A Contemplative Life

I snapped this photo earlier today. I so LOVE this quilt! This morning feels like a good while ago, what with a deluge of rain falling, causing flooding all over Humboldt County. Highway 101 was even closed near College of the Redwoods, both sides of the freeway inundated with water. We spent an uneventful day, thankfully, although keeping track of a nearby field that kept looking more like a lake. The chickens had some outdoor time, mostly spent under the awning near the coop. They happily dug through gravel, no idea what they found so intriguing, and I'm also glad they can't tell me. Only four eggs today, WHEW! Take a break girls. But all of that wasn't on my mind when I coined today's title. More to matter was peace, grace, love; all those I experienced in great waves very early this morning, wiping my teary face on the top edge of the Cornflower quilt , what I've been snuggling under for the last couple of weeks, wanting a full-size cozy, what with winter knocki...

  Good and evil and Christmas coasters in the making.... And chickens. It's the third week of Advent, which I didn't mention on the last post, over which I then inwardly chided myself, but sometimes not everything lands in an entry. The Bondi Beach shooting had occurred, that didn't get into the last post either. Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered, allegedly by their son. The list of awful incidents seems unending, and yet, a miracle is nearly due. How to slot waiting for the birth of Christ into my daily, and mostly mundane, activities; we're getting three to four eggs a day, Camilla still the star, but then her Barnevelder sisters are pretty cool too, laying eggs a good two months before the average Barnevelder hen. Fussy the Chicken raised HECK yesterday when she emerged from the coop, all her sisters out free ranging. Cluck cluck CLUCK brought me to find Fussy in the run, and it took five minutes of crooning/cajoling her to where her coop-mates were forag...

Advent is a time of waiting, of preparation for the Christmas miracle. Of being mindful of the great gift God presented humanity in the form of a helpless baby destined to die thirty-some years later on a cross. My husband and I appreciate the season of Advent, and this afternoon I arranged four candles on our coffee table. Then it was time to attend to chicken maintenance; I needed to add sand and wood ash to the dustbathing box, change out the waterers both in the coop and run. And then clean out poop. Because even if today is the first Sunday of Advent, those chickens aren't going to do any of those tasks for me. In letting the hens out of the run, I guided them into the garden. A couple wanted to poke around freely, but I had things to do and fortunately the chickens acquiesced. In counting them, I was down one, and saw no one loitering in the run. My hubby headed to the coop to see who was dithering. Observing the hens, I realized Camilla was missing, which seemed odd; she...

  Already it's the last Sunday before Christmas. I could say this year has sped past, but time moves so quickly now that I'm...not so young anymore. And yet, for as quickly as this year is ending, another awaits, the fleeting and permanence of today's title. Much like our lives on this planet, our grasp of what we believe we possess, like our health, things, a claim on a month that is practically over; December roared in on a wave of advertisements and assumptions, as though shopping till we drop is the achievable nirvana once a year. Yet what does Christmas mean? It's still celebrated over two thousand years after Jesus's birth, so it's relevant. It's.... It's late on this Fourth Sunday in Advent, and I'm weary. Tired of ads proclaiming that all matters is sparkly holiday parties and athletes dressed up as Santa saving the day. I'm exhausted from all the commercialization of something sacred. And in a few days, attention will be turned to the en...

  Peace is the theme for this coming week. Peace, peace.... Easy to wish for others, not always easy to claim for myself, mostly because I'm living with one foot in this realm, another beyond the veil, and corporeal human life these days is....difficult. Not on a health-level, not economic. Not in most face-value manners, so outwardly my life is happy. Fulfilling. Yet.... Yet my nation is fraught with BS politicians and billionaires and it makes me wanna puke. Hard to be peaceful when so much shite is stirred up, so much hypocrisy, so much.... I've already swore once, don't need to belabor the massive wrongs awaiting. Why it's hard to be at peace, that corporeal foot feeling stuck in concrete. But what about my other leg, another possibility? Can I take on faith that all will be well, no matter how futile the outlook seems? Can I seek a different render of the future, perhaps many years from now, maybe beyond my presence, or even tomorrow? How bleak must life have seeme...

Many notions rumble through my mind. Like how 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8 C) is pretty damned cold! That was the temperature we felt as we entered the cloud bank, pictured above. Not that it had been warm right before we drove into what was freezing fog, but WOW! Nature and weather are pretty amazing elements, let me say. Thankfully freezing fog was the forecaster's term; there was no fog, only clouds as we headed from Nevada into California on Interstate 395. That icy spate lasted until we turned off Highway 36 for Highway 44, when bright sunshine lifted temps a few degrees, yet the sun's warmth was like stepping into a different realm, for the scenes we encountered on 395 were like an alternate reality. They made me think about a similar scene I wrote in The Hawk , when Lynne and Sam observe an icy vista right before Christmas. Yet I conjured that from my imagination. Driving through it, mile after mile, was wholly something else. December, and Advent, are similar, in how many ...

Fascinating from the back, as though a map to an unknown destination. It was an early start today, half a chapter written, then texting with my youngest daughter and enjoying photos of her sunrise a few hours east of us. I woke to clear, starry skies, but clouds have since moved in, rain forecast for the next few days. Maybe in a few days I'll have completed my novel; it's VERY CLOSE to being done, but I said that in a recent post, The End dangling like a carrot merely an arm's length away. Meanwhile I've been stitching together Cornflower blocks each evening. The photo above was snapped last night, what I see as I sew. MANY papers to remove, but I'll deal with that later, lol. I'm also working on another quilt, hehehe, more about that in a day or two. And the last ones for this year are washed and waiting to be given to my granddaughters on Christmas, which is just a little over a week away! I considered today's title right after reading through the sevente...