Hey friends. How are you?
Happy to be back here with you after giving myself a hall pass last week. Last Friday with my second full week of getting up and taking myself to work for eight hours everyday in the bag, I celebrated by stopping at TK Maxx on the way home for a sweet smelling candle and started the weekend by going to bed early.
So April hey, any plans?
Mine is to give the house a good airing out once this relentless rain gives up. Its got that damp closed up too long, mustiness about it at the moment- hence the candle – and its crying out for a good dose of fresh air and sunshine. I think maybe we all are!
As always friends I hope these few words and reads will be fresh air and kind company to you as you head into the weekend- – –
A Good Word
A Good Look
“Home may be the most powerful word known. And, you know, sometimes home isn’t a place you find — but home becomes the place wherever you are. Sometimes home is tiny, like a quiet crevice in a wild world you can crawl into & exhale & listen to your heart beat & hear His whisper. Sometimes home is a dream come true simply because He who is Truth led you there. And then sometimes home isn’t what you hoped for but Hope can find you anywhere. Ann Voskamp
See the life size version of this cubby in the woods along with the one of a kind “castle cabin” built by Jacob Witzling HERE
A Good Idea
from Kimberly Coyle
I haven’t written much about the hard edges of the world right now.
It doesn’t bear repeating when the news is enough to make us believe there is no softness, no beauty left.
We bang our shins on the edges of life every day—the sharp sting can steal our breath away.
One way I’m learning to care for the inevitable bruises that come with walking towards pain, and not turning away, is by engaging my senses in the smallest ways.
On hard days, I run my hand over the length of my pup’s velvet ears again and again as he lies beside me. The soft warmth melts into my hands, and the sting slightly recedes.
An Italian tutor joins us in the academic support center once a week, and sometimes I close my eyes and let the gentle lilt of his voice speaking Italian carry beauty across the room to me.
I bend to smell the flowers my husband gifted me. I close my eyes to the damp spring wind and let it fling my hair wild and free. I listen for the chorus of birdsong and try to identify the mourning dove’s gentle coo among the voices.
I dive my hands into the bag of birdseed and remember that to fill a bird feeder is to take one small step towards loving the world, hostile as it may be.
These tiny practices help me remember I am an embodied being and beauty is available to me.
Take a moment to find a sensory comfort in your day—then come back and tell me about it! Share your beauty.
A Few Good Reads
From Hilary Yancey
What I Will No Longer Do
“I am trying not to make fun of myself anymore,” I tell my husband in the quiet of our bedroom after the kids are asleep, the wind is howling unusually loud, making itself felt as a force against the house. I’m nursing a slight nick on my finger from my first time using a mandolin to cut potatoes for a recipe I’m trying that involves getting kids to eat vegetables by putting cheese and eggs around them.
If you have met me before, I’ve probably made a joke about my lack of culinary skill. I’ve probably said something like, “oh, I’m hopeless, I can’t cook anything, thank goodness I married my person because he makes it all.” – – – keep reading
From The New Yorker
The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter
A new book and an exhibition on Potter, who wrote “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” use letters, sketches, and a coded journal to capture an author who delighted in the detail and humor of the natural world.
Many teen-agers will go to great lengths to keep their diaries private—I kept a little key for mine in a wooden jewelry box, which I guarded jealously—but the children’s book author Beatrix Potter took it to an extreme. Between the ages of fourteen and thirty, she fastidiously recorded observations about her stiff Victorian world in several journals. Her parents, descendants of wealthy cotton merchants in the North of England, were rich and exceedingly proper. Perhaps to protect her work, Potter wrote in a minuscule handwriting using a code that only she could understand. Her journals remained a mystery until 1958, when a collector, searching through them, identified a passing reference to Louis XVI, and then painstakingly decoded years’ worth of Potter’s innermost thoughts. (Fans are nosy, too) – – – keep reading
From The Rabbit Room
Peanut Butter & the Marriage Supper of the Lamb
I bolted up the stairs, heart racing in response to my husband’s call. He was the calm one, the unflappable med student; that level of urgency in his voice froze my blood. Bursting into the bathroom, I saw. Our one-year-old son, his eyes and lips swollen, his perfect round baby belly splotchy with an ugly red rash. My husband, already on the phone with the pediatrician, asking, “Do we give Benadryl, or bring him into the ER for Epinephrine?”
Our life changed that moment.
In a span of minutes, from when we gave our baby a taste of what we were sure would be his new favorite food to when his body rebelled, we were living in a different world. A more hostile world. Someone described the mental shift to me as though the color orange could send your child to the hospital: suddenly you notice it everywhere. Going to the grocery store became for me something akin to walking a beach strewn with mines. I called my best friend, sobbing, the day I picked up my son’s Epipen, our new constant companion. Phone, wallet, keys, Epi. I raged against God, my fear and anger battling themselves into weariness as I threw out our giant jar of peanut butter and washed my hands over and over, dreading every holiday and birthday party in the future. The intensity of the world’s fallenness landed on my fragile heart that season, when I learned that this good created thing, the humble peanut, could strip my tiny son of his life.
It rocked me. The good became not good keep reading
That’s all for now friends. Have a beautiful weekend. Rest up. Do something you love xx
Water Into Wine 