Thursday, May 26, 2011

Inspiration


A friend recently asked if I ever used inspiration boards. I have, but I find I more often use my "commonplace book" for this purpose. A traditional commonplace book was a repository for all sorts of information: favorite poems and book quotes, perhaps a little stillroom knowledge, trivia that caught the writer's fancy. Some commonplace books fall into the stillroom book category, filled with recipes (receipts) for cordials and medicines, garden and harvest information, sketches of herbs and flowers and more. 

My personal commonplace book is a bit of both - filled with book passages that either inspired or challenged me, some current events and political thought, poems, recipes, homeschooling projects, sketches, garden journal entries, preserving logs (and hard-earned tips for "better practices"!), daydreams and ideas for future projects...

Do you keep a commonplace book?

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Over the years, I have written several letters and poems honoring my mother - for her birthdays and for Mothers Day.

Mom has kept them, tucked into a drawer at her bedside to reread when the mood takes her.

They run the gamut from childish scribbles of "Roses are red and violets blue, I couldn't have a mommy more wonderful than you" to the dramatic leaps of adolescent angst and imagination to the "now I understand your sacrifices" sentiments of a young mother to the quieter sentiments of our post-9/11 lives. Today I will once again take pen in hand and honor the woman who gave me life, who raised me with tenderness and sterness as needed, who taught me the values of honesty and integrity and hard work, who lived an example of grace and strength that I emulate in my times of trials.

Happy birthday, mom! I love you!

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Thoughts on Fruitfullness

Flowers signal a promise of fruit...and yet they do not bear fruit unless certain conditions are met. Proper minerals in the soil, light and water must arrive at the right times and in the right amounts, bees or butterflies or other pollenators must be present and working... and even then flowers may fail.

When my son was 3, my sister in law and my best friend were both pregnant with twins. Naturally that led to questions and conversations about how babies are made. I did not want to fob him off with fairytales about storks - but nor did I feel a technical explanation was appropriate to his age. So we left it at "to have a baby, one needs a mommy and a daddy and a miracle from God". Simple and in no way contradicted by later conversations that discussed the more technical aspects of human reproduction.

Even with all our technological advances, the best we can do is plant seeds with high hopes and tend to their needs...we cannot create increase...

So I look over my strawberry blossom with care...and will savor the small miracle when the berries arrive in June :)