Tag Archives: nature

Settling in and a New Year’s wish

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Happy New Year’s Eve!

It feels good to be back here with you after a four-week break to move across the country and start getting settled in to an unfamiliar new home.

I hope you’re enjoying some rest during the holiday season, though I know tonight may bring revelry and exuberance as we usher in 2015.

As I settle in to my new home and get accustomed to unfamiliar surroundings, I’ve been struck with how fortunate I am to live where I do, near a beautiful protected park along the river. From the first morning’s walk with my husband and dog, I was captivated with the surprising beauty and peace of the place.

I was surprised one morning to see this tree filled with vultures. I tried to look alive as I ran under the tree.

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How many vultures can you spot in this tree?

This isn’t even a very big tree. I was amazed at the numbers gathered there and was briefly unsettled, until I remembered my husband telling me about the salmon spawning here during his visits in November.

The vultures didn’t care one little iota about me. They were here for their Christmas dinner, and given the smell of rotting salmon coming off the river, I was glad for their presence. They still have work to do, and I find myself happily looking for them and counting them each morning. Today was breezy, and several circled the river riding the wind. They looked almost graceful in their enjoyment of the ride.

While I would never have thought vultures would teach me something about a new calendar, these birds have. Not everything can stay the same, nor should I want it to.

Not everything can stay the same, nor should I want it to.

Just as I don’t want salmon carcasses left to decompose along my running route, I don’t want to cling to the old things that are no longer meant for me. I need to let go, and I need to embrace the sometimes ungainly, unlovely helpers I encounter along the way.

While I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, there are things I have to let go of to embrace the year ahead. Can you relate?

My wish for you (and me) is this:

May we let go of what must be left in 2014. May we embrace the coming year. May we encounter gentle paths along the way. And yet, when we encounter the inevitable rocky paths, may we embrace those, too, knowing that they help us stay sharp, they help us develop compassion for others’ rocky paths, and they challenge us to become a stronger, better self than we would be if all our paths were calm. Most of all, may we flourish.

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I’ll leave you with a scene I’m blessed enough to see every day. The dog is settling in well, and we both enjoy stopping here in the mornings to watch the river teem with birds. I couldn’t ask for a better way to greet each morning, and I wish you many moments of calm and serene beauty as you start your year.

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My dog and I run the trails and stop by the river each morning, becoming more “local” every day. 

 

All the best to you in 2015!

PS—Thanks to some crazy VAT law the EU passed, the price for my ebook will go up tomorrow. So buy it today before the price increase! (I think it’s a steal at $3.99.)

Calm in the midst of chaos

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My life feels pretty chaotic right now. As the days rapidly approach my cross-country move and my book release, I feel like my to-do list is growing instead of shrinking.

While my husband spent several days out in California juggling work with meeting work crews (yes, multiple) to prepare our new home for the move, I took advantage of some unbooked days to sneak away to the mountains. I headed for a place that is the calm, the peace, the still beauty that I need when life feels too crazy to manage.

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This is one of my favorite places on earth, and I’ll be seeing a lot less of it in the coming months. But for now, I’m grateful for the refuge it offers. This place makes me feel small, a great reminder that the problems I’m facing are small in the grander mechanism of the world’s workings.

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I had hoped to share more pictures with you, but my laptop and the wireless internet decided to have a knockdown, drag-out fight mid-post. One of the “charms” of escaping the chaos of my regular life is an unreliable internet connection, I suppose.

Where do you go when you need to find calm in the midst of the chaos?

A musical nature

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I grew up in a home where music played constantly. My dad loves classical music and has shelves and shelves of records that he frequently played while I was growing up.

In kindergarten, I started to learn violin and trained to play classically until eleventh grade, at which time I set the violin down with no intention of picking it up again.

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My violin, waiting for me to tune it up and play

My brother played piano and then guitar and then electric bass, a gifted musician who would go on to tour the country for several years with his band. While my dad and violin teachers were educating me about classical music, my brother was passing along his passion for rock and roll.

As an adult, I discovered Irish dance and music. I picked up my violin again, started referring to it as a fiddle (a word that was like nails on a chalkboard in my days of playing classical music), and began to play for fun instead of duty.

My husband’s love of music drew me to him early, and he admits to being smitten when he found I knew of Tift Merritt and her music. On our second date, he took me to a show that introduced me to singer-songwriter Todd Snider. Ours has been a life filled with music ever since.

Of music festivals and the bands that make them fabulous
This past weekend, I got to spend four days at MerleFest, one of the premier bluegrass and Americana music festivals in the country. For those four days each year, I lose sense of the outside world and drink in song after song after song.

Old favorites made appearances: Sam Bush, Scythian, Donna the Buffalo, Todd Snider, Steep Canyon Rangers. For the first time, I saw Old Crow Medicine Show and Carolina Chocolate Drops perform live. “Wow!” is all I can say about both groups’ performances.

There’s nothing better than watching talented musicians have fun while they play – and these acts did not disappoint.

A newer group, Della Mae, is one I’ve learned to love over the last two years at MerleFest. They’re a young, all-female bluegrass group, and I enjoy their playing and singing in equal measure. My ears perked up when I heard one of their new songs, Pine Tree:

Pine tree, pine tree, growing from the soil of Galilee,
Don’t be scared now, don’t be slow.
If you don’t go, the roots won’t grow.

I think there’s a sermon tucked away in that chorus. You can listen to a snippet of this song and others off the group’s upcoming record release.

Singing trees
Della Mae’s song was not the only time music and trees connected with one another at the festival.

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I love the message on the back of this t-shirt!

This shirt made me wonder if at least some music fans also have a deeper appreciation for nature because we know what goes into making the instruments sound so beautiful and what we lose when whole species of trees die out.

Take the violin for instance. Each violin likely consists of wood from at least eight different trees (among them spruce, maple, poplar, spruce, willow, ebony, rosewood, boxwood, mahogany). The pernambuco tree once made up most Western violin bows, but now, because the tree is endangered, violin makers are searching for other woods and synthetic options to make great bows.

Even the rosin that enables the bow to draw sound from the violin’s strings comes from tree sap.

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The scroll, pegs and neck of my violin — all made of wood

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I’m partial to my own violin, I know, but I think its back is simply beautiful.

Without trees and the gifts they provide, what would become of the violins, mandolins, guitars, banjos, cellos, dobros and basses that make such beautiful music?

Nature has its own wonderful music, but I’m grateful for the music it enables humans to create, too. Today’s weather may not be serene and calm where you are (it’s getting ready to storm again where I am), but the next time you find yourself outside on a peaceful day, I hope you’ll think of the message from another t-shirt I found at the festival:

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Nature and music inextricably linked

Will you listen? And will you make the trees sing?

What to do during the shutdown

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You may be wondering what to do with your time while we all wait for broken politics and broken politicians to reopen the National Parks. I have a few suggestions.

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National Parks are still closed eight days later, and though there’s access to some places, some of the closing measures seem punitive, designed to make citizens as mad as possible.

I simply don’t understand this quagmire, but instead of letting it make me despondent, I’ve searched for ways to be grateful and to fill my time with activities that soothe and heal and calm my soul.

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Nothing beats a stunning sunset at the close of the day. I could have missed this one had I been focused on watching the nightly news instead of sitting on the porch swing at the close of day.

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The federal government can’t shut down autumn. Get outside. Visit a state park (or even parts of National Parks that you can still get into. Or simply go for a walk in your neighborhood.

Fall is here, and it’s bringing its beauty with it. The government can’t mess up some things. So go outside and look for the change of seasons. Visit a pumpkin patch. Go leaf collecting. Fill up your bird feeders and see who’s still around looking for seeds.

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Good reads!

Even if the weather isn’t cooperating where you are for outdoor adventures, or autumn hasn’t yet made an appearance, there are still ways to tune out the shutdown. Read a good book!

I’ve been catching up on my unread book pile lately and thought I’d share some of them with you.

A friend and fellow writer posted an interview with Nadia Bolz-Weber on her Facebook page recently, and as soon as I listened to the interview, I was hooked. Bolz-Weber is the author of Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, a stunning memoir in which Bolz-Weber describes the damage done to her as a child growing up in an ultra-conservative church, her subsequent path through alcohol, drug abuse and recovery (not to mention a few tattoo parlors) and into a Grace-filled life as a Lutheran pastor. If you have read this book, I want to sit down and talk about it with you over coffee.

But this book isn’t for everyone. It may not be for you:

  • If you mind salty language (Bolz-Weber can make even sailors blush sometimes).
  • If you think church shouldn’t welcome certain groups of sinners (not you, of course, but the really bad sinners like drag queens, swindlers, alcoholics, government officials … ahem).
  • If you think God’s grace can only happen to certain people who then go on to live out perfect, conventional, acceptable lives.
  • If you think a female Lutheran tattooed “pastrix” (a pejorative for women pastors) has nothing to say that could change your heart about or for God and those whom God calls us to love (our neighbors, our enemies, ourselves).

Anyway, like I said, if you read the book, I’d love to discuss it with you.

Since I like to alternate between fiction and nonfiction these days – an easy way to cleanse my reading palate – the next book I picked up was Louise Penny’s The Brutal Telling, the fifth in her Inspector Gamache series. I don’t want to give too much away because it is a mystery and is the fifth in a series set in a small Canadian village with characters I’ve grown to love, but I will tell you this: The Brutal Telling is Penny’s best book yet. There are more in the series, and I’m woefully behind. So she may have better later books, but The Brutal Telling is haunting and magical and masterful. I love what Penny writes on her website about her own books: “If you take only one thing away from any of my books I’d like it to be this: Goodness exists.” This belief in goodness comes through in the way she writes, and the goodness in her complex characters shines through even the darkness inside them.

Next up on my list to read: Alberto Salazar’s 14 Minutes: A Running Legend’s Life and Death and Life. That’s not a typo. This world-class runner, now a coach to running greats such as Mo Farah, Galen Rupp, Dathan Ritzenheim and high school phenom Mary Cain, spent 14 minutes dead. No pulse dead. My husband has already read the book, and I’m looking forward to the inspiration it promises.

How about you? Are you finding good ways to distract yourself from the government shutdown? What about your favorite books that you’ve read lately? I’m always looking for recommendations to add to my to-be-read book stack.

Love of place (and a Lenten challenge)

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Before I launch into today’s post, I want to thank those of you who responded to last week’s post, The obsession with our scales. I enjoyed the range of comments you emailed and wanted to encourage you to take the season of Lent (which starts today) to consider whether you need to shift the way you think about food and weight. Lent offers a time to repent of sins in preparation for Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and it’s a season that Christians traditionally give something up as a way of focusing more on Christ.

Maybe it’s your scale (and the anxieties that accompany stepping on it) that you need to give up to God this Lent. Could you put it away in a closet and not look at it again until after Easter and spend the time you would normally stand pondering the number on the scale instead reading a Bible verse or saying a quick prayer? Or maybe you need to change some eating habits (too much sugar/alcohol/caffeine, not enough vegetables/fruit/water) so you’ll have the energy you need to get up five minutes early every morning to spend time with God. I’d love to know if you’re giving something up or adding something in this season of Lent, and if it’s extra challenging, I’d be honored to pray for your success in this area. Just let me know by emailing me or commenting below! And now for today’s post …

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Love of place
I spent this past weekend in the mountains, a place that is home away from home for my husband and me, a place that sometimes feels most like “home,” though we don’t live there permanently, a place so wrapped in natural beauty that I feel closer to God when I’m there.

We had been away for too long, and I was giddy at returning, proving that the adage “Distance makes the heart grow fonder” doesn’t apply only to people. This place has wound its way into my heart.

I took some time simply reacquainting myself with this place, walking its trails, skirting its places still icy with winter, sitting in a favorite restaurant filled with laughter and the unforgettable smell of a wood-fired oven, driving to catch the best moments of setting sun.

So on this eve of Valentine’s Day, I wanted to honor this place I love so dearly by sharing some photos of it with you.

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Ducks and ripples in a part of the lake without ice

I discovered a few fallen friends along the trails I walked, victims of wind and winter.

I discovered a few fallen friends along the trails I walked, victims of wind and winter.

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I saw these ice crystals and wondered if earlier versions had inspired the first chandelier makers.

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More chandelier inspiration; I love how many colors show up in this photograph, proving that winter isn’t all gray and brown

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Time for reflection — both mine and nature’s

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A broad horizon at sunset

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Layers of blue ridgelines as the sun sets

Perhaps you understand? Maybe you, too, have a deep and abiding love of place? What place grips your heart this way? What about it feels like “home” to you? Why not send it a little Valentine in the comments below?