Apple blossoms at their peak just a week ago

(Is it still mid-April? Close enough?)

Dogwoods around the neighborhood—blossom time is fading, they’re beginning to leaf out.

My apple blossoms are now a carpet of petals on the grass.

Rhododendrons in glorious color everywhere I look! Including ours, out the kitchen window.

This morning the first California poppies have shed their little hats.

The tiny lupine I planted two years ago is now an enormous bush. Flower spikes just beginning to open. Leaves are covered with ladybugs. We’re all quite excited.

Oh but WHERE is my asparagus??? It flourished so beautifully in Year One. So far, Year Two is…nothing.

I planted one little camas lily last year and it’s in bloom now. Starry dark violet blossoms on a slender stalk.

The serviceberry I planted last spring is in bloom and looks happy in its spot. Blueberries are covered with blossoms. Strawberries have taken over both sides of the white fence. (I’m not complaining.)

Our neighbor, a landscaper, very kindly pruned my overgrown Japanese maple that borders our property. He did a marvelous job. I’m so grateful. He also pruned the roses & raspberries in late winter. Living next door to an amiable gardening professional is an unexpected perk of buying this house.

Speaking of: we just passed the two-year mark!

You know, just in case it ever comes up.

These photos are from a few years back—I’m seeing similar gems in the neighborhood this week but haven’t stopped to take pictures

Blooming: crocus, snowdrops, a few winter flowering plum

Up: daffodils, buds forming

Pruning: rosebushes, Japanese maple

Lots of rain. A night of fierce winds. Mulch piles everywhere. Hummingbirds, song sparrows, and chickadees busy at the feeders.

Taken by our Bird Buddy a few days ago

It’s impossible for me to talk about writing without talking about living. It’s all connected. Collectively, our choices make our lives what they are. Who do we love and spend our time with? Where do we live and with whom? What is our work? What do we spend our days doing?

Changing one of these things changes everything. Changing one of these things changes your life.

Recently, on a long walk, I realized that my life is like a poem in another way, too: My life, like a poem, is small and enormous.

Let me explain. In a poem, counterintuitively, compression creates expansion. A single image or metaphor opens up into a wide open space. Less is often more. The more I edited down my life to the essential elements, and the more I revised away the extraneous, the bigger it got.

Leo Babauta:

You don’t need any material things in order to slow down. You just do less, and savor each activity. Take some breaths, and give yourself more space. Leave space between things, and enjoy that in between space.

Notice when there are moments of quiet, and savor that as well. Create moments of quiet if needed.

This is the benefit of living a simple life, this slowness and spaciousness, but it can also be a path to the simple life. Slow down to simplify.

Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds:

Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They are the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.

Picture of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s painting Tribal Map (2000-2001) at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., in 2022. Source: Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Rilla finished her first college class yesterday. A 200-level Women in Art course, which, yes, was rather a dive into the deep end. She turned in her final paper and we celebrated with Jamaican takeout. She worked so hard & has done very well in the class—and as her study partner, gosh I learned a lot!

She (we!) encountered the work of so many artists we hadn’t met before: Carrie Mae Weems, Mariko Mori, Emily Counts, Rosa Bonheur, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Pablita Velarde, and Edmonia Lewis to name a few.

This homeschooling gig remains my best education ever. So grateful for the ongoing adventure.

None of my December posts appear in the Feedburner feed. But they’re all there on the other one. So if you use a feed reader like Feedly, you may need to change the URL in your subscriptions. (But note that even then, it may take a day or so before new posts appear in your Feedly or other readers.)

Thanks for bearing with me—and for reading me, wherever you like to read! We’re coming up on this blog’s 20th anniversary in January. Hard to believe! And some of you have been with me since the beginning. I treasure every single Bonny Glen reader. Your time is precious and there are trillions of words to read on the internet. I’m grateful mine are some of them.

ORIGINAL POST:

Jamie kindly alerted me to an odd issue: my December posts aren’t showing up in Feedly. I’ve checked my RSS feed and also tested a different feed reader, and all seems well there. So maybe it’s just a Feedly issue?

This post, which I’ll probably delete in a day or two, is simply for troubleshooting purposes. If you use an RSS feed reader, can you let me know if you’re seeing my December posts there? Thanks much!

One of my favorite moments in time. This would have been December 2005. Reposting it today in honor of these two birthday fellas. Love!

This practice worked well for me last week, so I’m giving it another go this week. I’ll update the post throughout the week as new passages capture my fancy. New entries will appear at the top of the post.

After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present [note: Burkeman’s argument is that understanding this reality is a good thing that vastly improves our quality of life], it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment—that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can.

—Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals

This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links. I’m also doing a better job of updating my Bookshop shop (lol). Here on the blog, there’s a widget in the sidebar for my current/recent reading adventures. And I’ve got other collections of books there if you’re looking for great gift ideas.