Musings on Life and Beauty Archives

Leaning into Gratitude

November 5, 2024 jennifer Musings on Life and Beauty, Thanksgiving, Uncategorized

It feels like anxiety and stress levels are running a little high for many of us, and for a myriad of reasons. Autumn blew in and suddenly today feels like winter, complete with tiny snowflakes swirling in the biting wind. Darkness settles over the day early, making me want to curl up with a book. Yet there is much to do; my calendar is full, so many people around me are struggling, and all of us watch the news in concern. What to do? I’m leaning into gratitude as a powerful tool for staying positive in tricky times.

I found a lovely printable gratitude tree recently which I intended to use at Thanksgiving. Today I changed my mind and printed a couple dozen copies. I think it’s time to use them now, so I’ll be sharing them with family and friends this week. The tree has 16 banners for writing down the blessings we’re grateful for. It also says “Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.” I agree. For many years I have loved the quote from G.K. Chesterton, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

So today, instead of worrying, here are just a few things filling me with wonder.

The last of my summer dahlias, cut and on the kitchen table.

One lone bells of Ireland plant in my flowerbed. I’ve tried to grow these for years with no success. Imagine my surprise and delight when a single seed grew this time! I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.

The sound of geese honking overhead, causing me to look up as they fly in formation across the pink-tinged sky at sunset. Against the backdrop of nearby mountains, it’s magical.

Watching one of my children light up with a new-to-them insight, and savoring the smile that comes with it. Small miracles like these remind me it’s amazing that we can keep learning.

Hot pink streaks on the back of fading flower petals. It’s the little things!

Cooking dinner for my family with food we grew in the garden, while savoring the colors, smells, and textures of fresh vegetables.

Slow stitching in the evenings, making steady progress on my applique project.

Studying the shapes and forms around me, because they are an endless source of inspiration and beauty.

What does leaning into gratitude look like for you? Savoring simple joys is, undoubtedly, a healthy practice. So lean a little more. Look for the good. Live in the gain. Do it emphatically, no matter what’s wrong out in the world. We’re going to make it!

My Bleeding Hearts

May 18, 2024 jennifer Musings on Life and Beauty

I remember it well, the wondering if I would ever feel happy again. Ever smile a genuine smile. Wondering if the heartbreak that threatened to pull me apart would ever quiet to a distant ache.

It was May. So busy and so awful. I carried a pain that made me pace circles around my house unless there was something needing immediate attention. My only coherent thoughts came in prayer. I bought a number 7 to put on my kitchen counter, a reminder of the people who needed me to hold it together somehow.

On a walk to visit a neighbor, I noticed bleeding hearts in bloom. I’ve always loved them, but this was different. It felt like the only thing in the world that might understand me. This achingly beautiful, heart shaped flower with a teardrop falling from it. It was everything I couldn’t say aloud. So I drove to the local nursery, found one, bought it… and nurtured it carefully all summer in it’s pot.

At the end of the season, too overwhelmed to find a proper spot for it but too attached to get rid of it, I dug a hole in the first spot I thought of in my yard. A spot where I’d tried other perennials over the years. A spot where NOTHING had ever grown back before. That’s why it was bare. Not a good spot of dirt, apparently. But I planted it anyway because it was all I could manage that day and I couldn’t bear to throw it away.

Imagine my surprise the following spring when it came back.

And every year since.

It stops me in my tracks every time: it’s so much more than bleeding hearts. It’s my heartbreak, growing in the worst soil, and thriving.

Today, years later, I sit near them just to be there, to look and admire, and remember. I remember those days, days made harder by knowing we were only at the beginning of a road I desperately wanted to avoid. And it has been long and hard, sometimes excruciatingly so. I don’t know where the road ends, or if it ever will during my life. I know so much more, and so much less, than I did then. What a journey!

Today, here is what I know: God knows us and is aware of us. He gives us bad soil sometimes, and it’s up to us to plant what we’ve got and press forward. To show up and keep moving and do our best to love. Even if we’re doing it with broken, bleeding hearts. And somehow, He will find a way to let us know He’s still there. Somehow the sharp pain settles to a dull ache, and the day eventually comes that we smile and laugh for real.

And the bleeding hearts come back again: stronger, more beautiful. A witness.

I’ll never take it for granted. Truly, all things testify of Him.

Birthday Hopes

July 18, 2023 jennifer Musings on Life and Beauty

I have been thinking about life as a chapter book, with plot twists and secondary stories, and chapters. Some chapters we can predict, and others take us to places we never imagined. I started a new chapter this week, one that hinges on a number and a milestone birthday. My daily life hasn’t changed, but my thoughts have. At first I dreaded it, then accepted it, and now I’m going to embrace it. Today, I have a few birthday hopes to record.

Most of my dread stemmed from the feeling that I hadn’t accomplished what I expected. But along with that, however, were challenges that forced growth in other, unanticipated areas. That story brought me to my knees and to God, changed me at the core, and still tutors me. In short, my forties were, hands down, the hardest decade of my life so far. Motherhood has been both my undoing and my making, and the theme continues at a higher crescendo now than ever before. So of course it wasn’t what I expected. I’m sure my fifties won’t be, either. But here I am, ready to make it the best 10 years of my life.

My birthday hopes:

Accept full responsibility for my thoughts and feelings, and learn to create the life experience I wish to have by controlling those two things.
More fully translate my faith in Jesus Christ into moments of tension, dismay, fear, weakness, doubt, disappointment, and uncertainty. Let the perfect plan and the perfect sacrifice of my Savior inform all my responses to life’s challenges.
Tell my story in artful ways that feed my soul. I have missed working on projects like She Listened , Living a Prayer , and Through Tears She Saw More Clearly . My heart needs more of this, so I will create time for it AND encourage others to do the same.
Be a better resource, a better helper. In this space, that means contribute more that others can use. Watch for the first of quarterly free patterns coming this fall.
Write, write, write. Work on family history projects I’m passionate about. Find a way to record all the thoughts swirling around in my head and heart and put them here.
Accentuate the positive. Assume the best about people. Look for the good.
Cultivate a daily pattern of living that is in harmony with my life’s mission and which constantly moves me toward the future I envision.

There was a time, nearly ten years ago, when I didn’t know if I would ever feel truly happy again. In that season I bought a small bleeding heart plant from a local nursery because the sight of it resonated with my pain. At the end of the summer, I planted it in the only available spot I had – a “bit of earth” where nothing else had ever come back a second year. Not promising. And yet, the next spring, it was back. It’s been back every year since, and is now a large and thriving part of that flowerbed. This spring it was heavy laden with perfect little hearts, and I was overcome. I paused to observe it every day, knowing it was a quiet, perfect gift from a God who loves me.

On Sunday I shared my birthday with two of my daughters. One of them returned home at the end of June from serving an 18 month full-time mission in Guam – half a world away! Another daughter is preparing to do the same thing in upstate New York, beginning in August. My gift was hearing them share thoughts and feelings, seeing evidence of the amazing women they’ve become. I’ll never forget it. My heart was full of life, love, happiness, in spite of the dark and hard things we worry about. It was a day that reminds me to look forward in faith no matter how hard a moment, or day or month or year, may be.

So I’m taking all these memories, challenges, and perfect moments with me. They make me who I am. And I’m going to use them to become more ME, the girl I’m meant to be, to live well, serve fully, and carry my birthday hopes into the future. Most of all, I want to be an encourager. I want to bless lives.

Thanks for coming along!