Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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farm retreat day 1

July 22, 2020

I woke up around 5:15 a.m. and could see in the dark bedroom that my husband was pulling on a tshirt. I stretched my legs and belly, leaned up for a kiss, and asked was he getting ready to work? Yep. What’s broken now? No, it’s just a work day. Oh whew. He resumed Commish duties bright and early today. No need for a tool box or emergency trip to Petty’s Hardware on 29th.

Midday I drove to the City to retrieve Jess and Bean! They are starting a little farm retreat, and we could not be happier. The exact moment that Bean and Klaus saw each other, the high speed romping was on. It was on like Donkey Kong.

Image may contain: grass, sky, outdoor and nature
Image may contain: one or more people, people standing, sky, tree, grass, outdoor and nature

These summer days and family nights are a gift to all of us, for a thousand reasons.

I gotta go. Bean is talking to me. He said, Grandma let’s go outside and play.

And I said
hey hey hey hey hey
XOXOXOXO


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my birthday advice

July 21, 2020

One of my favorite ways to emotionally assault friends and family is to, at their birthday dinner or party, ask what have they learned this past year, what advice will they give us on their birthday? Truly, most people hate to be asked this, but I can’t help myself. #sorrynotsorry

Just about a week before covid quarantine started for us, I turned 46. My husband filled up the farm with friends and family, and we had FUN. I mean, we didn’t know it that night, but it was the last time we would gather a large group like that, possibly for the rest of this year.

And there was cake! We had delicious food and multiple cakes and blew out candles. We talked outside and took selfies with the animals and played tug o war. A fun birthday party for sure. I felt so loved, and we laughed hard, late into the night.

I remember having birthday advice to share but nobody asked me for it, ha! So here we go. I think it more appropriate now than ever before:

Dream really big and sketch out your plans, pursue your goals and passions. Chip away at them regularly. But be flexible in your methods and focus on one day at a time. Practice living within the bounds of today, maximizing the moments. We truly have no guarantee, none whatsoever, of what comes next.

This is nothing new. We hear it all the time, from people in all positions and throughout history. So why do we forget so easily? How can we (I) become so arrogant in our (my) expectations and so wasteful in how we spend our todays?

Over the months leading up to my March birthday, it all developed fully in my heart. 2019 was all about “creating space,” then over the winter and in the first months of 2020, I became more and more aware of a gentle urgency about the present day, like a blind spot when I tried to look too far ahead. I sometimes used pencil in my planner, past the current week’s lists. It’s funny, isn’t it? To think of using a planner this year? Values, goals, systems, and habits make more sense right now.

Covid-19 hit our state less than one week after that fun birthday party, and everything shut down. All of our best laid plans suddenly fell subject to the strongest demands of flexibility and creative living any of us, really, had seen yet.

I welcome it. I am luckier than many people n a thousand ways, but the need for both flexibility and focus is no less real for me.

Okay, tomorrow my sweet, handsome, hard working, fun loving husband will resume his daytime Commish duties, though he is still working remote. Today we indulged in a ordering hot wings and shrimp tacos from Hooters, the first time we had food from there all these quarantine months. After eating that delicious early dinner, we watched funny You Tube videos and made shrinky dinks.

Our anniversary staycation this year was very different than any of the eighteen preceding ones we have enjoyed, but we definitely made the most of it. We romanced it day after day, rolled gracefully with the farm-maintenance punches, and stayed pretty engaged in the moments, together. I only notice interpersonal tension twice, and both times it was because we were overly concerned for the other person’s perfect comfort. Ha!

And we are excited to see Jessica tomorrow! Her hard earned week off finally starts tonight, and we are turning the farm into a wellness retreat and family R & R paradise for as long as she needs. Planning and dreaming, you know, building our pencilled calendar with habits and values and general systems, but going to bed and waking up knowing that everything can change. So we live one day at a time, gratefully. As lovingly as possible.

Do the next right thing.
XOXOXOXO

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: biorthday advice, choose joy, love, quarantine

marigold has wounded me deeply

July 20, 2020

This morning at first breakfast, Little Lady Marigold displayed a startling level of steadiness and composure. A tiny little stone colored frog had been perched on the edge of her bowl, and when I filled it with molasses scented grain, the frog jumped right up to her left shoulder. It landed in the deep, stressed-out tuft of her greyish fleece, and she did not even budge. For a sheep who still won’t let me cuddle her, she allows an amphibian passenger?? Gross.

Speaking of gross, the cats are still nursing. They seem content with jeans edges and such, but wow. How much longer can we expect this behavior?

Handsome was thankfully able to extend his staycation by a couple of days. It is not only needed; it is really needed. So we are relaxing a little extra today and tomorrow, expecting to resume daytime remote office duties early Wednesday morning. I skimmed an online article about how people are designing their work-from-home office spaces, and I really want him to ask me to do this for him, ha. It’s unlikely to happen, though, if only because he loves to work from either of his car shops. He takes advantage of every spare minute to either tinker with his fun cars or make progress on the Batmobile, and I totally get that. Are you following his Batmobile photos yet?

Today is Quarantine Day 128. We are enjoying some New Moon energy, and our late July weather could not be more luxurious. The first day of autumn (September 22nd) is a bright and glossy 64 days away, and our first average frost date is at least 101 days away. Probably more. These facts help me breathe deeply, like I am buffered by a wide, velvet greenbelt of summertime. I feel so lucky to live in Oklahoma, where the growing season is not only long but also multi-faceted. It gives us lots of choices and keeps us guessing. We have first spring, second spring, early summer, late summer, at least three autumns, and maybe an Indian summer too.

Jess has been working lots of overtime at the hospital and has scheduled her corresponding days off all together, rather than staggered like usual. It will look and feel like a nice vacation, but she will leave her vacation time untouched. Genius! We are excited for her to get some much needed rest, and we are really excited that she will spend part of her time off here at the farm. I have said it before with Jocelyn, and it is still true: Preparing a guest room for your adult kids before they visit is at least as much fun as preparing the nursery before going to the hospital. And that is saying a lot.

We are working on some fun projects for the upcoming school year, so stay tuned! And happy fresh new week, friends! Thanks as always for reading and for sending me your thoughts. I love hearing from you.

“Then tell me of your long journey home.”
~Cold Mountain
XOXOXOXO

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: animals, blogging streak, choose joy, dailiy life, farmlife, love, summertime

in a continuum, where does the story begin?

July 19, 2020

“The good news is that the heat seems to be exhausting our five million grasshoppers. Wait, let me back up…”

I was around nine years old, barefoot and in the middle branches of Mom’s mulberry tree, right there on the west edge of the house against our neighbors’ driveway. My hands were stained black with the wonderful inky juice, my skin brown from summertime and my hair probably tangled in the back. I was worried that something deep and important was wrong with me because I could never figure out the correct beginning of any story. I was fundamentally flawed, though I didn’t know the word fundamental yet.

I marveled at how people could just dive in and tell any story fluidly, discerning with confidence how to begin the tale and what details to include. To me, to my nonstop thoughts and conveyor belt lines of questioning, every beginning was really just the middle or end of something else, everything was very literally connected. Nothing, not even in fiction books, had a believable and well formed boundary.

It’s why I still have trouble telling stories. I never know where to start. What history can be excluded, can just be trimmed away as if it didn’t happen, as if it doesn’t matter any more.

What details matter not just to me, but also to the listener or reader? What details would be missed, if I attempted some economy? What precious context supplies the understanding that makes all the difference?

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and no man is an island. We all affect each other, and we are all affected by each other. That’s not a flaw; it’s part of our wonderful design.

As for how you tell me stories, tell me everything. Leave nothing out. I want to hear it all, even if it barely seems relevant. I want to understand the background stories, the moods and flavors, the weird implications, the spider webs of complicated stories that led up this exact moment.

The grasshoppers are numerous, but they are slowing under the weight of Oklahoma summertime. And the tomatoes are thriving. Tonight we ate a pretty delicious galette made with a few of those tomatoes plus fresh garden basil and a parmesean-cornmeal crust.

And we sat with and loved on our friends whose story is changing. Not suddenly, and not in a vacuum. I do not grasp where it begins, really, and maybe they don’t either. Tonight, though, we have this part of it, of this one part of a big and complicated story that is far from over. This moment in a continuum, this chance to do the next right thing.

I very much wish that someone would have told me, at nine, barefoot in that mulberry tree, that it’s ok to not know where a story begins. No one knows. We just get to dive in right where we are and pour ourselves out lavishly.

“You never know how hard it will be.
You never know when it will end.
You can’t control it.
You can only adjust. And, he added,

No one gets through it on their own.“
~Angel, Born to Run, Christopher McDougall

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: choose joy, community, gratitude, grief, love, marriage, storytelling, ubuntu

some very good input

July 18, 2020

The following podcast episode caught my attention with the title, “Are We Wrong About Bio Mechanics?” because I love learning all about the human body. But the content was an even more luscious surprise. The guest author spoke passionately and convincingly about fluidity and joyful movement, about remembering to think of our physical selves as collections and intersections of space and light, and about quantum physics. He described how babies move without regard for how they should move and just take joy in how they can move. He invited the listener to discover ways of moving in space with natural anti-gravity (buoyancy!) and with a freedom of spirit. I am paraphrasing here because I listened to this while running, and I definitely missed some detail. But it was so good I plan to listen again with a pen and notebook handy. Click here: https://www.stitcher.com/s?eid=53881087&refid=asa

Although I finished Cold Mountain a few days ago, it won’t leave me. The story is big and historical, the setting and scenery beautiful despite being war torn, and the characters felt so real that despite a crisp and powerful epilogue I crave more of them. Ada and Ruby, especially, validate every yearning I have for our nine acres. So industrious! During my big downstairs artwork rearrange, I moved a small framed painting of a mountainside cabin to one of my kitchen walls. I want to see it often and conjure up the novel’s thrumming vibrations of reasonable struggle, resourcefulness, natural rhythms, and the beauty of creative labor. I want to think of friends living together.

“The main thing, Ruby said, was not to get ahead of yourself. Go at a rhythm that could be sustained on and on. Do just as much as you could do and still be able to get up and do it tomorrow. No more, no less.” ~Frazier

A well respected Oklahoma physician shared his thoughts on the mask debate in this letter to the governor. The government’s mandates or absence of mandates is one thing; the colossal accumulation of all citizens making good, wise, loving personal choices day after day is what will turn the virus’ tide in Oklahoma, and everywhere. Cellular level wisdom, this is what we need. https://nondoc.com/2020/07/18/letter-if-the-governor-wont-enforce-a-mask-requirement-the-task-falls-to-citizens/

Are you watching the new season of Yellowstone? Oh man. Much to say. Much. Many words.

“Just lose yourself in the work.”

Yesterday I cracked open Born to Run, a book I have been wanting to read for months. It chronicles the Tarahumara, a niche and extremely remote running tribe in the mountains of Mexico, and in just a few chapters I am hooked. My brother Joey read it a couple of months ago and warned me not to read it because it will make me want to run an ultra, ha! Then my foot doctor referenced it while we discussed unique physiology and barefoot running. All of this, then today i heard that gorgoeous, lilting message about fluid movement. Magic!

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

“There’s something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.” Also, “In terms of stress relief and sensual pleasure, running is what you have in your life before you have sex.”

One last thing, may I suggest as a perfect summertime meal a scoop of shrimp ceviche with cold watermelon and some salty tortilla chips? Okay. Not exactly foraged from the prairie, but delicious.

Seize the day, friend. Nourish yourself.

XOXOXOXO

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: born to run, cold mountain

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Hi! I'm Marie. Welcome to the Lazy W. xoxo

Hi! I’m Marie. This is the Lazy W.

A hobby farming, book reading, coffee drinking, romance having, miles running girl in Oklahoma. Soaking up the particular beauty of every day. Blogging on the side. Welcome to the Lazy W!

I Believe Strongly in the Power of Gratitude & Joy Seeking

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