Spring Inspiration

I'm an autumn kind of gal, but spring storms are one of my favorite things. It's temperate enough to keep the windows open, but not so deep into the warmer season that it's humid. I especially love storms at night.

A few days back it was a stormy night, and after getting Nate to sleep, I was cleaning up around the house waiting for Andy to get home from work/lacrosse.  While listening to the iPod, this song rotated through the playlist.  Maybe most, regard a song that could be the M.O. of their life.  If I were to pick a song that sums up my life, Faxing Berlin (Piano Acoustic Version) would be it. Deadmau5 is one of my favourite artists; the original Faxing Berlin is good too, but the piano acoustic resonates with me in a way that none of his other songs do. Being alone in the dim quiet, with the faint sound of spring rain outside, reconnected me to this song in a really awesome way.

It's not that the song is a translation of my moods in general; in fact, I'm not sure I could quite articulate why it embodies my sentiments around living life. There aren't any lyrics. The piano isn't the epicenter of the song. It just does.

Recently I've also been finding that I experience inspiration when I'm in the moment.  I first read Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, in 2005 and was recently inspired to read it again.  Along with other daily practices, including readying to take on the 7 Day Vegan Challenge, I am feeling an inspiration for daily living that has beautifully coincided with spring.

bamboo tealight candle holder picked up at the local thrift sometime back, $2.50. Shotglasses from our cubbard; daffodils from our yard.

Nate and I also spent part of Earth Day visiting two local parks and making tortillas from scratch. Last week, our family achieved the smallest amount of total weekly garbage: one small, white kitchen trash bag. Definitely awesome, and I absolutely think we can do better.

Creative Outlets

First of all, I think creativity is subjective. What appears to be a creative process or accomplishment to one could be drab to another. That's the beauty of it, though.

I have so much respect for people who trust themselves enough to be creative and even share that creativity with the public. I am certainly not the most creative person on Earth, but I do enjoy utilizing creativity as a means of connection, expression, and release. There is a growing list of creative endeavors that I would love to do; some of them require a quite a bit of time as well as money, which is why I cannot do them all- or even several of them- at once. I do hope to experience them all (either for the first time or in a more developed way) at some point, though.  A few of those things:

::  Expand my knowledge of aromatherapy. This would most likely happen in the form of enrolling in an aromatherapy course or guidance as a mentee under an expert in essential oils. I currently have nearly 50 oils, which I use weekly in the form of diffusing, bath, and the occasional massage. In my dreams, I would extend my current understanding of base, middle, and top notes with a thorough comprehension of the therapeutic benefits each oil contains. Of course, growing my collection, and refining and recreating blends, and integrating them into additional products (beyond candles, balms, and room sprays, which I've done for family and friends).

:: Learn how to woodwork and have my very own shop.  I've worked with precut wood in the past, and often scour the thrift stores for remnants that I could upcycle. Complete with the necessary power tools and an outdoor shed. Working with local reclaimed wood. Using natural wood stains like coffee, tea, pennies, berries. And on, and on.

:: Learn to read sheet music for the piano.  I've been "playing" for many years. It's all by ear. I'd love to actually know how to read a sheet of music and then play. This has been a lifelong dream. There's a part of me that feels illiterate, since I can play, I just don't have the technical knowledge. Like, I cross fingers and I know that's not how a formally trained pianist plays. We have been so blessed to inherit Andy's grandmother's Cable. It is an immense source of inspiration in and of itself. It came with tenderly old sheet music that wants to be read.

:: Knitting and yarn dyeing. This place totally inspires me. Expand my working knowledge of knitting. Make, make make.

:: Quilting. I envision beautiful, monochromatic quilts in whites and grays. Blues and earthy tones. Wrapped up in them with my family, drinking coffee or hot chocolate by our fireplace.

:: Learn how to build a log home. Massive, I know. Build said log home. And integrate all the above in it.

There are more, now that as I start to actually list them. V.2 forthcoming.

two of my favorite pictures we took while Westward ho! moving to Utah. 2008

One of His Favorites (and Mine, too)

When I was about 4 or 5 years old, my father taught me a version of Let It Be by the Beatles. We had a keyboard, rather than a piano, and I remember how much bigger the keys felt beneath my fingers back then vs. now.

Nate, too, loves the song, Let It Be, and gets a kick out of watching little videos on my tablet. So I decided to video record the song for him so he could watch it anytime.  The recording quality isn't great- there's a hissing noise, but I don't really care because the best part is Nate joins me in playing.  And he did a pretty spectacular job keeping to the beat.

About the Kitchen

I've said it before: we keep food pretty simple and wholesome.  In the past, we'd do two bigger grocery shopping trips each month and, as needed, pick-up fresh fruit, cheese and vegetables in between (we'd always run out of these before two weeks pass).  I've decided to switch it up and do one (smaller) trip once a week, usually Friday, sometimes Saturday. This way, I can focus on meals needed for just that week. I'm sure many people already shop this way; but, I'm particularly grateful for this tweaked approach.

Our favorite place to shop is Trader Joe's! Though I do love Whole Foods when needing to purchase bulk. This week we'll have:
- homemade pizza (with this crust and sauce) with romaine salad
- garlic linguine with caprese salad (with marinated fresh mozzarella) and this rosemary bread
- slow-simmered pintos with homemade tortilla
- garbanzo couscous dish with free range curry chicken for the boys
- black bean and chip salad

I don't assign dishes to dates; just make what feels good that day. And I usually make enough to have leftovers the rest of the week. Nothing fancy, but certainly flavorful and fresh food. Nate loves to help cook, and we have a ton of fun in the kitchen together. One of our favorite lunches is natural peanut butter  and raw honey on multi-grain bread. Classic, and so, so good.

Some things I hope to do to alter/improve our kitchen and the cooking therein:
- build and expand indoor herb garden
- refinish dining table. It's a gorgeous walnut table that has too much wear and tear to go without a tablecloth pretty much all the time
- eliminate completely all plastic anything
- grow my wooden spoon collection

And every morning, around 9:30, the sunlight hits the prism on our kitchen sink window- Nate and I will spin the prism and watch the rainbows flicker throughout the room. It's pretty magnificent.

Houseplants

Last night I noticed that a couple of our houseplants were looking a tad dusty. Being as we're emerging from a long, cold winter (with concurrent construction behind our house), I find we have to vacuum, sweep the floor, and dust much more often than normal.  The only other place I've ever had to do this upkeep as constantly was when we lived in arid Utah. Nate loves to use the spray bottle, so I figured I could enlist his help to give our adored plants a little spray.

We have houseplants in each of the eight rooms in our house. All of the plants have either been saved from the nursery clearance racks or are cuttings transplanted from the original plant. At any given time we usually have a few cuttings lined up on our kitchen sink windowsill. I think we have plenty of room for even more.

I gathered the smaller downstairs houseplants and placed them on the floor of our kitchen. After a long, gray winter, all these plants clustered together was a beautiful sight to behold.

Though I do prefer cooler weather over hot weather, I was growing a bit weary with not being able to at least open the windows for fresh air.  So it was such a reprieve to open the windows for a bit this afternoon as we almost reached 50 degrees. It is especially nice to read next to an open window. Here are a few of the current books Andy and I are reading: Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson (me), Consilience by E.O. Wilson (Andy), and collected stories by Jorge Luis Borges.  Though neither of us have a tremendous amount of time to read these days, but we both try to allot a little time here and there as we can. 

It's March

It has been so long since I've written here! It has been on my mind to get back into the groove of taking the time to be here, but it just hasn't happened until now. It's not that things have been busier than normal (at least not for me- Andy has been incredibly busy with his new job at Ohio State and coaching lacrosse, so our time with him these days is super precious).

I think it stems from a mutual agreement on the part of my husband and I to limit portions of our time spent online; we quit Facebook altogether a few months ago, and frankly, neither of us miss it one bit.  There may be a chance he and/or I will return one day, but we'll approach it very differently; in the pursuit of valuing our time in general, we will probably remove most of the contacts on our "friends" list. In the past, both of us had temporarily put the brakes on using the site, but this post inspired me to really think about what we do online, and with whom we share what personal information. Andy isn't nearly as private a person as I am, but he values authentic connections every bit as much as I do. It truly has no reflection on the associations of people that we had on that particular form of social networking- it is simply a reflection of how we choose to spend our time and where we choose to focus our energies deliberately (and without as much noise).

I am not sure how I'll continue to use this space. I'd like to think that, at the very least, I'll use it once in awhile to express myself when the mood strikes.

And, naturally, I love the quote at the bottom of Leo's page on why he quit Facebook.