How goes your week, friend? Are you clipping along, devouring earthly pleasures and churning out little accomplishments like the superwoman that you are? Are you gleaning insights and deepening relationships as you go? Are you counting your many blessings? I hope so. I hope January has thrust you into light and strength like you have not yet known.

   I have been enjoying a week of both pause and nourishment, a few days to really deeply water my roots in anticipation of a VERY busy couple of months soon to begin! It’s been kind of a breather between the holidays and springtime, and I have loved every delicious moment.

   Right now I am working through distilling my thoughts on Little Women while also reading through the hefty and completely worthwhile Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography. So I am flanked by both sweetness and grit, and it’s perfect.

   The gardens are whispering to me constantly, but it’s still time for them to rest. So I suffice myself with houseplants, seed catalogs, and manure collection. Are you planning your spring gardens yet?? I would love to know what my friends from around the globe can cultivate!

   Physically, my strength resolution is ramping up. In just ten days I begin half-marathon training, and that is pretty darn exciting! In the mean time, I just run as often as time allows, do a sit up here and there, and eat slightly less sugar than I did in December. Baby steps, you know?

   Speaking of resolutions and words, a couple of weeks ago Handsome and I opened the farm for one last bonfire of the holiday season, which turned out to also be our first social gathering of the New Year! It was so much fun. A handful of our friends (from different circles, by the way, which is so cool!) gathered around the fire, tossing in our past year’s regrets and pains into the flames, helping each other let go. We laughed and laughed and ate too many marshmallows. Then we wrote our intentional words for the New Year on a big chalkboard in our stairwell. One of these days I will actually download those photos and share the chalkboard image with you. As a group we came up with some pretty great words!

   I better scoot, but I wanted to wish everyone a very happy end to your week! I hope your first few weeks of this New Year have been good to you and good for you. Keep doing your best and count your blessings! Life is beautiful.

“Let us love winter,
for it is the spring of genius.”
~Pietro Aretino
xoxoxoxo

P.S. A very grateful thanks to my friend and fellow book clubber Erica for sharing this photo she snapped as she pulled into the Lazy W recently. We love our friends and treasure our guests so much! I really appreciate it when you share your joy too. xoxo

   How are you guys? I haven’t blogged in a week, for a multitude of reasons. We’re pretty great. Just awfully busy and fairly sleepy and sort of occupied keeping ourselves fueled from day to day. Balancing fun decisions with necessary ones. Feeling voids and then filling them. Not quite believing that I have had much to offer you fine citizens, in the way of prose or poetry. Just thinking a lot whenever I sit still.

   But life is good. The four leggeds are all healthy and happy. The newly adopted poultry have integrated really well with the existing flock. The mild nighttime freezes we’ve enjoyed have nearly eliminated all flying pests.

   We have been so lucky here lately to spend time with great friends. In fact, I spent election day last week with one of my most beloved friends, but also a woman with whom I agree on precious few issues. You know what? Not one scruff. We had a great day together and made a hundred happy memories. This is a blessing in our life for so many reasons. It’s good to have a variety of people to influence, support, challenge, reflect, entertain, and basically LOVE us. Our friends are treasures.

   So is our marriage. As time passes on the calendar, I see more and more proof of the importance of a strong, happy marriage. How it can serve as a wonderful foundation for so many other beautiful life experiences. How it’s not just an event or a simple relationship or even a familial bond. The complexities of a fulfilling marriage (in my view) are matched only by the incredible wealth of love and joy that can spring forth from it. In so many directions.

   I’ve still been running, though only in short bursts. I crave a nice, long run badly. I have realized that training for a half marathon on a quarter-mile track is kind of like reading Infinite Jest on a smart phone. There really is no underestimating the value of this development in my life, you guys. I feel better in every way from running, and if you are still on the fence about it I strongly suggest you take advantage of this brisk weather and get out there! Sweat out whatever is going on in your heart. Find that pace where you barely feel your legs and your thoughts glide past easily.

   How is the weather where you are? Is anything still blooming in your garden? Does it feel like Thanksgiving yet? We woke up to frost on the ground (and on the llama) today, and to round out our time off, Handsome and I are lighting a bonfire at sunset and welcome local friends and family. I sure wish all of you could join us.

   I hope life is good for you. I hope you have a seed of gratitude in your heart and a swell of warmth for Veterans near and far. I hope you have plenty to eat and thick blankets to cover you at night. I hope your prayers are alive with hope and your coffee is perfect.

Talk soon.
 
“Promote what you love
Instead of bashing what you hate.”
xoxoxoxo

   Hey everyone! How was your weekend? How has your work week started out? Is it still foggy where you are, as your read this? At the farm I can barely see past the garden gate and the forest trees are blurred, showing only their slender black trunks in the grayness. Also, our animals are still mostly asleep at 8:30 in the morning! Lazy.

   Around here, today begins two full weeks of lunar fertility; I have a long list of autumnal jobs to tackle, both indoors and out; a good friend is starting her wedding preparations, and I am super excited to help; I have a beekeepers’ meeting and am working at the Great State Fair of Oklahoma again, AND (certainly most important of all these fine things) I am embarking on a new emotional adventure for my children.

   This might be a light writing week for me, but then again so much is going on that I might lost my mind if I don’t write. So we’ll see. Either way, I wish you guys perfect September weather, just the right amount of food and exercise, three or four great books to read, a secret love note or two, and deep, abiding faith for whatever breaks your heart.

   I would be so thrilled if you kept my girls and me in your prayers especially right now. And if you’re local, come see me at the Fair this Wednesday! I will be at the beekeeping exhibit again, learning more than I teach.

“Autumn is a Second Spring 
When Every Leaf is a Flower.”
~Albert Camus
xoxoxo

   Greetings you sweet, creative, thinky people! How has your fresh new week started out? Are you off and running, pouring your momentum and energy into every task and whistling while you work? Or are you dragging a little, running a bit rougher than you would like? Or maybe somewhere in between? I don’t mind saying that I hit the ground running today, both literally and figuratively.

   After a few days last week spent actively resisting sadness and then mindlessly eating too many bowls of indulgent pasta, today was a healthier, happier day. I traded sweet notes with my baby girl on Saturday, her seventeenth birthday, and now she and I are looking forward to some time alone, hopefully very soon. I have tucked a few long, sweaty runs under my belt; and this coming week is filled with unusual and very exciting opportunities.  (I’ll be sharing some of this with you!)

   On top of it all, our weather in Oklahoma has shifted ever so slightly. The late evenings are cool, and the early mornings are downright crisp. Our afternoons have been sunny and warm enough to collect a few rays on my bare legs and shoulders, but they are no longer murderously hot. These are the sublime days. The days between summer and autumn, the days when at any moment you can turn off the air conditioner and shove open every window in the house. The days when horses nap with their bellies open to the sky instead of hiding beneath the cooling shelter of cypress trees. Even the herbs are responding to our friendlier atmosphere…

   So I’m feeling pretty good. Great, actually. Despite some recent disappointments in life and ongoing challenges in several areas, Handsome and I feel so blessed. I am more grateful than ever for good friends who care and who offer nourishing little bits of wisdom and encouragement when it is needed most. For others who laugh with us so hard that we forget ever not laughing. I am so grateful for this constant river of inspiration that somehow speeds along inevitable grief. Life at the moment is bursting at the seams with opportunities for growth, improvement, and comfort. Do you feel that too? There is something in the distance, but something wonderful.

   At a garage sale over the weekend, I snagged for exactly one dollar a framed oil painting of a garden door.   Believe it or not (I hope you do believe me) it is the spitting image of one of the ways that Worry Door appeared to me almost two weeks ago. I now have the painting propped up on my writing desk, gently reminding me to keep that door closed.

   As I close up this afternoon to move on to life’s next skinny little chapter, I am expecting some good news for my parents and little sister. I am trusting that my girls, my human chickens, feel the best of everything along with me. I have confidence in my husband and his future.And I crave Nutella like nobody’s business.

“My joy, my grief, my hope, my love,
Did all within this circle move.”
~Edmund Waller*
xoxoxoxo

*Edmund Waller was a seventeenth century English poet and member of Parliament.