Hello friends! The Man and I are stay-cation-ing this week!! It’s our wedding anniversary again, fifteen years on Thursday, and to celebrate we are spending day after day in a mix of local exploration and indulging in the farm as a HOME-tel. : )) The best of both worlds, we like to think. The food is so good. The weather is ideal. And precious few business obligations are breaking up this long stretch of freedom.

We are keeping in close touch with my family and visiting Grandpa Stubbs in the hospital, and thankfully recent turns have been really positive. He is doing so much better. Many thanks to those of you who have sent sweet notes and promised to pray. xoxo

Saturday morning I spent a couple of hours alone in the kitchen, cleaning out the fridge and just sort of reordering, hard-boiling, and pre-chopping everything for our week ahead. I drank copious of amounts of very dark coffee with only heated half and half, no sugar. The prep work created quite a heap of scraps for the chickens and geese. They were duly appreciative, and I came inside with eleven hot, heavy, pastel-shelled eggs.

While working slowly and steadily I indulged in a few Ted talks, and this one in particular held my attention. It’s about the super-conscious, which is different than my normal appetite for matters of the sub-conscious. Really interesting. The lecture holds some nice tandems with the Law of Attraction, Biblical concepts, and my personal philosophies in general. Very good listen if you are so inclined.

Handsome spent that slice of time outdoors, mowing with his new (used) John Deere and weed-eating every straight edge on the farm. Also some curved ones. He also replaced the pump on our swimming pool and cleaned it to a perfect Caribbean blue. These easy Saturday morning tasks helped us get on the right foot for stay-cation.

Tomorrow I get to see my sports doctor again. Hopefully he can help me with some frustrating knee pain and ankle swelling and get me on a path to higher mileage, whether that includes marathon training (starts theoretically next Monday!!) or just more running. Fingers crossed.

How are you? What’s going on in your world? Are you guarding your heart from the ugliest and worst but still finding ways to engage the world and embrace all of our fractured places? I am privately making a conscious effort to not see the sarcasm and the bitterness all over social media, only to seek information and cultivate compassion. Peace has to be more than a mood, right? More than an idea or a stock image? But still it all begins with our thoughts. And it all is fueled by what we allow our eyes to see.

Okay. I am on to date night. One of many this week. Wishing you so much Love and a thousand wishes granted.

XOXOXOXO

How are you, you fine person of a people? At this moment I am sitting comfortably in a our very chilly concrete-floor T.V. room, in the happy company of Handsome (he is home early, feeling a bit sickly) and Klaus, the World’s Best Pup.

When the weeks pass by without much blogging, perhaps it seems like I have nothing to say or nothing is happening. In my life lately, neither is true.

I have so much to say that the words swim violently in my head. To relieve the pressure I use a dictation app on my iPhone and email myself scattered, un-punctuated, stream-of-consciousness essays. These are on all sorts of topics. I do this mostly while running an easy pace on the treadmill or while carrying baskets of laundry upstairs or down. It’s messy but offers some relief.

As for how much is happening, the answer is so much that often the minute I realize “Hey this is a great thing to blog about,” that moment is passed and we are on to the next wonderful, beautiful moment.

I’m not complaining. Life is full to bursting with beauty, activity, and good vibrations. Better to fully Carpe the Diems than to stop that delicious flow in order to braid together a few sentences, right?

Except, of course, there’s that well-worn quote…

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. ~Anais Nin

In lieu of writing I try to thrust onto the web an Instagram image here and there, or some less artful but more day-in-the-life Snap Chat moments. This is all lots of fun, but I crave to write. And I am slowly but surely whittling down my stack of projects and commitments so that more passionate domesticity, hobby farming, and writing can once again take center stage.

Ted Talks are big in my life these days. How about you? I have this great little blue tooth speaker that can travel with me all over the house, so I can listen to a string of lectures while cleaning the kitchen, prepping food, ironing Handsome’s shirts, sweeping and mopping, anything like that. Even goofing around in the gym has proven to be a great background activity for filling my brain with smart people’s words and ideas. Lifelong learning, you know. Three cheers for that!

The gardens. My gosh. Oklahoma’s heat, humidity, and generous rainfall have been pure luxury for our flowers and edibles! I am in heaven here. My tomato vines are reaching in tall, rib-opening poses toward the sky, breathing deeply and calmly ignoring the protective cages we built around them. So far they are only bearing hard, green fruit, but there are hundreds of them. Literally hundreds. One of these days I will walk downhill and need a wheel barrow to collect my treasure.

I got my wish for abundant flowers this year too, and because I am pretty sure God loves me He has even allowed me a gluttonous supply of basil. I am spoiled.

Okay, some photos and short stories before we close up for tonight.

Okay, time for this brilliant cheap gardening idea:

You can multiply your tomato plant supply for FREE. Just save the longest, thickest suckers when you do normal pruning. Root them in a glass of water and once the white fleshy root threads appear, plant the shoots in soil. BAM. More plants. I have “Herbsnthings” from Instagram to thank for this idea. So excited to have a staggered harvest!

Thanks as always for checking in. A thousand other things are happening here. Work stuff. Goals stuff. Healthy stuff. Family stuff. Just like you.

We all are just trying to swallow the moon whole and shine from the inside out.

XOXOXOXO