Category: Musings on Life and Beauty

My children are all off to school for the last day of the 2015-16 school year.  I hear lawnmowers and birdsong through my open windows, and this morning I took a tour of my peonies to check on their progress.  They are so beautiful at every stage.

I wrote a few weeks ago that spring, more than the other seasons, reminds me to slow down and live in the moment.  Last night as our family played games together in the backyard, I looked around and felt so content.  We were together, with no urgent to-do list breathing down our necks.  It felt SO good.  It’s been interesting to watch the end of year stress begin to lift and dissipate, allowing for some unscheduled naps and creative play.  It makes me happy.  I am so ready for this.

In my mind, they’re walking through the door today to stay.  Mine for the summer.  Except it really isn’t the case anymore.  There will be the flurry of end-of-year parties, followed closely by soccer tryouts and the ongoing soccer and football practices that we’ve planned the summer around.  My teenagers will spend much of their time elsewhere with friends, we’ll be off to reunions and vacations and hosting guests when they’re in town.  We have a surgery scheduled.  Birthdays, holidays, tournaments, and the day to day work of ten people in the house.  It’s a different brand of busy, and I want to slow it down.

I want to bottle my six year old in all her first grade, precious stage.  I want her voice to stay just as it is, especially when she reads to me.  I want to hear my seventeen year old daughter’s daily reports on life forever.  I want to memorize all of them as they are right now.  Oh, we mothers have so much to keep and ponder in our hearts!  I want this summer to nourish and bless each of them in their development.  Today it feels like we have an endless supply of golden days stretching out in front of us, but really it will be gone as fast as my lilacs and peonies.

Today I have a growing prayer in my heart for wisdom, strength, and enthusiasm to be the mother they deserve, to navigate the days and weeks purposefully, and especially to slow down and enjoy it.  To smell ALL the flowers.  Read good books.  Play in the sun.  Get enough sleep.  Be happy.  Love.

Happy summer to all of us.

Do you see it?

I didn’t, at first.  It looked like an overgrown mess, one that had long since destroyed any beauty planted beneath it.


I love gardening.  When I get started, I have a hard time stopping.  I enjoy it.  But I made the mistake of planning my flowerbeds for a stage in life that is very different from the one I’m living.  Spring and Fall are spent driving and watching athletic events, not working in my yard.  That, and it seems there are things I don’t understand about gardening that others do, and so I have some problems that don’t seem to happen in nearby yards.

But still, it’s mine, and when I planted it, it was full of things that I picked because they’re “me.”  And I have a vision of what I hope it will become someday.  It’s my own little experiment, and so I suppose it’s not shocking that I make mistakes and have a lot to fix and learn from.

These little grape hyacinth were like finding a jewel in the weeds.  I would not have thought they’d made it, but there they were, pretty as ever, stems longer than normal so they could rise above my neglect.


I began weeding around them with more caution than I’d had a moment earlier.

People are like that, too.  Things can get out of balance in our lives through neglect.  We end up with weeds we should have rooted out before they became huge stumbling blocks.  Right alongside them may be good things, things we love, qualities we worked for, that have been allowed to run a little wild, overtaking other things and setting our personalities or daily habits off-balance.  Just like these dandelions and my overgrown honeysuckle.

It’s tempting to pass judgment on the whole thing.  To want to aggressively rip everything out.  To forget that beauty, potential, and even good roots are still hiding beneath the mess.

We just need eyes to see.  Faith to believe.  To believe both in the “project” and in the Master Gardener. At first the lesson was about someone else that I love.  All of a sudden I was that little garden plot, grateful that my Savior sees those tiny purple flowers in me, even beneath all the baggage piled on top.

So tread softly.  With people.  With flowers.  With yourself.

Something good, something worth saving is hiding down in there.

We must not give up.

We came home to Spring.  All of Utah is changed.  Where there was rain and snow flurries, there are now blossom-covered trees, daffodils, tulips, and tiny green leaves.  The mountains look more magnificent than usual.  The clouds are more breathtaking.  I wonder how I could have forgotten that I live in such a beautiful place.


And then I wonder, is it me?

I have changed.  I feel different inside.  Parts of me have healed, others are now deeper, still others softer.  In three days I laughed more than I’ve laughed in a year.  I saw new things, spent time in new places, and they influenced me.  I spent time in the woods, time by the sea.  I visited people I haven’t seen in years.  I held still.  I read a book.  I took a break from the cares of my everyday life.  The world looks a little different.


As I wandered around my yard, it occurred to me that everyone around me is different too.  Like ocean waves that come and go from the same beach without pause, leaving it the same in identity and yet so different in detail, life does that to us.  I thought of these people I care about, how we’ve all collected another two weeks of stories, how we’re all still “us” but a newer version of us.  I felt a growing sense of awe and curiousity about the process, about my friends.  What a grand thing we are witnessing in our relationships, if we can see it!  I felt amazed that I am lucky enough to know them, hope that I can be the kind of friend who notices, supports, and nurtures the change in others.  Of course we all have things we would instantly dispose of, but the good?  Oh, how I want to grasp the good and somehow keep it!

I want to stay changed, just like I want to keep spring.  I’m afraid that before I know what’s happened, I’ll be back in the rut of my worries, schedules, and deadlines, and it will blind me to the wonder of it all.  I desperately want to avoid it.


Spring, more than any other time of year, reminds me to live in the moment.  We ate dinner outside on Sunday.  I set a goal spend 10 minutes of every day “on vacation.”  So far those daily minutes have been spent sitting beneath my cherry tree, admiring the blossoms, listening to the humming of the bees as they flit from flower to flower, inhaling the scent.  I’ve watched the sky through the branches, closed my eyes and breathed deeply.  I’ve read a little.  And started to dream.

It feels good.