Beautiful World of Mine (Eliza Gilkyson)

Today is Easter Sunday.  I am not necessarily a proponent of the religious aspect, but I do appreciate the metaphor of rebirth, renewal, and resurrection... a bit odd in that this virus has most of us in hibernation mode, and our Spring may not come until late-summer.

However, rituals are touchstones and our sweet Sarah is embracing the holiday, especially because Colin is at an age to really appreciate.  Yesterday they dyed eggs, she put together an Easter basket for him, and she even made a bunny cake, traditional in our family for decades, beginning with my mom, segueing to me, and now Sarah.  My mom would actually pluck straws from her broom for the whiskers, I used bamboo skewers, and Sarah creatively came up with licorice Twizzlers.  Would have loved to be the proverbial fly on the wall when Colin first saw it!

They, and the boys, will come over about 10 am, and we will do a social distancing egg hunt, followed by bubbles (blowing as well as popping!), playing on the golf course green (which Colin thinks is his own private sandbox), and using sticks to draw in the sandy path.

Not bad for Plan Q...  :-)

P.S.  A few hours after I initially posted.  Our kiddo with his basket of eggs.  HEART!!!

SONG:  Beautiful World of Mine by Eliza Gilkyson

BOOK:  A New Beginning: Celebrating the Spring Equinox by Wendy Pfeffer, Linda Bleck (Illustrator)

POEM:  The Way Wings Should by Rumi

What will
our children do in the morning?
Will they wake with their hearts wanting to play,
the way wings
should?

Will they have dreamed the needed flights and gathered
the strength from the planets that all men and women need to balance
the wonderful charms of
the earth

so that her power and beauty does not make us forget our own?

I know all about the ways of the heart - how it wants to be alive.

Love so needs to love
that it will endure almost anything, even abuse,
just to flicker for a moment. But the sky's mouth is kind,
its song will never hurt you, for I
sing those words.

What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us
fly?

QUOTE:  "The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope." ~ Wendell Berry

Spring Street (Dar Williams)

I've written before that we don't really have distinct seasons here in South Florida - it feels like almost year-round summer, with flowers blooming constantly, no falling of leaves and no winter to speak of. For the attuned, the difference is subtle yet distinct - we've been experiencing a "cold snap" (i.e., 60+ degree nights, 70+ degree days) which has been refreshing, invigorating and a wake-up call for me personally...

I went through a patch these last few months whereupon I lost my concentration - I got so bogged down in the minutae of daily life (everyone else's) that I forgot to pay attention to my own. I was eating crap (and lots of it!), being extremely sedentary and in a stuck place productivity- and positivity-wise - through the motivation of various blogposts (here and here) and the support of a particular friend on a similar journey (hi, MH!), I am back on track in all its many connotations...

This past Monday found me focusing on... my 3-mile trek around the neighborhood (god, I'd missed my walking!), followed by a stretching routine; a healthy eating plan of fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains, with my only sweet/indulgence being a Skinny Cow (love the taste, hate the name!) ice cream sandwich each evening; vitamins twice a day (memory's the second thing to go, you know!); an as-close-to-midnight-as-I-can-make-it bedtime; and beaucoup glasses of water - I've succeeded four out of the last four days, and am well on the way to completing today's assignment...

Still haven't managed to make/find time for 10 minutes of meditation a day - always room for improvement. I've vowed to resume blogging on a semi-regular basis as well - there's a place in the world for the therapeutic spew-and-send (major understatement... :-)

Many plusses this week: Eric is home from college for the Easter weekend and we'll have a family dinner Sunday afternoon... my Labyrinth Cafe concert is this Saturday night, and it got a nice treatment in today's Miami Herald... we get to hard-boil and dye eggs tomorrow... and the HBO drama In Treatment is back with Season 2 - "I don't have to go to Spring Street... 'cause it's spring everywhere"!

P.S. SMM here, here, here, here and here...

SONG: Spring Street by Dar Williams

BOOK: Spring: A Spiritual Biography of the Season by Gary D. Schmidt, Susan M. Felch (editors), Mary Azarian (illustrator)

POEM: Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We are All Writing God's Poem' by Barbara Crooker

Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed

a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles

begins with a single step. On the interstate listening

to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist

say, "The universe is not only stranger than we

think, it's stranger than we can think." I think

I've driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy

scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing

sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,

and aren't we just? Just yesterday,

I read Li Po: "There is no end of things

in the heart," but it seems like things

are always ending—vacation or childhood,

relationships, stores going out of business,

like the one that sold jeans that really fit—

And where do we fit in? How can we get up

in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,

put one foot after the other, open the window,

make coffee, watch the steam curl up

and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls

in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,

lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.

The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop

for the thousandth time.

QUOTE(S): "Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment." ~ Ellis Peters

"The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring." ~ Bern Williams

Spring (Richard Shindell)

From Today's Writer's Almanac:

Today is the first day of spring, the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth is tilted on its axis, so as it travels around the Sun each pole is sometimes tilted towards the Sun and sometimes tilted away. It is this tilt that causes the seasons, as well as the shortening and lengthening of daylight hours. On this day, the north and south poles are equally distant from the sun, so we will have almost exactly the same amount of daytime as nighttime.

I love living in South Florida (we moved here 16 years ago this month) but the seasons are not easily discernible - when we lived in Atlanta, the four quadrants of the annual calendar exhibited visible lines of demarcation: fall's crunchy leaves, winter's frosted lawns, spring's bursting dogwoods and summer's oppressive humidity.

It's basically always warm, green and flowering in my part of the state (not that there's anything wrong with that!) - in fact, I, who have had a black thumb for most of my life, now appreciate being able to make almost any plant flourish under my oftentimes neglectful care. We have a yard full of various hibiscus, bougainvillea, bromeliads, crotons, an assortment of palms, ixora, liriope, thumbergia, and so many others - suffice it to say if it's vegetation, it grows with little or no help. I even have a gardenia bush on the side of the house that blooms for only a month (mid-April to mid-May), although it whacked out this year, started producing blossoms in January and it hasn't stopped yet - what a treat!

Spring is a time of rebirth, renewal and reawakening and I seem to be going through a bit of that myself... trying to find my way back from scramble mode to equilibrium, starting with cutting back my working-outside-the-home hours (soon, I hope) and downsizing my volunteer/committee work - it's continued with reclaiming my home office/guest bedroom (after Sarah's departure) and an ongoing effort to purge/consolidate/streamline. I appear to be breathing more and stressing less - I can already envision more reading for pleasure and walking for health... :-)

I have a calligraphic print on my dining room wall entitled Chaos: Where Great Dreams Begin - the text reads: "Before a great vision can become reality there may be difficulty. Before a person begins a great endeavor, they may encounter chaos. As a new plant breaks the ground with difficulty, foreshadowing the huge tree, so must we sometimes push against difficulty in bringing forth our dreams."

Here's/cheers to embracing change in order to achieve vision - puuuuuuuuuusssssssshhhhhhhhhhh!

SONG: Spring by Richard Shindell

BOOK: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

POEM: Starting With Little Things by William Stafford

Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --

Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.

QUOTE: In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt." ~ Margaret Atwood