Seedlings in Stone: April 2012

On, In, and Around Mondays: Eating the Simple

They got a $157,000 grant to study dandelions.

But long before this, my mother taught us to eat the greens.

Sometimes we eat the flowers too, tickly as they are, because there's a lovely sweetness inside the tickle. Cut open the stems or leaves, and you've got a free remedy for skin conditions. The roots are said to taste like coffee, and that's where the $157,000 tea is being brewed... from knobbly-looking roots.

How many times have you dug those roots up and tossed them in the compost pile? Every root an astonishing elixir against cancer.

I am reminded again of the power of simple things. Common things. Unexpected things. The sweetness of a sunshine tickle, just outside the door.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

On, In, and Around Mondays: Listen to the Small

Looking out over the lawn, its uneven terrain of purple spikey wild flowers and white violets, I perceive within myself a small ache.

Maybe a loneliness.

I sit very still and listen to it, until it grows large enough to ask for expression. Then I pick up my business journal and begin to write.

The loneliness translates itself, articulates. What I am really wanting is more face-to-face time with my colleagues. But my work doesn't work that way. It's all conducted through keyboard characters and finger taps, just as I am communicating with you now.

I daydream about working in an entrepreneurial space—a rented space where people from disparate businesses show up for the day. I think Claire Burge told me something about that, and how she met so many people.

But my life is not organized to allow for such a solution just now. I think back to words I wrote a few years ago, "I am going nowhere."

I keep letting the loneliness scrawl itself onto the lined paper. And suddenly the answer seems so clear. How could I have missed it?

Convergence. That's what I need once again. A way to take this ache and find its solution just inside the door.

When does the idea come? One moment it is just an ache. The next it is a plan to do something unusual along with my girls. Face-to-face, yes. But also virtual, with those colleagues of mine I never see.

I will teach the girls about business. I will not do it alone.

Sometimes it is good to ache.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Making Your Way

What if there is something you need to be born to today?

How will you make your way?

One little tap at a time in a determined direction.

And suddenly, seemingly overnight, everything will feel open and filled with possibility.

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My favorite form of self-reflective tapping is an occasional return to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. It might not be for you. But it might be.

Labels: change, goals, personal growth

On, In, and Around Mondays: What Makes Your Writing Day?

I noticed it one day.

How I drink differently from a teacup than I drink from a mug.

Oh, that doesn't mean I eschew mugs. I've got my days when I want to steep tea and drink it down, all in one convenient place.

But I noticed it.

Something about the tilt, the edge, the thin place that left me sipping instead of gulping.

I am a writer. My writing, it seems, is better when I've sipped my day.

I wonder, thinking on my teacup versus my mug, what the surprising mechanisms might be that send me one direction versus another. It could be very small things. As small as the edge of my cup.

It could be whether I sit on the porch instead of at the counter.

On the porch, I hear the world speaking itself, quietly, to me. How hard would it really be to change where I sit?

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: On in and Around Mondays, writing

On, In, and Around Mondays: Reclaiming the Practice of Cloud-Reading

"How *do* you do it?" she emailed, with a little wink.

My friend was referring to a photo of one thing that suggested the shape of another.

I loved her question, because it made me ask... how can this happen more, and purposefully?

Thinking back on my camera travels for the week, I answered her, "Maybe we can reclaim that childhood practice of reading the clouds."

You remember that, don't you? How you used to lie on your back and find a dragon; a dog eating an ice cream cone; or the ice cream cone alone, melting across the blue?

I realize I am actively doing this with my lens. Rather than simply snapping a "nice picture," I'm spending time with the subject and looking for shapes within shapes. A Georgia O'Keefe practice, I suppose. Suggestive, yes. And, I believe, loving.

This practice can be for the writer too. It helps develop a way of seeing. And before we know it, we aren't just reading the clouds, we're writing the dragon-clouds too.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: On in and Around Mondays, photography, writing