Hey friends,

How are you? I hope the week has been kind to you.

After just getting used to the idea of leaving the house for work everyday, it was work from home again this week due to close contact and my personal grooming went out the window just like that. Back to being a grown up next week but right now I’m three coffees, a vanilla slice and two scrabble games into the my weekend.

As always and better late than never this week I hope these few words and reads will be fresh air and kind company to you and if you enjoy The Friday Recliner would you be so kind as to forward it to a friend you think would enjoy it too?

A Good Word

Because we’re all creatives in one way or another

Alexander McNutt

A Good Look

Here’s to soft landings

Pic from my fave Vintage Interior

A Good Idea

by Marian Vischer

During the seasons in which there is no margin, the ones where each day is ruled by a to-do list from dawn to dusk, I’m learning to take my cues from nature.

No season lasts forever. And depending on the season, this can bring either relief or grief. To be honest, I’m feeling a bit of both.

All things will bloom when they’re good and ready. There is no “early” or “late,” no rushing the daffodils or the dogwoods. All in due time, dear one. Waiting forms us in such needful ways.

Creation itself is embedded with rhythms of rest. Each day the sun rises and sets. And so should we. When I attempt to live beyond my means, denying rest and Sabbath and God-given rhythms, it shows up in every part of my life—body, mind, spirit, and relationships.

Beauty begs us to stop and gaze and breathe deeply. Which is exactly what I did today between the 7th and 8th hole of today’s golf match. While the play continued ahead of me, I stopped by this stream, slowed my breath, paused my thoughts, and allowed the sounds of fresh water rippling over smooth stones calm me right on down.

What is nature teaching you these days?

A Few Good Reads

From Cal Newport

Smartphones vs. Science: On Distraction and the Suppression of Genius

Last month, Adam Weiss, a fourth-year chemistry PhD student at the University of Chicago, published a column in the journal Nature. In the piece, Weiss talked about how he had recently hit “a rut” in his polymer chemistry research. “Although I had been productive early in my graduate career,” he wrote, “my long hours and hard work were no longer translating into success in the laboratory.”

It didn’t take much self-reflection for Weiss to identify the problem: his phone. He recognized that he increasingly colonized his “quiet time” with digital distractions. As a result, his work felt “chaotic and disorganized“ – – – keep reading

From The Kitchn

How an Apple Tart Taught Me to Embrace a Messy Kitchen

When I have guests over for dinner, most of my friends insist on helping with the cooking part in order to avoid doing the dishes. Not because they’re unwilling, but because after years of witnessing my particular cleaning routine, they maintain that I’m better at it. It’s their gentle way of saying that I make them far too nervous to perform basic cleaning tasks in my home. They’ve watched me, time and again, shuffle their casually dropped bags to their appropriate place, properly adjust their shoes by the door, and — on a rare occasion or two — yes, re-wash dishes they’ve already washed. I’ve been navigating these impulses since I was little. My earliest memory of getting in trouble as a child was when I was late for dinner because I was too consumed with cleaning a friend’s room. And while I agree with the sentiment that our home is a reflection of our mind, the sometimes-debilitating nature of my intense cleaning habits has often kept me from fully living in my home. The main casualty in all of this being the kitchen — the most used room in everyone else’s house and, historically, the least used room in mine – keep reading

From The Art of Simple

The Stories of Faces

There are already two children, probably around 2 (a handful of months older than my son), playing with the toy kitchen in the library.

Jack is shy at first, pushing his body back against me as he watches, eye trained on their busy fingers banging pots and pans, pulling open the oven door and occasionally pulling on each other’s shirts.

The mom looks up, friendly, as I fumble through signing that it is okay for him to go explore, that these are nice new friends that he can meet. “Do you sign with him?” she asks.

I nod – and hesitate, before plunging in without drawing breath that since we don’t know yet about how he will prefer to communicate, whether his hearing loss (the one missing ear makes it conductive rather than what they call ‘simple’ deafness) will mean he prefers signing or speaking.

She smiles, genuinely interested. It turns out she was a speech language pathology major at Baylor. When she asks what I do, I tell her I study the philosophy of disability – – – – keep reading

This was fun