Tag: Change

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Year In Review: Really?

Yes, this is a post about 2016, a classic “year in review” run-down, a “hey look at me, this is what happened in my life” kind of post.  Because this is my website, so I can do this sort of thing.  If you have a website, maybe you can do the same.  If you don’t have a website, you could even do this on a piece of paper.  The point is to find the clarity in the messes, the good among the catastrophe, and the pattern that flows through the chaos.

Danielle LaPorte posed five questions to herself, and they seem like good ones to ask as I reflect on the past year.  So I’ll go ahead and borrow them — here they are: Continue reading “Year In Review: Really?”

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Balance For Today: Lessons from a Rock Cairn

Yesterday I took to the woods in the afternoon.  It’s the first week in about ten years when I don’t have any sort of schedule.  There is no work calendar hovering in the background, I’m not on vacation for a certain amount of time, there are no appointments to plan around.  I’m a free agent, at least for now.  So I did what I do when I can do whatever I want – I went to the woods.

Going to the woods is what I tend to do when I am feeling melancholy, unsure, anxious, or angry.  It’s a place to go when I’m grieving, wondering, lamenting, or stewing about something outside of my control.  Basically, going to the woods (or prairie, or ocean, or any other natural area) is healing.  It’s a place to go in celebration as well, but lately, its role in my days has been one of holding space for what needs to rise from the ashes of what has recently burnt away.  Continue reading “Balance For Today: Lessons from a Rock Cairn”

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Autumn’s Paradox

It has been a busy month.  September always seems to mean racing to prepare life for winter.  Of course we could do some of these things before we HAVE to do them, but it doesn’t seem to happen that way, year after year.  So we fly around in September getting fire wood cut and stacked, filling fuel tanks, mowing the grass a few more times, winterizing motors, cleaning the chimney…..the list is long, and usually expensive.  Things feel really hard, tempers are short, work days seem long and sometimes it feels like a hopeless cause to try to change anything at all.  But here we are on the first day of autumn, and the list is getting done.  We have firewood stacked, the septic is pumped, the furnace is tuned up, and we still have funds to the other things we need to do, even if we won’t be going on any European vacations anytime soon.

Autumn is a paradox. The leaves are changing, the harvest is coming in and the warmer temperatures this year mean the blackberries are still putting new blossoms on their brambles.    There is vibrant tree color alongside the withering of the annuals I planted in the spring.  There is the fresh possibility of a new school year alongside the mourning of summer’s sense of freedom.  There is hope for a late freeze alongside a yearning for the day the temperature drops far enough to bring many kinds of garden work (and allergies) to a halt.   We feel like we will never have enough, yet we always have more than we need. Continue reading “Autumn’s Paradox”

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The Blue of Longing

When I hear the words “the blue of longing,” I am transported to a dusty red four-speed Toyota that doesn’t have air conditioning, and I’m driving west across South Dakota.  It’s August and there’s a cassette tape playing since no radio stations will tune in without static.  After miles of corn fields give way to miles of grassy pasture; after the Missouri river valley gives way to rolling tall grass prairie; after I cross through the barren beauty of Badlands spires reaching toward the sky, after the signs for Wall Drug say, “wait, you missed it!”……after all of that I finally come to the place where the Black Hills loom in the distance, and I marvel at the sudden change in the horizon.  There is a reason these mountains are called what they are – when they appear in the windshield, it is like looking into layer upon layer of coal colored refreshment against the brightness of a late summer sky.  I am astonished at the majestic expanse that commands my sight lines and the welcoming darkness of what lays ahead.  Surely there is myth and magic to be found once I arrive at this oasis.  And then at some point as I continue on the westward journey, it’s gone.  Once I reach the point where identifying individual hills and trees is possible, the black has vanished and only the landscape remains.  They are just hills, now – beautiful and sacred as they always were, but the mystery that came with the space that was once between me and the place I sought is as gone as the distance that was closed to nothing.  And when I look up and out past the place where the hills give way to grasslands again, I can see hints of the next place that I seek, and the color that tints that desire to arrive.   The myth and magic remains just around the next corner. Continue reading “The Blue of Longing”