Life..

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks–when you hear that unmistakable pounding–when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming–then row, row for your life toward it.                    ~Mary Oliver

To do... or not to do? That is the question..

We have had a beautiful warm, sunny spring weekend here in my neck of the woods. Right now it's raining, but tomorrow is promising to be warmer and sunny again, so I'll take it. We have one more week of school until spring break. The hard part about spring, for me, is that there is soo much stuff to do, and so many things I want to do, and not enough time to do them all. I need to spring clean my house (which this year as much as I want to do it, I've been procrastinating on actually starting). I need to clean up my yard. I need to paint The Boy's™ radio room. I need to stain my bench. I have craft projects I want to do. I have gardening that needs to be planned and be done. Yet, today, I mostly spent the day in the kitchen, cooking. I also spent some time crafting, did all the laundry, went to church, and wasted time on the computer. Could I have done more? Yes. Did I want to? Yes. Did I actually do it... well, that's where I'm having a hard time right now. Mostly it's a motivational problem, that I know will work itself out soon enough, it's just frustrating me to no end. Add that to the food issues I'm still having, and other stressful life issues, and it's all just a little overwhelming. As a manner of speaking, I think sometimes the doing nothing, or wasting time on the computer, or working on stuff in my craft room instead of cleaning is a method of self preservation. My sub-conscious knows that in order to deal with all the rest of it, I need some quiet down time. It's just not working with my "must do it all now" type A personality. Working in the confines of my One Little Word for this year, I'm trying to just accept that right now, it is what it is, and I just need to go with it until it gets to a place where things can get on an even keel again. It's hard, but I'm trying. I guess if I look at it that way, today was a pretty good day.

In Which We Find an Easter Tree...

In Eastern Europe, it's customary to hang hollow Easter Eggs from trees. The eggs symbolize new life, and it's a tradition that I can get behind a lot easier than a bunny who brings toys and candy. I haven't ever had an Easter Tree before, and I'm not a huge fan of plastic eggs. In fact, this year, I bought some painted foam eggs at Pier One for the glass jar in my dining room and I'm quite smitten with them. I do however, have a stash of plastic eggs that I used to put jelly beans into before I put them in the kids Easter baskets. Turns out that neither of my kids like jelly beans, so while I still put some small candies in them to help fill the basket, I have a surplus. Today I was outside in the yard taking down the Christmas lights (I know, don't even get me started. We had huge snow banks), and noticed a large maple branch that kind of looked tree-ish lying on the ground. Fifteen minutes later I had this lovely bit of decoration standing next to my door. I like it. I don't think it's too hokey, and it brightens up an otherwise dreary bit of landscaping.

Life is kicking my butt right now, in ways that I can't share here on the ole' blog, but rest assured that we are all OK in the best way we can be, and will pull through this in due time. In order to combat the emotional turmoil, I have been crafting, and cleaning. I don't know why, but for some reason, whenever I am stressed out or worried or what have you, I clean. Lately however, I've been doing more crafting then cleaning. Maybe crafting is my new therapy.

Yesterday, I created this moss covered R for the mirror in our dining room. That mirror was made for me by a dear friend, out of an old window casing that my dad gave us. It came from a barn somewhere in Virginia. To say I love it would be selling how I really feel about it short. A few years ago, one of the parents of a student I worked with gave me this cute "clothes line" kind of Christmas card holder that you put up, and then string up silver decorations that are meant to hold cards. I left the silver "clothes line" part on the window frame, and I hang random stuff off it during the year.