Friday again friends ! So glad your here.

Anything lovely planned for the weekend?

This chicks double vaxed now and the thrift stores are open so that’s my Saturday in case your wondering.

As always I’ve rounded up a few good words and reads to keep you company as you end the week and head into the weekend.

So take a few deep breaths, grab something good to drink and enjoy  – – –

A Good Word

Source: Corinne Rodrigues

A Good Look

An indoor swing!  What are your thoughts?  Such fun or keep the chiropractor on speed dial.

See more of this gorgeous home HERE 

A Good Idea

from Andrea Debbink

What Trees Can Teach Us

Outside my window, the green leaves have brightened to gold or deepened to ruby. The honey locusts were first and the maples soon followed. As I’ve watched the trees change, I’ve thought about how they relate differently to time than humans do. They don’t spend it, save it, or count it. They live through it: changing as they must, growing when they can, and accepting dormancy when the seasons shift.

Earlier this month, a podcast host warned me that fall’s arrival means there are “only” 90-something more days until the end of the year. She referred to these next three months as a “gauntlet” (gauntlet: an open challenge, as to combat; a severe trial) and reminded listeners to start their Christmas shopping. She wasn’t the only one. I’ve noticed several podcasters and writers recently taking up this theme: Fall is the checkered flag. Hunker down and hurry up.

I’ve been looking forward to autumn since mid-August. Where I live, it’s a season of cooler temperatures, brilliant colors, golden light. Nature becomes drowsy as its dynamic growing season winds down. This year, I feel as if I’m welcoming the season like an old friend. Maybe that’s why the social media admonitions to simply power through it have felt so jarring.

In her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren (who is an Anglican priest) writes that our modern culture encourages us to treat time as just another commodity to maximize, while in contrast the liturgical calendar treats time as a story, “a narrative that we live out.”

I love this idea, and I can’t help but see that nature (especially in autumn) offers the same invitation: to see time as a narrative to live out rather than a commodity to control. When I watch the leaves flame and fall to the ground, or notice little striped snakes slithering home to their winter dens, or see the red-winged blackbirds’ reunite for their migration, I see story. I’m reminded that time is a narrative we live out.

Sometimes simply being outside is enough to remind me of my place in this story. Sometimes it isn’t, and I need other writers and artists to guide me.

One poem in particular has helped me do this. It’s “The Trees” by Mary Oliver,

Do you think of them as decoration?

Think again.

Here are maples, flashing.

And here are the oaks, holding on all winter to their dry leaves.

And here are the pines, that will never fail,

  until death, the instruction to be green.

And here are the willows, the first

  to pronounce a new year.

May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them?

Oh, Lord, how we are all for invention and

  advancement!

But I think

  it would do us good if we would think about

these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply.

The trees, the trees, just holding on

  to the old, holy ways

If you, like me, want to revise your thoughts about time, don’t look at the calendar or social media; go outside, stand under a tree, and read a poem. It might remind you that autumn isn’t a gauntlet, it’s an unfolding chapter.

A Few Good Reads

At Home: Start With Your Senses

by Emily P Freeman (with Myquillyn Smith)

Listen or Read.  Links below

In an attempt to disrupt the cycle of overthinking and get out of my own head, I’m working to pay attention to my body, namely my five senses.

This is not my most natural way, I’ll go ahead and say that. I’m real good at thinking and feeling not as practiced at acting, although I am improving in this area, but if you can relate, I hope that intentionally seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing might prove to be a grounding practice for you as we consider together our next right thing in several different areas of our life. Today, I’m glad to have my sister join me for a conversation about how to start with our senses at home, after literal months of not hanging out it’s such a gift to have time with my sister as well as other members of my family.

I’m so glad to talk with her about how paying attention to our five senses can help us make better decisions in our home.

Keep reading  HERE

Listen to the podcast episode HERE

Farming in a Tuxedo: Finding The Power of Place

by Daniel Grothe

I come from a long line of agrarians, salt-of-the-earth farmers and ranchers, and lovers of the land who lived in small towns across Washington and northern Idaho. 

The patches of skin that for decades were exposed to the scorching sun and howling wind—the forearms and hands, the ears, the back of the neck—were permanently transfigured, a collage of various colorations arranged on one body. There’s a reason they call it a farmer’s tan.

As a family, we treasure the fifty years’ worth of daily journal entries that were scribed by my great-great-grandmother Lula Wilson and her daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, Lucille Kemp Wilson. Lula and Lucille were the most recent matriarchs in my line. 

These journals give a glimpse into the life of a family living on a rural farm. You can thumb your way through Lula’s journal and see the textures of a rural community just as the darkness of the Great Depression was descending across the land. Here are a few of those entries from 1930:

June 30: 16 loads of hay hauled in today. Burl [her son], Mick, Elmer and a stranger worked. Lucille and all the children are here. White sow bred today.

September 6: Little yellow calf born.

September 22: Canned 6 quarts of beans, 6 quarts of corn. Fried 2 chickens for dinner. Finished digging potatoes, 10 sacks.

December 25: A beautiful morn—Burl called to wish all a merry Christmas—a wonderful Xmas, grand dinner, the table looked beautiful, the dinner was swell.

Lula was an amputee, having lost a leg to diabetes. Can you imagine the quality of the health care along the back-country roads of small-town Washington?    – – – keep reading

That’s all for now friends. If you’ve enjoyed The Friday Recliner drop me a comment or copy the link and pass onto a friend.

Have a beautiful weekend, rest up, do something you love xx