Right Now: 6.21.11

Jennifer--Trying To Smile Through Chaos

love of books.

I loved what you said about anticipating spending time reading the books you had from the library.  I was in the library as well this past Saturday, picking up The Time Traveler's Wife for the book read you mentioned.  I also got another book and two cookbooks.  I am a cookbook fiend, browse them in bed like a magazine.  I love the library...so many good books.  I'm a sucker for a good cover, sometimes it's turns out worthwhile sometimes not.  I remember times before I had the girls that I would just go in and wander up and down the aisles taking down books that looked good until I had a whole stack.

These days I don't have as much reading time, but I'm trying to carve a place back in for it.  I sat down for two hours last weekend and finished my last book, cleaning being banished to the back burner.  The photo above is of the books currently residing in my house that I have yet to read, or yet to finish.  Remember back in the beginning when I said I was working on becoming a better "finisher of things".   So these are in addition to the library books.  I find though that I have to be in a certain mood for certain books, so I am sure I will find my way back to them.

We drown in books in this house, the girls each have overflowing bookshelves of books they cannot part with going all the way back to Karelyn's favorite Goodnight Moon.  With money being what it is I tend to rely on the library more and more.  It is a good thing to have a librarian for a sister!  When I do find books I really, really want to keep for inspiration or for another read, I check out used bookstores online.  I have gotten great used library copies of books for as little as a couple of dollars.  I don't mind that they are marked up or rough around the edges, I figure that's the sign of a well loved book.  One time I got a copy of a book with the little card in the back where it listed the names of the library users and the dates they checked the book out.  Seems so far from our automatic check-outs these days. 

So that's all for tonight.  It's late, very tired as it's been a long week already.  Now to settle into bed with a hot cuppa tea and that book I was talking about.  They say the best writers are avid readers.  Until tomorrow......

Right Now: 6:15 2011

Herbs On The Porch-Jennifer

contentment lies on the porch.

I'm hoping you had a good weekend.  I did something completely different than usual this weekend....I did nothing.  Not nothing really, but I did try to do as I said I would and live more in the moment.

What I did do was spend a lot of time on porches.  I am so happy that winter is over.  Winter this past year was really hard on me.  Do you get those wintertime doldrums?  So it was a real pleasure to spend some time this weekend sitting outside with loved ones.  Saturday I went to visit my parents.  My brother and his girlfriend were home and so for a few hours we sat on my Mom's porch and talked (my mother, Claire and I) my brother and my step-father tended to flit in and out of the conversation.  We didn't have that porch ( a long, concrete open one, that runs the length of the house) when I was growing up.  It is a new after the children grow up and move away addition.  My brother, the youngest,  is twenty-four and works for a newspaper about three hours away.  He was the second marriage child, thus I am fifteen years older than he.  I used to read him The Many Adventures of Winnie-The-Pooh long before I read them to my own children.  I have a special kind of attachment to him.

When I decided I had lollygagged enough at my mother's I came home with good intentions to get to work.  That is until I saw my Grandmother sitting on her porch.  A small wooden porch just big enough for a wooden swing on the side of their house facing mine.  I walked up so we could fret over my Grandfather who was working way too hard in the heat (he refuses to admit he is living in his eighth decade). So I sat with her until my Grandfather finally gave up, plopped on a step with us and I listened to them talk about when they were younger (something I could do for days, let alone hours).

Finally I went home and did a bit of laundry, a quick trip to the grocery and went to pick the girls up at their father's.  When we got home about nine p.m. they settled in to watch a movie and as I bustled around the kitchen I realized a storm was coming in.  Now one of my favorite things in the world is to watch thunderstorms coming (is it a stupid question to ask if you get thunderstorms, they must be a worldwide phenomenon right?)  I poured myself a glass of wine and went and sat on my own front porch, wooden, wide, pots of herbs and seashells from vacation running along the sides.  I watched the fireflies (ok, fireflies? yes or no?) in the field compete with the heat of the lightning in the sky and felt the temperature drop about ten degrees with the coming breeze.  I stayed out until the rain came down and the thunderclaps became too loud for the girls and the scaredy-cat dog to be by themselves.

Sunday, I had to suffer the consequences of goofing off so much and went to work doing the cleanup around the house in the morning.  By late morning the girls and I commited to one of our happy rituals of warmer weather, snapping beans on (of course) the porch.  Do you get any more country than that?  I have to tell you I am just happy to have children who value where their food comes from (in this case our Amish farmers down the road, I have the evil black thumb) and think that an afternoon splitting open pea pods is a good time.  Exclamations of "This one is stuffed"and "Eight, eight in this one"!!  Karelyn gave up about three-quarters of the way through and chose instead to sit in a chair and read poems from a library book to Emily and I instead of snapping, but so it goes.  Regardless, we ate through that hard work this evening.

Maybe someday you can come and share the pleasures of our porches with us.  They are nothing grand or ornate, simple concrete or wood, a few flowers here and there.  Sometimes it's a bit hot, or the bugs get a bit bothersome, but something about it calls when the weather warms.  It is a nice place to be together, shelling peas, watching a rainstorm, debating local politics or reliving well-lived memories.  It seems a perfect simple pleasure and a perfect weekend way to live in the moment.

dreaming small.

As much as I love to dream, I think that maybe one of the things that I have learned is that sometimes "too much" is just "too much"  whether it is thoughts, ideas, dreams or things.   And it's through my "conversations" with you that I have begun to see that my dreams might serve me better if they pertain to the right here and the right now. 

So I've decided to make a new list of dreams.  Dreams for the immediate future.  I guess some would call them goals, but goals to me are "lose ten pounds"  or "get a promotion" or "save enough money for a new car or college".  Goals seem to me to be kind of strict and well, a bit boring.  I think what I want more than anything right now, is to spend my days with a sense of peace, with a sense of calm, with a sense of satisfaction.  So maybe I can come up with the "TO-DO" dream list to simplify and calm my life.

Like, planting flowers around my house, tidying up my basement, reading a book to my children each night, hanging some artwork on my bare walls, committing to actually finishing a book.

I'm ready to start making my current life my dream life and thus it is far more attainable and rewarding and far less likely to cause great amounts of stress.


So to start by simplifying and slowing down.  Slowing down is a hard thing for me to do. The very nature of being a working single mother of two young daughters makes it difficult, but I am vowing this month to start.  Take a task at a time.  Decide what is a priority and what can wait until later.

Tonight I tried.  I made a simple dinner for myself with no dishes to wash up.  I took some photos and edited them.  I drank a glass of wine and had a warm bath.  I took the dog for a long walk along the woods and discovered I have multitudes of little white moths living in my lawn.  I sat in the quiet of my daughters' room and held my little one's hand while she fell asleep. Then I crept into bed early and wrote you this letter before I roll over into what I hope to be a full and peaceful night's sleep. 

And really isn't that a dream come true right there?

Thank you, my friend, for pointing out to me that "dreaming  small" is sometimes the best gift you can give yourself.

My Dreams

Wordle, created from my Dream list

Funnily enough, I am indeed sitting here with a good cup of coffee, sunshine streaming through the kitchen window. Lately I have been throwing some instant in a cup, but I decided to get the cafetière out.  

Of course, being me I had to immediately go and listen to that song. It’s lovely. I am an inveterate follower of links and looker-up of things, forever going off on a tangent following up something someone has said, or I have read or seen somewhere. I can get lost down an internet rabbit hole for hours. Days.

The list of dreams that I wrote last autumn is scribbled on a folded piece of A4 paper that I tucked away inside a journal, and forgot. Reading the list now, months after I wrote it, I find some of the things I wrote down are starting to happen, others don’t attract me so much anymore, and there are new ones I would like to add. I am struck by the fact that neither writing nor photography made it on to the list, yet I know that it was the process of dreaming, of writing that list, that led me to write again and to start taking photographs.

It took several difficult days to be able to write down those dreams at all. I found it hard to acknowledge there were things I wanted that were seemingly out of reach. Maybe admitting I wanted them was like inviting failure, I don’t know. I used to say I didn't have any dreams, mine didn't seem big enough to deserve the title.  Somehow I felt that I should want to backpack around the world, or excel at something marvellous. I have come to realise that not all dreams have to be big as diving with sharks (my brother) or skiing down a mountain (my friend Gail) or getting a PhD in Medieval History (my husband). Dreams are a very individual thing. Some of us just want to plant a garden, listen to the birds, and watch the tortoises, and some of us don’t know what we want until we give ourselves permission to dream. 

Nowadays, I am dreaming a lot more. That little house of yours sounds a lot like the one in my dream...but maybe mine would be on the very outskirts of a town. Maybe it would have beautiful countryside views, birds in the garden and peace and quiet...and have a regular bus service to the cathedral town where there are craft shops, a farmer's market, pavement cafés where I can eat cheesecake, drink cappuchino and write. Maybe my house would have a cottage garden. Lupins, foxgloves, rambling roses, sweet-peas, side by side with the vegetables and herbs. At least one tortoise. I love tortoises! Something about a tortoise is so wise and ancient, like a little dinosaur. 

Like you I also have some of the things I have mentioned already. I grow sweet-peas  tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers, though this year I fear I have left it too late, I was busy at planting time, planning my wedding. I have a fragrant rambling rose, called 'Wedding Day', a present from my son, waiting to be planted by our front door. I have birds visiting the garden, though the neighbours' cats scare off all but the most intrepid. Ours is a quaint little house - nothing special on the outside, we can't do much with it as we rent - but it is quirky, cottage-style.  My dream house is tidier, more organised, nicely decorated, is filled with flowers from the garden and the scent of baking, despite the fact that I have hardly baked in my life. These are all reachable dreams, something to be going on with, working toward. 

I have other dreams: the impossible, the silly, the potentially embarrassing (just who does she think she is?). Those are staying on that piece of paper, tucked away. Some of them might see the light of day....when they come true.

On Dreams...

(somewhere over Tennessee or Virginia today)

So is there a better place to ruminate on dreams than above the clouds on an airplane?  First I have to thank you for all you have done working us through these first couple days with this blog while I was 2,000 miles away from home on vacation.  It's a sign of an excellent partnership that we got this off to such a beautiful start with even more distance (and time zones) between us.

So I was thinking about what we were saying about dreams while I was on the plane today.  Right now I am at a very "scratch your head and wonder" kind of time in my life and when I think about the future I want to know if what I envision for myself and what I can make or want to make for myself can come true?

I won't list all my dreams here.  We've both made the lists and some of them are far too personal and some of them sometimes seem far too ridiculous.  The ones you've disclosed to me that you thought were too embarrassing or ridiculous I think are spot on and perfect for you.   But thinking about it, I sat on the plane today and thought well, why can't I take control of my life and make my every dream come true and what again is my dream for my future, has it changed since last year?  It seems sometimes our lives get pushed and pulled in varying directions and we find ourselves falling into old patterns or unsure of new paths and for selfish reasons, having given up so much in my previous life, I would love to put all my energy into continuing to make my way toward the life I have been dreaming for myself.

So I wrote down a few things today.   A little bit of a reminder and a recheck on where I would like to see my direction in life go.  Loose thoughts written on a piece of paper on an airplane, so here goes:

I want to live:

in a small house, cabin or cottage set back in the woods or a field, out in the country. wood, lots of wood. simple furnishings and decorating.  lots of inspirational artwork, clippings and maps on the walls.  decorated with small vases, rocks, and little bits of nature found.  airy and light.  minimalist but comfy and inviting.    a garden shed size studio out back or in a separate room, a wall to showcase clippings and other bits of inspiration.  a nice big wooden desk with a hutch for little bits and a laptop for writing and a space for laying out photos or pages for books.  a wood stove for winter and a screen door for summer and maybe a little porch to sit out and listen to the birds and soak up the sun.  a small garden, feeders for birds and a place for nature walks.  a comfy chair next to the stove with a good book and a cat as the sun goes down. 


In some ways, I have worked a lot of this into the home I have now, so maybe I am working towards this place and maybe one day if I stay focused I will get there.  I wrote some other notes on what I wanted to be doing in this future dream life, but that is for another day.  I am tired and ready to fall into my bed.  Funny enough, I am playing a song from the girl's goodnight playlist I created and am listening to Kesang Marstrand sing "lay your head down and let yourself travel, in the land of dreams, in the land of dreams.  the stories in your heart will start to unravel, in the land of dreams, in the land of dreams".

It's goodnight time here, which means you will be near waking soon.  I hope you have sunshine and a good cup of coffee and that you find yourself lost in your dreams, but not lost too much.

Greetings!

Hello, I am Debbie, or Deb, or Debra - I answer to all of them. I live with Philip, my husband of one month and my almost 20 year old son, Joseph. We have a tiny little house, not much more than two up and two down, on the edge of London, England.

I love my little house. It needs decorating, and it is cluttered up with too much stuff, but for many years Joe and I lived in a flat, and I longed for such exotic pleasures as being able to have a proper washing line to dry the laundry on outside and to grow sweet peas, my favourite flower. Joe longed for a house because I had promised him a dog if we moved, so we also share our house with Star, his black Labrador.

I can sign, and for a few years I worked with Deaf children, but in January 2010 I had to stop working due to illness and a few months later I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. CFS affects many aspects of my life, but I try not to let it limit me too much and I hope eventually to recover. It does mean I have had to slow down a lot, and I can't do as much as I would like to.

I was a single parent for seventeen years, since before Joe was born. Parenting alone was very hard at times and sometimes isolating, but also very rewarding. Just to make life even more challenging, I educated Joe at home from the age of eleven. It was daunting at first but turned out to be very enjoyable for both of us. Joe and I have always been very close. When I was 40, I found Philip and later that year, he came to share our home. I am so lucky that Philip and Joe get on together very well and Philip treats Joe as his own. On 23rd April this year we were married and Joe was my Man of Honour.

I am the oldest of two children, my brother is four years younger than me. He lives just a few minutes away, as do my parents. We are a close family and see quite a lot of each other. I also have extended family, aunt, cousins, grandparents, all within less than 45 minutes drive away. We have always lived in this area, though I have longed to get away for as long as I can remember. When I was young I used to want to live in the hustle and bustle of the City, and now I am older I would like to live closer to the countryside, but not necessarily in it! I know myself well enough to realise I need things to do, nice restaurants and decent public transport.

I do indeed still have my list of dreams handy, Jen! I remember when we were doing the Mondo Beyondo course and were asked to write our dreams down, I found it very difficult to do. It took me days to write. Having been a single parent and not having not had much money for many years, I always tried to make a point of not coveting what I thought I would never have. I wouldn't look at houses in estate agents' windows, or browse in furniture stores, I wouldn't even watch holiday programmes on the television. I just got on with life, cleaning, cooking, bringing up Joe, home educating him, I had not even thought about what I might like to do, and found it very hard when asked to 'dream' on paper. I didn't feel that I had any dreams. I certainly didn't really have any big ones.

I did come up with a small list of little dreams eventually, and was looking at it just the other day. Some of them are starting to happen. I know some of yours are, too! It's amazing how once an intention is set, things seemingly start to percolate away by themselves.

One of the things on my list was to start a blog, which I did some months ago now. That was a big enough leap for me, I didn't dream that we would be starting another one together now, and I am really looking forward to seeing where it takes us!

hello, from me.

hello.  it's me.  jennifer.  here's a little about me to begin.

I was born in a rural small town in Maryland on the East coast of the United States.  I live in that same town right now about twenty minutes from my childhood home.  I am the oldest child of three.

I don't have a specifically big family, but we are all right here so sometimes it seems that way.  I love my family more than anything in this whole wide world.   Family=Love.   It means so much to me to be able to sit on my mother's porch, drink a glass of wine with my brother and sister and laugh the night away in the place I started to become.  I live on the land of my Great-Grandparents, right next to my Grandparents, who I have had a close bond with since I was just a wee thing.  It was in this place that my Grandfather chased me around the yard with his camera and my Grandmother rocked me in her rocker, patting me on the back and singing to me.  And it is here in this place that I chase my children (and sometimes sneak up on the same Grandfather) with my camera, and where I hush my girls to calm.  Still to this day, sometimes I want to sneak into my Grandfather's old dark room or walk up the path, climb on my 80 year old Grandmother's lap and have her pat me on the back and sing to me on a really bad day. I make do with sneaking down the path from her house with a slice of homemade pumpkin pie.

It is a house of girls here where I live.  Even the dog, the cat and the rabbit are female.  But really it's the place I make home with my two girls (Emily, age 10 and Karelyn, age 8).  I became divorced in 2007 after almost eleven years of marriage.  My ex-husband battled addiction based on medical problems.  In 2006 we pretty much lost everything, and well, I started over.   Alone.  Well, not really alone, because there are the girls, and then of course, there's that family I was just talking about.

Getting divorced, changed my life.  I was miserable and defeated in that marriage, battling to overcome an addiction that held onto him stronger than I could.  I battled myself with depression and anxiety.  I never in a million years imagined I would be raising two children by myself.  In ways it's not so hard as I was scared it was going to be, but it's so hard some days I lock myself in the bathroom for a good cry.  My girls mean everything to me and sometimes it's hard to give them everything I think they deserve.

The year after I left the marriage I picked up my camera.  Then in another year, I got a bigger, nicer, camera.  Now it's hard to find me without my camera.  I think my camera has given me a different look at the world and also of myself (see goofy self-portrait above).  Shooting photos and writing my thoughts down are my therapy and my passion.

I have a lot of hopes and a lot of dreams.  Sometimes I get so filled up with them I think I might float away in excitement.  Other times the thought of reaching them makes me want to run in the other room and hide away.  I am a true Pisces (though not a huge believer in Astrology) in that I get really, really excited about ideas and projects and then turn tracks halfway when some other sparkly idea catches my eye making me run off and start another route.  I am apparently a great "starter of things".  I am hoping to become a better "finisher of things".

When we met we made a list of hopes and dreams.  Do you remember?  It was last year.  Do you still have yours handy?  I want to go back now and revisit what your dreams were so that I remember.  I want to write about them now, but feel it would best be posted another day.   I do know that I am glad that our dreams brought us together this way and we get the opportunity to take this journey together.