Lazy W Marie

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

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Educated, a book review

Five solid gold stars to this book for its social content, writing style, readability, relevance, and emotional impact. Wow.

Educated by Tara Westover

Often after devouring a book, I immediately want everyone around me to read it too, if only so I can then make them discuss it with me, haha. Educated by Tara Westover is no exception, but this time I have a few specific target audiences in mind.

Friends, make time to read Educated if you:

  • are a feminist.
  • don’t call yourself a feminist but want to understand your feminist loved ones better.
  • have ever struggled with fundamentalist religion.
  • appreciate your beautiful life situation (or are perhaps amazed by it) but feel you don’t deserve it, feel you don’t belong where you are.
  • are a survivor of an abusive relationship (not necessarily a marriage).
  • are estranged from either your parents or your children (though this could make parts of the book especially painful, it could be very healing too).
  • are not estranged from family but distinctly separated from them in some important way, and it hurts.
  • doubt your potential as a human being because of your life circumstances so far.
  • crave a wider view of the world, of written history, of society and family dynamics than what your personal world has offered so far.
  • simply enjoy lush prose and masterful storytelling.
  • appreciate memoirs that span time, geography, personalities, trauma, and triumph.
  • need some encouragement about the resiliency of average people and the length to which the Universe will go to assist us.

Okay. Does any of that include you? If so, please take my advice, as I took my sister Gen’s and her BFF Julia’s, and read this book. Page after page offers heartbreak, wisdom, good solid writing (even poetry), and plenty of universal truth and encouragement. Humanity stuff.

And if Educated reminds us of anything, it’s how profoundly reading can shape a person’s sense of self and possibility. Tara Westover’s journey shows that literacy isn’t just about decoding words on a page—it’s about accessing ideas, challenging assumptions, and building inner strength. That’s why I believe so deeply in nurturing not just a love for reading, but the skills and confidence to engage with texts meaningfully.

For those of us looking to strengthen our own reading habits—or help our kids do the same—resources like https://readingduck.com can be a gentle but powerful way in. With thoughtful reading worksheets that don’t just test comprehension but invite reflection, it’s a tool that makes the experience more approachable and personal.

Because whether we’re escaping into a memoir, questioning the world we’ve known, or simply exploring language itself, reading remains one of the most radical and affirming acts of self-growth we can pursue.

I can stand in this because I’m not trying to stand in it. The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.

I’m just standing. You’re all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the side stepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.

The author is young, so her memoir only covers the earliest chapters of her life, which I hope will be long and only more fruitful. This is just her beginning. But in a little over 330 pages she manages to weave a page-turning drama and paint the emotional landscape of a life that could have continued on a very different trajectory, had fate or Love or (as she concludes) education not intervened. She views herself in a detached enough way that she can write with humility, almost too much of it, and a great deal of curiosity, just as if she is one of many human specimens worth studying. Curiosity is a vital element to good education, after all.

This is more than a coming-of-age story, so please don’t avoid reading it thinking that’s all it is. It’s as much about this one girl’s life as it is about her family, her family’s generational patterns, and their culture at large. It’s about ignorance and straight up mental illness. It asks really big questions about who writes history, what feminism could say to polygamy, how to discover self worth and exploit our potential free of labels, and so much more.

And because any true account of this much trauma and family implosion will certainly have more than one side to explore, you might read it with some skepticism. I did. The internet is brimming with skepticism about her stories. But what I found refreshing about this author is how diligently she examines herself, how brutal she is about checking her own motives and scrubbing clean her own processes. I never felt beguiled or cajoled into taking her side as I read. Even when I (incredibly) could perceive there was more to the story with her parents, I trusted her telling of the facts as she saw them, and this has led me down some healing paths in my own estrangement story. All of it is heartbreaking. All of it is beautiful, eventually.

Ok. This book deserves lots of deep conversation. I am so thankful to Gen and Julia for the push to read Educated.

Me, Gen’s hair, Julia, and Dad in the background,
exploring downtown Los Angeles last month!

And I am so happy that a few of my close friends are reading it now too, so we can roll it around together. Do you want to join the conversation? It is all so smart and beautiful and provocative.

Okay. Gotta go. Thanks for reading, friends! What else are you reading?

“First find out what you’re capable of,
then decide who you are,”
~Tara Westover
XOXOXOXO

friday 5: favorites this week & random photos

001 Fave Music: Lately I have been happily immersed in a deep, cleansing catalog of Halsey’s voice and all that watery, rhythmic music she offers. Her stuff is all at once abrasive and soothing of the injury she inflicts, ha. Halsey reminds me of Jocelyn for this quality and also because it was on a trip to Colorado that my beautiful firstborn first introduced me to this artist. Really talented, really beautiful, achingly sweet and angry. Enigmatic in the best feminine ways. It has been perfect music for these rainy days lately when I am indoors cleaning, cooking, and ironing. Have you heard her version of Walk the Line? Love it.

002 Fave Eats & Drinks: Refrigerator-pickled garden vegetables, Tex-Mex style. Especially if they can be eaten with a generous helping of my friend Kellie’s homemade guacamole. Oh man, so good. I am also loving deluxe mixed nuts and shredded balsamic chicken thighs (not breasts), in other words FATS as per my monthly cravings, ha. And plain iced tea is my favorite drink right now. Last weekend, at two consecutive events, we were served really strong, deliciously fresh iced tea, which I hadn’t had in months, so this week I have kept a gallon of it brewed in the fridge. Unsweetened, it has been a nice switch from diet soda.

003 Fave Fitness: Strength!! After a few months of slowly incorporating more “strength” days and gradually edging out miles here and there, I am really loving a very different routine. How different? Well, a of today, I have only logged 18 miles all week, which is how much I would normally get by Tuesday, easy. Yet I feel leaner and more energetic, crazy! My daily/weekly workouts are now pretty centered on weighted circuits, with cardio and running interspersed as I have time or the craving. This is a huge learning curve for me, and kind of an addiction-breaker, but for now I love it. This routine saves time, because I have a gym here in the barn, eliminating the need to drive to a trail or paved park sidewalk six days per week. I am liking the slow (and sustainable) body composition changes, too. Runner up for fave fitness: Lots of marathon inspiration from friends. I plan on starting a new training cycle in late July, for a fall race. I am VERY excited to see how these weeks of strength and fat loss help with that! In the mean time, I am still watching my friends crush goals left and right. Lots of inspiration, not a drop of envy. That feels great.

004 Fave Emotions: I am deeply thankful for a sense of truce with old enemies, people with whom I have had friction, even deep injury, in the past. God has laid a blanket of peace over so many old battle grounds, and I am more thankful than I can express. Another favorite emotion this week has been joy. Day after day, no matter the circumstances, Love has been uprooting anger and worry and allowing joy to bubble up instead. It comes quite unbidden at times, other times with some effort. But it is all delicious, and I am better at everything because of it. More, please.

005 Fave Reading: Tara Westover’s Educated has me captivated. I missed an entire day of reading this week while we were pretty glued to the weather channels (no tornadoes though, thankfully), and by evening I was in a panic to grab at least a few pages. She is eloquent, expressive of both physical and emotional landscapes, and her story overall is relatable and astonishing. A couple of smart friends are reading this along with me, and I cannot wait to discuss.

Now 5 random photos!

spring garden veggies
?

I hope you can take a few minutes to soak up the best of this past week, whatever is happening in your world. May the weather be kind (we feel so fortunate at the Lazy W this week, whew!). May your enemies be at peace with you. May your health and sense of abundance overflow! And I hope your upcoming weekend is all you need it to be. Thanks for checking in!

“No I won’t smile
but I’ll show you my teeth.”
~Halsey
XOXOXO

more new than ever before

I find myself wondering whether this springtime is among the most luscious of all my life or my eyes and heart are simply more open than ever before. Everything feels new, but more than new; everything has a wet, trembling quality, and it feels like more than just the abundance of rainfall.

When seeds germinate and break through the topsoil lately, they seem to do so with music playing. When the chicks run across their flight pen, they return the other direction a full size bigger. And have you heard the news that one of our young hens has learned to quack, no doubt by living with two ducks? The skies are probably the same colors as before, but more crystalline, more kinetic. The pine trees are growing arms and fingers and reaching for brand new ideas, learning new languages I think. Walking around the farm, you can smell fresh energy like it’s incense or very good cookies and bread baking.

Old thought patterns are falling apart like charred wood, burned (I believe) by truth. And I can leave them where they fall or sweep them up and replace them with better thoughts, stronger ones, more loving ones, more exciting ideas about life and God and all of our complex human relationships. Fear is almost fully edged out now, and the Worry Door has not cracked open in so long.

A new friend recently loaned me her treasured paperback copy of Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. Somehow this author had been completely foreign to me, and now I want time to stop so I can gobble up all of his work, because his term “Christian spirituality” is right on target for my life. Here are a couple of passages that have struck me beautifully this past week:

I believe the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather to have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.”

I love that. And it speaks straight to me, because I am such a creature of habit. I thrive on not only physical daily routines but also meditative practices, which certainly have value. But when little interruptions ruffle my feathers or when I am so cemented in habits that I am wasting time, it all has a kind of soundproofing effect between God and me. Don’t get me started on excessive volunteering or millions of obligatory social connections.

Okay, and then this:

Passion is tricky, though. because it can point to nothing as easily as it points to something.

Somewhere around that sentence in the book, Miller describes his thought process around what he would die for and what he is living for. It’s all kind of the front burner for me now. The moments when we might be asked to die for someone or something may come rarely, if ever, but every hour of every day we are actively or passively exchanging both our time and our life force, our God given human energy for something else. We give ourselves away in pieces, big and small, over and over again, and I wonder how many of those transactions are beneath us, how much of it is waste. A lot, you know? Maybe unintentionally? But so very much is exchanged for good, too, for strong, solid, worthwhile purposes. We trade our time and energy and human life force for love of family and friends, for personal passions that are linked directly to some aspect of our creation that leads us right back to God. How thrilling to see that our intrinsic passions can be connections to God and thereby pipelines for more abundant life. I love that we are all created in such unique ways and that He can draw us near and put us to work based on our passions. I want to find more ways to facilitate exactly that.

So. The farm. All of these nine acres are pure joy to me. The creatures who live here, even when they frustrate me, the plants, the wildness, the work and creativity, our romance and our human fabric, all of it. It has become my home and sanctuary, classroom and temple. And for all of the physical, sensory pleasures here, I know in my bones that the real magic is unseen. The real magic and power and drama can easily be extracted and reinvested elsewhere, should that time ever come. This is just the stage.

This is how I know the shimmer and pulse of our current season is owed to more than the mild Oklahoma springtime; God is doing something here with us that brings it all into focus for me. The old fears and worries are burned up and crumbling; worldly distractions are falling back and losing their noisy power in favor of birdsong in the morning and frog symphonies at night. More beauty than I have ever seen is front and center, both for the physical senses and for that part of me that can’t find the words. Hope, joy, belief in the power of Love, compassion for the weird things we all need and chase, patience, silliness, healing. Lots of healing. So much more.

I’ll take the flowers and the vegetables and even the snakes. I’ll take the skies changing and the air tasting like candy, as temporary as it all is. They are outward proof of an unseen Power. For me, this is something worth living for, day after day. Our lives are filled with more goodness than we can manage, despite our efforts to soak it in. And the shifting details just press me to live attentively, to find balance in movement too. It’s all constantly changing and never-ending. Such magic!

Thank you for introducing me to Donald Miller, Stefanie. My mind is churning from it all. Happy weekend, friends. I wish you magic and Love and clear vision.

“You have found the life underneath your life situation.”
~Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
XOXOXOXO

an unexpected step towards Chunk-Hi’s wildflower meadow

I have a story to tell you, but as usual, I do not know where it begins, so I’ll start at the end and hop around in the middle for a while and see what happens.

Yesterday Handsome and I enjoyed some rainy-Saturday exploring around town that culminated in stopping at a moving sale just a mile from our farm. We met and became happily acquainted with the property owner, who is not only a collector of cool found objects (my husband kinda wanted some of the Pontiac and shop storage treasures), but also an avid gardener and beekeeper. He gave us a tour of their huge plastic-wrapped hoop house and spoke freely of their two bee colonies.

Were Mike (his name is Mike) and his wife not preparing to relocate to Houston to enjoy full time grand-parent-hood, I suspect we could have become good friends. Or at least good neighbors with lots of hobbies in common. I could have stayed in that bright, humid hoop house for hours, talking about native perennials and natural beekeeping and who knows what else. In the hoop house, while it rained harder and harder outside, he spooned up some volunteer echinaceas, straight form the gravelly floor. You should have seen the wild onion gone to seed, it had to be four feet tall, and snapdragons nearly the same size! Strawberries and mums and kale growing everywhere.

Ok, that’s not the story, but now you have met “Mike.” I bought from his sale a large, heavy, rusted wire basket (it is going to become a fun Easter centerpiece), and he generously gifted me the echinacea starts. Also, some seeds. This brings me, finally, to the story.

In the midst of casual conversation, my husband mentioned where we live (just a mile over), and Mike actually knew our place. As so many people have over the years, he remembered us because of Chunk-Hi the Lazy W bison. Mike said he used to drive past all the time just to see what the buffalo was up to, and eventually he asked us what ever happened to him. As we started talking about Chunk, my nose stung and my eyes watered. This happens from time to time, that someone remembers Chunk but never heard the full story of how he came to live with us and where is he now. Lots of people have seen him or read about him but never met him up close and personal. Still, people seem to feel this familiarity with him. It always hits me in different ways.

We learned that Mike had just retired from a job that occasionally put him in the position to entertain overseas colleagues. Visitors from Bangladesh, the Philippines, and other far away places would travel to Oklahoma, and Mike would drive them past our farm to see the beautiful, tame buffalo exploring freely in natural prairie grass and sand wallows.

This unexpected conversation gave us the opportunity to share a few happy facts and memories about our big sweet boy, and though often this type of exchange is more bitter than sweet, somehow yesterday it felt really good, really sweet.

I love the idea of Chunk’s massive, shaggy head and shoulders, his skinny hips, and his butterfly eyelashes being seen and admired by people from around the globe. I loved the notion of our gentle giant being not only our home state’s mascot but also our little countryside’s goodwill ambassador. No matter that none of us knew it at the time. We did saw him trade love and joy with dozens of people over the years. And we can easily summon those memories for each other.

Mike included in his recounting the fact that our front gate was always closed, or else he might have at any of those visits driven up our driveway to meet us and meet the buffalo, our baby.

So. The wildflower seeds.

As we continued some friendly price negotiations over other estate sale treasures, the three of us traded beekeeping best practices (such a fun topic when people are happy to share with each other, not necessarily inform), which naturally led to talk of flowers and bee foraging. I said that we were in the process of turning the front field where Chunk had lived into a wildflower meadow. Maybe my voice cracked. I saw my husband’s head drop just a bit and realized our nostalgia levels were reaching capacity. Mike turned silently away from our small group, disappearing into an office adjacent to his shop, then reemerged with two heavy bags of wildflower seeds. He handed them to me and asked if I would grow them for the buffalo. I accepted the bags and begged to pay him, but he insisted we take them. “No, just grow them in his memory.”

So. Our inspiration all these months to build a true prairie style meadow, and the slow but stunning progress of nature just beginning to take over the hot, sandy front field (the wild stuff is beautiful right now), are being brought along with this perfect gift from a stranger and instant friend. Someone who loved Chunk from a distance has gifted us up close and personal with seeds for the future. Literally, seeds.

We miss you, Chunk-Hi, our innocent and strong Ambassador of Free Spirit and Good Will. You were magical! You were loved by people everywhere, and your meadow is about to be exceptionally beautiful because of the connections you continue to help us make.

The End.

Or, the beginning of Chunk-Hi’s Memorial Wildflower Meadow.

Thank you, Mike!

“Until one has loved an animal,
a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”
~Anatole France
XOXOXOXO

thursday thoughts (ramblings, whatever)

Nearly halfway through March (my favorite month) and fast approaching the Spring Equinox (coupled with a full moon!), my sentences are forming with an extra dose of Adam Sandler’s Excited Southerner. If I can get through this blog post with decent spelling and at least the fragrance of a coherent message, I will consider it a win. A big one. I hope you will too.

The thing is, the gardens are happening. They are mostly indoors still, on grow trays and beneath heavy all-day mists and grow lights, but a few bits of chlorophyll have found their way to the actual beds. And I can scarcely catch my breath sometimes.

Have you ever wondered whether Eminem and Eckart Tolle are the same person? Have you considered this possibility? Have you ever seen these men in the same place, at the same time? That’s what I thought. Lose Yourself and The Power of Now and all. Okay. I spent four and a half miles analyzing their similarities the other day, and I can debate this.

I am particularly fond of the following spontaneous breakfast. Among so many great meals recently, this one was a winner:

Kodiak waffle, crunchy peanut butter, habanero jelly. YES.

Our llama was screaming the other night. Screaming the way only llamas can, in that trilling, other-worldly, toxic-femininity tone that he has even though he’s a very territorial boy and only a wee bit toxic. Our neighbors heard the screaming and thought we were in distress. They messaged us with such sweet concern. We laughed so hard. The reason Meh was screaming, in case you need to know, was probably the 65 mph wind gusts for which he was holding the horses responsible. He is a loving creature but not a rational one.

Do you know the difference between a farm kitchen’s “chicken bowl” and the “garden compost” bucket? Do you care to know?

Our baby chicks and ducklings are growing like I have never seen before. Rick Astlee (not pictured, but I promise you ok) is especially monstrous. They empty their multiple food and water jars three to four times per day. And they are really loving human cuddles. Pacino (also not pictured), most of the time, is fine with it all. Their constant gentle “peep-peep-peeping” sounds enough like his long-established kissing sound that he probably thinks they are asking for kisses. He asks them, do they wanna wanna wanna kiss, and they peep again. So it’s symbiotic.

This is Muddles, my parents’ adorbs dog. She is the sweetest but I am ever so slightly worried that my Dad loves her more than me. It’s fine. It’s fine, right? I lived here first, Muddles. You weren’t even born yet when I lived here.

Have you watched any of the Netflix special One Strange Rock yet? Oh man. It is so fascinating, so soothing to listen to, and what truly breathtaking photography. We binged it recently and cannot recommend it highly enough. The overview effect as shared by all the astronauts is exactly what we needed to adjust our perspective and feel a wide, heavy quilt of connectedness. Perfect.

Savory Spice Shop on Western wins again!! I popped in for a couple of refills and to greedily accept my birthday freebie, and the nice ladies suggested this Bohemian Forest spice. Delicious! I added it to half of a roasted sweet potato and some asparagus, and I slow roasted some chicken breasts with it too. So nice and earthy and herbal. Yum. Also, it’s sourdough time again! That’s the jar in the background there. It is almost ready and the weekends are about to get really satisfying.

Ok. How was my grammar? Spelling? General coherence? I had to take lots of deep breaths. The sun is down now and we are one day closer to the weekend, to the new season, to more LIFE. Thank you so much for checking in!!

“Focus is the new IQ.”
(Dammit.)
XOXOXOXO