Category Archives: flourishing tree

Simple lessons from the nativity scene

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I shared with you last week that Thanksgiving was threatening to overwhelm me, but I was really in denial about what would come before the leftovers were even all gone. The “commercial” Christmas season has come roaring in, practically running down Thanksgiving in its wake. Not that it hasn’t been around since before Halloween, but this week has brought a new level of frantic Christmas messages.

Neighbors have lights and greenery and blow-up snowmen out on their lawns. I still have pumpkins on my front porch and feel a sense of camaraderie with others whose front porches are still decked out in Thanksgiving decor.

The catalogs are screaming with deadlines for shipping in time for Christmas. My inbox has became an unmanageable beast shouting about Cyber Monday deals and extended Cyber Week sales and last chances and one-day coupons and so much more that my head is spinning. Exactly when did Cyber Week become a thing anyway?

I got an email from a big crafts store yesterday with a list of one-day deals and a lead-in sentence that said: “This year, take the stress out of the holidays by simplifying your DIYs …” The sale was for ribbon and fake poinsettias that I could use to transform my normal (read: boring, blah, unacceptably plain) chairs into appropriately festive ones with perfect chair ties.

I thought to myself, “Hey – I know. I’ll make my holidays even less stressful by not going to the store and buying festive-chair-tie-making materials.” I also convinced myself I did not need “Celebrate It pre-lit entryway trees,” even if they, too, were marked down 60% for one day only.

By not jumping in the car yesterday, I saved a little piece of my sanity and 100% of the money I would have spent. I also solved the issue of my family exchanging glances behind my back, wondering when I started feeling the need to decorate perfectly good chairs when what I really need to do is just figure out how to bake a pie without filling the kitchen with smoke. (I admit that this is a recurring event in my kitchen.)

Whether I prepare and decorate and learn how to bake the perfect pie … or not, Christmas is coming. I want to get my heart right for it. I’m determined to find some quiet in this Advent season, to carve out some space for preparing for real Christmas. And I think the nativity scene is the perfect place to look.

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These nativity shepherds look so calm and happy and relaxed. That’s how I’d like to be this Christmas.

I wrote a bit last Christmas about the nativity set my mother painted for me, and these are the shepherds from that set. Stop and look for a moment at their faces and what they have with them: a few of their animals, a water canteen, a musical instrument and some food. That’s all.

When they heard the angels singing of Christ’s birth, they didn’t rush around looking for ribbons and fake poinsettias to decorate their chairs. They rushed to the manger and brought only what they already had with them.

Friends, will you take a cue from the shepherds this week and drop what’s not important so you’ll have time and energy and joy for what is? Are you willing to set the Martha Stewart expectations aside and prepare your heart and home for the presence of Jesus?

Got a good tip for how to make the coming celebration a simpler one, less filled with stress? Please share it below!

An abundance of stress, the stress of abundance

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Happy Thanksgiving to you! (Most of my readers are from the US, and so I hope the rest of you non-US readers will also celebrate tomorrow with gratitude, even if it doesn’t mean family gatherings and eating too much turkey.)

I only have time for a short post today, and I’m guessing you may not have time to read a longer post anyway. Family is coming, and my to-do list doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. I was running errands this morning trying to figure out how to avoid letting stress overwhelm me this holiday season.

That desire to get control over what feels like an over-abundance of holiday stress juxtaposed itself with the image of a woman and child waiting with some small suitcases in the vestibule of homeless shelter where I volunteer with a group of church friends once a month. When I was there on Monday, it was a white flag night, meaning the temperature was expected to drop below freezing, and shelters in the area would try to accommodate greater numbers of homeless for the night.

The air was full of scramble and buzz and extra activity as folks waited for word of where they could spend the night – there, at another shelter or out on the street. Residents of the shelter added to the hubbub as they sorted through bags and bags of donated coats that crowded the small lobby, grouping the coats by size to make them easier to distribute.

The scramble that night was entirely different, a more dire kind of scrambling than the sort you may be experiencing today: the scramble for the last trip to the grocery store, or the scramble to wrap up work early, or the scramble to pass everyone else on the highway so you can get to Grandma’s house first, or the scramble to figure out just how everything will fit into a refrigerator that suddenly feels two sizes too small.

Both types of scramble bring stress, but one represents a stress of abundance, a stress that comes from having the option to run to three different grocery stores for your Thanksgiving meal supplies and the option to go to the big box store for extra guest towels and the option to fight traffic to drive to visit relatives near or far.

For too many, though, those options of abundance simply do not exist, and their stressors may mean the difference between life and death on white flag nights. There’s no money for groceries or towels. There’s no car. There are no guests coming to visit because there is no home.

So might I encourage you to take a deep breath when stress threatens to overwhelm you in the coming days? I plan to use those moments as a way to offer up a quick prayer of gratitude for the abundance that is causing the stress. In addition to prayers of thanks, might you consider a donation of food or time or money to your own local shelter? It may be just what you need to put your own abundance of stress into perspective.

Before I close, let me say it again: Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m thankful for you stopping by for a visit today and would love to leave you with a couple of photos from the Orchid House at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, a visit earlier this year that still leaves me filling grateful for the beauty I found there.

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What are you most grateful for this holiday?

Humor and other diversions

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Originally, I thought today’s blog post would be my response to Chad Stafko’s snarky Wall Street Journal article about runners, Okay, you’re a runner. Get over it, but then I read Mark Remy’s hilarious response here in his Remy’s World column at RunnersWorld.com. So I’ll just share the links with you and tell you a different story, though it also has to do with emotions like anger and humor and other things integral in the aforementioned articles. Enjoy! I’m curious to know which article you relate to more.

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My day started off all wrong yesterday. I had gone to bed the night before anxious about an email related to some work I’ve been doing, and the emails started up again early in the morning. Confusing, long emails filled with the “my way is right” subtext.

By 8:30, my breathing was jagged, and my mood was, too. I knew I needed a diversion. I had the perfect thing in mind. Over breakfast, when I would normally be checking email or Facebook, I decided to cull my growing magazine pile and came across an article about an art installation at the local museum. An artist, Tom Shields, had put chairs in trees. You read that right. The magazine article included some great pictures, but this was something I had to see for myself.

I grabbed my camera and plenty of warm layers to combat the chilly wind and headed out the door. On the way to the museum, I bought a salted caramel hot chocolate. There are very few foul moods that a salted caramel hot chocolate can’t make better.

Here was my first look at the little patch of woods, a mini forest of sorts, where the chairs were. I knew they were there but wondered how close I would have to get before seeing them. The title of the installation is Forest for the Chairs, but at first, I was missing the chairs for the forest.

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The camera could see what my eyes could not. Can you see the chairs yet?

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A closer look

I felt like I had stepped in Wonderland, or an Escher drawing or maybe even Oz. Continue reading →

Ready for Halloween?

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Whoooo's ready for Halloween?

Whoooo’s ready for Halloween? This wise pumpkin concoction was part of the scarecrow exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. (That’s a doll climbing the tree, not a real person.)

My husband has accused me of being a Halloween scrooge, but I think it’s only because we have an overwhelming number of children in our neighborhood, and not all of them are polite about the Halloween candy we give out. Some grab as much candy as they can from our bowls, some of the older ones show up in no costume and still expect candy, and others show up before the sun has even thought about setting. Isn’t there some rule against trick-or-treating before dark?

So yes, I can get a bit grumpy this time of year. But I also love seeing the costumes and the gleeful looks on the kids’ faces as they come up to our porch. I especially look forward to seeing the children I know best and see day-to-day, because they’re usually so sweet and a little shy in their costumes. It’s nice to see the parents out strolling around with their children, and Halloween gives my husband and me a chance to at least wave to neighbors we don’t see all that often or know all that well. Plus, Halloween is one of those occasions when Facebook is more fun than usual for me, because I get to see costumes of far-flung friends and their children.

I was talking with a friend earlier today about Halloween. She’s a mom of four, and when they all lived at home, the family would decide on a theme each year and figure out how each one would dress to match the theme. They enjoy witches’ brew each Halloween (aka beef stew), and that’s a tradition that hasn’t gone away even though they’re mostly too old for trick-or-treating. She made Halloween creative and fun for the whole family, and even though they’re growing up, they still think of Halloween as time for family fun.

I loved Halloween when I was little. One neighbor rigged up lights and noises to pretend there was a scary troll living under the bridge to his house. Our immediate neighbors made homemade goodies and pretended that they didn’t recognize me, though I was the only red-headed kid anywhere nearby. Another invited the neighborhood kids over for apple bobbing and other Halloween fun. There was usually a carnival at school with a costume contest. My dad would carve a jack-o-lantern for us. My very creative mom made costumes for my brother and me.

I remember the best one she ever made. I had fallen in love with Greek Mythology and wanted to dress up as Athena. I wore draped white and purple cloth for my robe, and I’m sure I had a spear of some sort. But the pièce de résistance was the helmet my mom made for me. She made the most magnificent Greek war helmet out of cardboard and aluminum foil, and used red, shiny wrapping paper over foam rubber for the crest. It was the one year I won a costume prize at the school carnival. Continue reading →

Playing with plants

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Fall means racing season for my husband and me, and this past weekend we headed to Atlanta for a race near there. We arrived early enough on Friday that we had some free time in the afternoon, and so we headed over to the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

In previous trips, we had never carved out enough time to visit for long enough to justify the steep admission fee. I was thrilled to go, especially when I saw what was waiting for us there: a special exhibit of larger than life plant sculptures, called mosaiculture (combining the words mosaic + horticulture).

I have never seen anything like this before, but I love the idea of playing with plants to create mosaic patterns and larger-than-life pieces of art. This living art is the work of Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, and the Atlanta exhibit is the first major one in the US.

If you live near Atlanta, I highly recommend getting to the botanical gardens before the exhibit closes on October 31. (And if you’re with the Atlanta Botanical Garden, isn’t there a way you could keep a few of the sculptures permanently?)

 

This trip was all about packing light, and so I only had my new cell phone with its improved camera on it. I was pleasantly surprised with the way the photos of the mosaiculture exhibit came out. I couldn’t wait to share them with you!

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One of two giant butterflies at the garden, this was the first of the sculptures I saw.

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At first, I thought this was a horse, but then I saw the unicorn’s horn.

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What’s not to love about this shaggy dog?

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A happy giant blackberry. I couldn’t get the light right for a good photo of his friends the strawberry and the blueberry.

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One of many cute rabbits invading a garden

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My favorite of the rabbits

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This one is titled Earth Goddess. She’s 25 feet tall and weighs 29 tons! There’s a lot of steel and concrete underneath that natural facade.

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To help you get an idea of her scale

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These fish rotate together on an axis, and they are aptly named “Dancing fish.”

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Hssss. One of two cobras facing each other as they tower over the garden visitors.

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A detail from one of the cobra’s tails. Now you understand why it’s called mosaiculture, right?

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The second cobra, with a side view of its hood

Ever since being terrified by the cobras in the animated Rikki-Tikki-Tavi that played on television once a year when I was a child, I have not loved cobras. But I actually think the cobras were my favorite of the sculptures. Which sculpture is your favorite?