Beckoning

(Tunnel under the train station. Photo by Robin. July 2007)

I’m not sure why I like this photo. It’s a tunnel that runs under the train station in Claymont, Delaware. Claymont is a steel town where people work hard. It was one of the towns we were considering when looking for a place to live during our sabbatical adventures. We were at the Claymont train station today in order to take the train into Philadelphia when I snapped this photo.

Maybe it’s what appears to be a figure pointing to the left that appeals to me. Or maybe it’s just the tunnel in general since I have a fondness for pathways of all sorts.

Green, green grass

Kermit may have been on to something when he sang about how it’s not easy being green. Finding green is easy enough.

(Grass on the hill. 2006)

(A green day on the Brandywine. 2007)

Thoughts of home

(Kitchen window. July 2007)

Where we love is home — home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oddities

(Mennonite woman on a cell phone. July 2007)

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp

Thinking out loud

(A robin at sunset. July 2007)

One of my favorite bloggers wrote a thought-provoking post that had me stopping and wandering (pardon the use of your title, Amuirin). I started writing this up shortly after reading Amuirin’s post. I ended up putting it on hold because I wasn’t sure where I was going with it. I’m still not sure. Just rambling, probably.

I have two blogs that I’ll claim publicly. Life in the Bogs is where I write about the everyday stuff. I do the occasional review of restaurants, bars, beers (because I’m a brewster which is the only feminine version of the title I like because brewmistress sounds so whips, masks, leather, and chain-like), concerts, venues, and books, but I don’t believe reviews are my forte. Or if they are, someone else hasn’t come along and offered me a job in that field so I do them for my own pleasure or remembrance. Mostly, it’s where I write for family and friends. People who know me in my so-called real life. I avoid anything too terribly personal or revealing in ways I don’t want to be revealed because I know my sons, my parents, my siblings, friends, and former co-workers read Life in the Bogs. Maybe not regularly, but they’re reading it from time to time. I don’t want to embarrass them or myself with any kind of Big Reveal, especially on a regular basis. It would make for awkward get-togethers.

Bountiful Healing, as I’ve mentioned before, is where I write for me. No, that’s wrong. I wasn’t doing much writing here. It was mostly about setting a tone for my day. I’d come here in the morning, post a photo with a quote, and hope that would bring some peace or comfort or whatever it was I needed into my day by way of cyber-osmosis. I didn’t advertise BH far and wide. I wanted it to be separate from Life in the Bogs because I didn’t want my parents dropping in to see what were for me private thoughts. Oh, I know. They don’t look private. They’re photos and quotes. But for me they were private and I wanted a bit of anonymity even though I knew someone would manage to connect the two blogs eventually.

People did find me, through a variety of connections. That was ok, too. I really hadn’t put much of myself out here, if you know what I mean. People continue to find me, lots of people I don’t know. Visitors are a bonus for me. A very nice bonus in most instances. My visitors have given me things to think about as well as some nice ego-boosts (much appreciated on those days my ego takes a long dive off a high cliff). They’ve also given me places to visit, enjoy, and learn by having blogs of their own that I can indulge in.

Still and all, I’m careful about putting a lot of myself out there for all to see. Or at least in putting it all out there at once, doling out small bits and pieces of myself each time I write a post rather than rely on the photos and quotes.

BH, as I mentioned above, was about intention when I started it. Anyone reading for a while knows that I was in a lot of pain in the beginning days of Bountiful Healing. My days were about popping pain killers and muscle relaxers in order to take enough of the edge off the pain to allow me to think beyond taking my own life just to relieve the pain. There were no comfortable positions in life for me at that time. I couldn’t stand, sit, lie down, hang upside down, turn sideways, stand on my head, or in any other way find myself comfortable, much less pain-free.

Months of living that way wears a person down.

So I started a blog at a place other than WordPress that had a name other than Bountiful Healing. The idea behind it was to get my head together because I believed that if I got my head together, my body would follow. As it turns out, this was true. But not without a lot of hard work.

From that blog with the other name at the other place, Bountiful Healing evolved.

I still have aches and pains. I suspect that’s not going to change much with age. I’m off the pain meds except for the occasional aspirin or ibuprofen. I keep active, I try to follow the healthy living plan I set up for myself (through trial, error, and research) and I continue to come here to set my intention for the day. I come here to start my day in peace, contemplation, or if I need it, an attitude adjustment.

That’s what Bountiful Healing is for me. Time changes things and may well change this blog and my intentions. But for now, it’s all about intention and attitude.

Intentions, processes, and attitudes won’t change things by themselves, but they do help start my day with good energy, for lack of a better way to put it.

Can’t ask for much more than that.

Working at it

Delicate things

(Damselfly visiting the Tyler Arboretum. July 2007)

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I’ve been thinking a lot about delicate things lately. I’m in self-improvement/-reflection modes, something that is seasonal with me. As the harvests begin to come in, I take a look at the seeds I planted in the early spring to see how well they’ve grown. Or not grown, as the case may be.

Some things have grown quite well, blossoming and blooming, coming to fruition. Others were either stunted due to lack of care or never made it past the planting stage. And then there are the weeds, old habits creeping back to clutter up my garden. A few of those are balanced out by the unexpected flowering of something I thought I’d forgotten or given up on.

I often forget that the things I learned when I quit smoking can be applied to pretty much every self-improvement project. The most important of those lessons was to nurture and nourish my quit on a daily basis so it could and would continue to grow and strengthen. Even more than six years later, I still wake up every morning and say to myself, “Just for today, I will not smoke.”

It was a delicate thing, my smoking quit, especially in the beginning stages. It’s still a delicate thing because it would be so easy to decide on a lark to have just one cigarette to see if it still tastes and feels good. I get the occasional cravings and cigarette hauntings. The ghosts of cigarettes past hang more in my dreams than in my waking mind these days, but they’re still there.

Of course I know I can’t have just one cigarette. Or even one puff of one cigarette. No need to remind me of that. I mention this because I know someone out there might want to remind me. I don’t have anyone in particular in mind. It’s something that happens whenever I mention cravings or thoughts of indulging in just one cigarette.

Recent reminders of lessons learned fall under the category of unexpected flowerings, beautiful blooms that suddenly popped up where I’d forgotten I’d planted something.

The seeds of those serendipitous blooms will come in handy in the future, as I get ready for my autumn and winter plantings.

Back to the Peace Garden

(Birmingham Meeting House grounds)

(Birmingham-Lafayette Cemetery)

I’m one of those odd people who enjoys spending time in cemeteries. Graveyards are always peaceful and have some of the best trees, trees that have been around for years and years and years.

They are also very human places to be, in the way in which we bury, memorialize, and honor our dead.

The Quakers, in keeping with their ideas of simplicity, have plain tombstones, very low to the ground. They weren’t permitted to inscribe the stones until 1842 because it was considered too worldly.

I’m not really going anywhere with this. It’s just one of those things I learned while we were out and about exploring the battlefield.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman

Moving to the dark side

(Tonight’s sunset)

So, yeah, I dunno. But look at that cloud stretching across the sky like a dragon!

It looks vastly different around here. Vastly. Different. Before you know it, I’ll be spelling like my friend on the other side of the pond, adding unnecessary U’s and stuff.

Sorry. Bit of an inside joke and I’m not sure the insider has time to visit lately so this joke may fall flat or bounce around the universe for a while before it’s discovered, greeted, and laughed at by the intended recipient. She’s vastly busy with really cool and amazing things. She’s the mother of three small children. I don’t limit my idea of cool and amazing things to the raising of children, but I do highly admire people who take on that much responsibility and do a good job of it.

The thing is, I’m transitioning. Going home again. I’m very happy about that. I’ve missed my home. I’ve missed the land on which we became caretakers of a very tiny portion of the earth. I’ve missed the house we earned so much sweat-equity in having bought it as a fixer-upper. Good price. Tons of work. It took us six months of work before we could move in. Not because we’re snobs, but because it wasn’t habitable without the work.

I marvel sometimes at the fact that we actually bought that house after several visits where we waffled back and forth. We loved the land, the view, the potential of the house. We hated the stink of the house, the mess, the way things hadn’t been cared for during its decades as a rental. But underneath the stink and the mess, the house had good bones. We knew that with our first visit. Like most people, we didn’t go with our first gut instinct. We had to think about it for a while, in the meantime almost losing it to another offer on the place.

Ultimately things worked out as destined if one believes in destiny (and I can’t say for sure I do, but I don’t rule it out either). We ended up where we should be. It’s home. Home. The place we envisioned for over 30 years of marriage. Somehow or another, we found our way to this place called Home.

Cool beans.

I never thought it would be in Ohio. But there you go.

All this rambling has nothing whatsoever to do with the changes here at my blog.

Or does it?

I don’t know. Cos, you see, sometimes transitioning involves a death before one makes it to the rebirth.

In two weeks we leave the place I’ve been referring to as Sabbaticalville. We’ve spent eight months in this tiny little apartment with the great sunsets, the coldness of winter due to a poor heating system, the heat of summer due to a lack of air conditioning, and the noise of being right smack in the heart of things which includes traffic noise (oh, those LOUD motorcycles!) and the parade of drunks when the bars close at 2:00am. Lest I be accused of being a cranky old lady, I don’t mind the parade of drunks in the least. They’re entertaining. I do mind those damn motorcycles and I think I’ll be throwing water balloons out the window at them the last few days we’re here.

(Never let it be said I’m prejudiced against motorcycles. I used to ride/drive a motorcycle. What I can’t stand is the obnoxiously loud mufflers, designed to be obnoxiously loud.)

We’ve had a lot of fun here. Best of all, we’ve had the chance to get to know our families once again. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my siblings and my parents on a whole new level. Once a month visits aren’t nearly enough and I’m going to miss them when we move back to the Bogs. My mother stated it best when she hugged me on the way out after our second or third monthly visit and said, “It’s like I have my oldest child back.”

I’ve been gone for a long time. Over 30 years. That’s not to say there haven’t been visits, but they were never this frequent and they got fewer and further between with the raising of children, the working of jobs, and the living of life.

So, anyhow. I dunno.

I was getting annoyed with the theme I was using. Most of my photos were being cropped on the right side by that particular theme, and being fairly new to photography (especially digital photography) and posting photographs, I didn’t know how to fix them. Trial and error wasn’t satisfying me. In fact trial and error was once again reminding me that not everything can be learned that way. Well, okay, sure. Most of humankind’s learning has been done that way so that statement isn’t true at all. But trial and error takes a lot of time and frustration. I’ve done a lot of self-teaching since I dropped out of high school when I was 16. I’m old enough now to know better, to learn from others. To RTFM.

(Never let it be said that I’m a slacker. I dropped out, took the GED test a few months later, passed the GED, and started college in what would have been my junior year of high school. High school sucked. Never let there be any doubts about that. I didn’t mange to finish college, but it might happen some day.)

I’m giving this theme a try, for better or worse. Time will tell. I like that my photographs aren’t clipped on the right side. I like that they stand out a little more with the darker background. I’m slightly lazy enough to like that of all the themes I tried on today, this one didn’t require major alterations. It fits around the bulky spots without looking like I tried to fit a fat sausage into a small casing.

Maybe it will suit me. Maybe it won’t.

We’ll see.

It’s still looks weird to me, but I kind of like it.

I’m not at all sure right now. I welcome all input and suggestions, especially as far as posting the photographs. I might end up where I’m at right now anyhow, but advice is always appreciated when I ask for it.

(In case you don’t believe me about the photos, go back and look. I think having the inch or so on the right side makes a big difference.)

Sweet corn bliss

(In the cornfield. Photo by Robin. July 2007)

Is there anything better than the first bite of the first ear of sweet corn of the summer? I suppose there could be, but right now I’m hard pressed to name it.

The corn here is so sweet it needs nothing (although it does enhance the butter and salt flavors if one should decide to butter and salt their corn).

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

~ Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels