty and love.  Pretty simple.  Beautifully simple.  Perfect.

Welcoming the Season

Because everything isn't heavy all the time...

Holiday decorating isn't something I go wild for.  Many of my friends are domestic goddesses-- full displays for Halloween, Easter, Fourth of July, Boss's Day, you name it.  Not me.  I did make a pretty fancy bouquet of decapitated heads for Bastille Day that one year, but generally I don't care that much.  It's just more clutter and work I don't like dealing with.  Even Christmas decorations feel like that EXCEPT for the mantel.  It's my favorite thing to do each year, closely followed by putting lights on the tree (oh that battle!  the bloodshed!  the sap! the LIGHTS!).   Each year, it manifests differently. I wish I had taken more pictures of previous years-- like when I did pine garlands and clementines and twinkling lights.  That was pretty.  This year started with a blue disco ball motif, but I changed my mind and this is what we ended up with:

It's alright from straight ahead, but it's the details that make me linger when I walk past:

The mouse was the ornament Nora picked out on vacation this year.  It joins our collection with the fox and the skunk.  I made those little Santa hats a few years ago when we had my frame full of birds hanging in the living room.  The hats fit these critters just about as well as they fit my bird collection.  The gourds are from our garden and look just as good for Christmas as they did for Thanksgiving.   Gourd haters be damned!

My bird ornaments all found homes on the dining room garland-- that garland was from Papa back at UNISIX and the bird in the center is the one I had hanging in my curtains there, so it's just lovely and sentimental.  I almost didn't hang up the two cages that made their way into the collection-- they make me sad.  But in one, the bird has fallen off the perch, and a cage with a dead bird in it is just right.  I mean, the symbolism, right?  That's what happens, right?  So I figure it encourages the other birds to make the most of their freedom.  The other cage is empty--a threat?  I didn't like a cage hanging up at all, honestly, so I tried to pry the door open, but nearly broke apart the whole thing, so, eh, it went up anyway.  It was a gift, after all.

In other domestic fun, I spent nearly two hours moving the livingroom furniture around and setting up the stereo station.  True to the typical way helens do things like this, I moved things around no less than six different ways and ended up settling on the first configuration I came up with.  Coulda saved myself a lot of heavy lifting.  At least Chris helped me do the last move.  It would have been more annoying to go back to the beginning if I had to wrangle all that furniture myself. 

Delightful irony:  after moving furniture so much today and yesterday, I'm sitting on the floor to write.  Ha!

Love

Nora is currently playing a game in which the bananas are madly in love with each other and keep standing up and saying "I love you" and giving each other kisses. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Daily Gratitude

It's that time of year again-- posting my daily gratitude in a public place.  I forgot to start posting over the weekend, so please walk back in time with me a few days and then, if you are so inclined, please join me in sharing your gratitude for the world.  This kid wouldn't claim any kind of wisdom or great worldly understanding, but I can say that cultivating a more vocal spirit of gratitude makes a big difference for me.  It allows me to tune in to the blessings and tune out the sad trombones...although, now that I think of it, that womp wahhhh sound is something to be grateful for, too.

So here we go.

November 1st Daily Gratitude: Brothers, great company, stopping in the middle of party prep bustle to read about King Solomon, the Cleveland Museum of Art.

November 2nd Daily Gratitude: The fellowship in a group of women I know, driving alone so I have complete control of the soundtrack (and can sing like a madwoman), going back to Evolution Yoga after a too-long hiatus, and feeling God's beauty wrap around me and support me.

November 3rd Daily Gratitude: Crazy looking handmade dresses from the thrift store, having friends to talk to on rough days, ropes + yoga, laundry + Munk/Walking Dead, wordmath.

November 4th Daily Gratitude: Work days at work, guitar in the background (and how it makes my brain work so much better!), spontaneous thrifting adventures, a chance to teach yoga (that's a blog post in itself) walking in the wind, coming home to my kids and those hugs and that garden and playing outside, watching a large cardboard box cartwheel down our block in a beautiful way, and then watching my darling husband run across the street, dropkick it, roll over, rassle with the box, and bring it home for us to fill with leaves.  Laughing hard.  Play dough, bath time, Nora's constant talking, love love love is all around.

Post your own gratitude!

This is the Stargazer sculpture at the CMA

 

A Day of Many Days

I'm sitting on the deck outside the upstairs bathroom right now.  I'm in my underpants and watching a gamboling humdinger of a lightning storm roll in.  Except for the glow of this here computer screen, it's great.  Ah the clouds just broke!

New scene: I'm lying on the floor beside Muffy's crib.  The window here faces a good part of sky and its proximity to leaves creates ocean sounds out of the wind.  You could be anywhere if you are here.  Sailing the high seas in your underpants, guided by glowy screens instead of a sextant.  Too poetical, maybe.  How about I'm just here.  A Helen in a rainstorm in the dark in her underpants and the front is passing through and my babes are all asleep.  And where I am is good.  It always is, if I make sure I'm fully there. <--That right there is a whole other topic for another post. Today is for writing about days of many days.

You have those days of many days, right?  So full of moments and conversations, adventures and tasks, that they seem like many days.  Today was one of those.  A week's worth of connections (some half made, maybe, to be picked up later), struggles, and just goodness and laughter, skin and the smell of children's hair on hot days, smiles from former students, oh and the disappointment in myself for forgetting one of my special one's names.  To be fair, he graduated two or three or four years ago, but I still should have remembered.  Even in the half light of the parking lot, I could see his disappointment. Poor kid.  He was a bright spot in my life that year, too.  Now he will think he was just forgettable, but he wasn't!  

The point is that I like the fullness of days like this.  I want to relive them sometimes, so I could space all the moments out and savor them a little longer.  Let the flavors roll around in my mouth before I swallow.  I listed some of them in my paper journal and more came and bells rang and a half list remains.

Last night, Chris and spent a few hours on the front porch after the kids were down.  In the course of our excellent, meandering conversation, we talked about how there are people in life we love but don't say it to.  Here's one of those times when I especially sympathize with men because our world makes it harder for them to verbally express love to friends.  But even as a woman, there are many relationships that ARE love, but the love isn't spoken.  It's too bad.

Remember those times when you were dating and you had that talk-- the one where you finally said you loved the person?  And your heart was beating in your throat somewhere and you weren't sure what they would say.  Part of you wanted to splash into a puddle on the floor and the rest just wanted to sing it out because it was real and it was love and you felt it.  Then you said it and you emptied and filled all in the same three syllables.  It really doesn't even matter how the other person responded because you said it.  You sat down and intentionally stated the words, eyeball to eyeball.  No casual "love ya."  The real thing.

I wonder why our friendships don't tend to give phrase "I love you" the place it deserves.  We might say it, eventually.  Your friend gets the flu and "Oh no!  Is there anything I can do?  Feel better!  Love you!"  or after a heart to heart you say goodbye and "Thanks for listening!  Love you so much! We need to get together more often!"  There's no denying that these are beautiful expressions, but I wonder what it would be like if we took the time to sit down with friends and confess our love.  I've had two friendships in which we did that.  One was a little more complicated of a relationship at the time, but that conversation solidified our friendship and gave it a foundation that has allowed it to last almost two decades.  The other was just a pure and simple long-time friend.  It felt so good to say the words in a serious way. I LOE you.  (That's an inside joke, not a typo).  And to hear them in a way that was intentional instead of in passing.  It made me love that friend even more just knowing that we took the time to say it in words.

There are a lot of people in my life who I do love.  I'd like to challenge myself to say it more.  To get over the fact that people just don't do that very often and get over the fact that it might be weird.  Frankly, if we all knew how loved we were, we'd probably go about life with more kindness, calm, and a generous humility that comes from feeling sure we are loved.  I challenge myself in this way knowing that I will still probably wuss out for a  while.  I mean, I love these people and the last thing I want to do is alienate them with declarations of love.  But then, who keeps their light under a bushel basket, right?  Can I get an AMEN?

New places

I've been looking for a place to call my new yoga home.  A place where I can do some more growing, because that's what it's all about isn't it?   On Saturday, I went to Alicia's class at Evolution Yoga and it was lovely.  The space lets me look outside, which is exactly where I want to be when I'm doing yoga because I feel so much more connected to everything that matters.  When Alicia said "...because what you believe, you create" a lump leapt right into my throat.  Memories and emotions flying at my heart all at once and the realization that we've all learned so much from each other at Nishkama and that, like all good teachers, schools, classes, the lessons we've learned stay with us.  So that was beautiful.

Today, I tried something else new at Evolution.  I tied some knots and hung from 'em like so:

The whole situation was ripe for picking metaphors:  Supported by the knots I tied myself, flying, turning my favorite yoga pose upside down, etc.  But in that moment, I just felt joy and loved being near an open window with a potted plant gently shedding its spent blossoms on me as I hung like a monkey (or a piece of juicy jungle fruit?).  Spinal traction aside, I feel just all around good.  It appears that I'm embarking on a nice journey at Evolution.  I'm excited to grow more.  Oh, and holy cow that assist I got today made my spine rotate further than I thought was humanly possible.  My goodness!

Look for a garden post coming soon.  Chard!

Hearts

Garden update!

Bleeding Hearts

So purty

Brunnera, Jack Frost.  Recovered well after the trauma of a harsh winter and being uprooted twice since late August)

Ox eye daisies volunteered in two spots in the yard, which makes up for the fact that the waterproofing guys destroyed the main batch up front.  Almost.

This very day

A small boy in plaid lags behind his mother unnoticed.   He is counting the deer in the field.  Unnoticed.

It is one of the most beautiful parts of my day.