photabilia
Monday, September 19, 2011
Garden Update and a Happy Surprise!
No deep thoughts here...just tomatoes and an unexpected happy surprise.
Tomatoes and peppers coming out of our ears, so to speak, though more accurately, coming out of compost and soil, and especially of the late summer rains that finally came. All the hose watering, all the carrying shower water and sink water and every last bit of saved water doled out during 5 months of drought didn't do what a couple weeks of regular rain did.
Sliced tomato with mozzerella, tomato soup, BLTs, salsa, omelets, tomatoes sliced, diced, fried, casseroled, in salads and sandwiches, given away, stuffed, broiled...and you thought zucchini was the garden wunderkind? Oh no, this year it is tomatoes...
...and peppers. But that's another story.
And I love them.
And I LOVE this journal which just today I won from Tami Chacon . Isn't it great? Take a look at her etsy shop, Choose Joy Studio while you're at it, because there's a lot more of her work there and you just might find something you can't live without.
Gracias, Tami!
PS: see the acorn squash next to the bowl of tomatoes up there? That's the mystery vegetable!
Monday, August 29, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Little Miracles
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
15 Minutes to Live
We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
15 minutes to live and a story to tell.
My stories are spelled out in great detail, painfully, excruciatingly, boringly detailed in my journals of oh, about 30 years, and yes, a lot of that is about fear. We are afraid of the truth of life…that everyone and everything ages, decays, dies but we all too often stop there at that point where what we know seems to end.
If I look around me, though, I am reminded again and again that life always follows death. Hiking the Sangre de Christos, over last autumn's dark and sodden leaves, I pass a narrow, linear swathe of iridescent moss and wildflowers. I pause and wonder briefly at it until I see beneath them the shadow of a fallen tree that has long since crumbled to dust. How long has it taken to decay to the point that life springs so exuberantly from it? I don’t know, but within its ghostly outline an entire new ecosystems thrives.
Like magic, the household waste I throw into the glass jar under the sink and later toss into the compost pile changes, sometimes in a matter of days, into rich brown humus that in turn nourishes the garden. Turning it I find worms, roly polys, burrowing bugs that eat and excrete and feed the robins who have built a nest in the nearby apple tree.
Friends and family, even those I know for such short period in my hospice work, die yet their voices and stories and presence continue to move and speak to me, reminding me of important truths, often ones I never heard while they walked this earth. Death does nothing to quiet them.
Relationships come to an end and if I pay attention to the hows and whys, the lessons learned from them inform and guide future relationships.
And one day I, too, will die. I have no worries about whether there is a life after death or what it might be. There is no need for fear. Life tells me so.
Life, death, life – that’s just how it goes.
and unsurprisingly, this was in my in-box as I closed this post:
Monday, May 16, 2011
I Did It!
Monday, May 9, 2011
A Reality Check
This one hit me blindside.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Happiness
It piqued my interest - after all, who doesn't want to be happy? It's not that I am not happy; much of the time I am, but there are days when it seems to be a long climb out of a blue funk, so...I browsed through it and then went online to find the author's blog/website, also named "The Happiness Project".
It made me think, so...
In the spirit of it all, let me share ten things with you that make me happy today: