Beyond the Garden Gate

Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world. Oscar Wilde I try to infuse my life with beauty and simple pleasures as much as I can.  Like my previous post where I talked about flowers by my kitchen sink add a touch of beauty and bring pleasure to a mundane and sometimes dreaded task. I think the world is just to full of yuck, hate, separation, stress, worries, pain, etc. And our home should be a refuge. A place where we can rest, breathe, find solace. When we are at home our souls should be at rest, or as much as possible, I don't think we'll ever be at rest until we're united with God like St Augustine writes in his confessions  “ You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You". But you get my point. One of the ways I like to infuse my home with beauty and make it comfortable to be in is by trying to always have baked goods for snacks.  Baking is something I find infused with pleasure from the moment I put...

It's one of my all time favorite times of the year... Peony time!  Seriously when I moved to the US and saw for the first time this beautiful, fragrant, feathery, giant, fluffy, soft, ball of pink puff my life has never been the same. I look forward to this time every year specially when I had my flower shop open... I miss it so I might re-open soon But we found out not all Peonies are the same and they all NOT smell the same... yes... normally I like to keep the feathery ones for our house because they are just so fun but the thing is when they are closed it is kind of a guessing game. What will it be? What color? Mixed colors? Hmmmm... By the way, did you know that peonies when closed they are covered in sugar? Yep, they open when the sugar dries or the ants eat it allowing the petals to start to expand. Sometimes for events if they were too closed I'd run them under warm water to wash the sugar off (I have heard of people licking the sugar off and they are edible but don...

Sunday was Mother's Day, oh what a complicated day.  So many women experience an incredible amount of emotions on that one day... the loss of a child, infertility, loss of a mother, oh so many things and triggers that can come up in this one day. My prayers go out to all women on this day, I've known the pain of infertility, of miscarriage, and of not having my own mother on this day. It can also bring up the attack society places on moms. The feeling of not enough, of seing motherhood as a waste of your talents, time, and the saddest one it being a burden.  But it is not, How magnificent it is that as women we get the gift to work hand in hand with God in creating and raising inmortal souls! As a mother your body has at some point held two souls inside of it at one time (or 3 if you had twins!) What a gift! Knowing that and how God gave you those little souls because He thinks you are the best person to raise them, with your shortcomings and flaws, with your gifts, and how we...

I don't know about you but I love the smell of Lilacs. They are a welcomed sight because it's the first signs of Summer. Living in the gray rainy cold Pacific North West the bright blooms and the sweet floral smell are like a little piece of Heaven reminding me dreary winter will not last forever. Although I have made peace with winter and now look forward to all the cozy it brings but more on that another day. This year with all the emotional Rollercoaster I've been in I decided it's better to put my little flower shop on pause until my brain catches up. Yet as most, if not all, people know I cannot live without flowers. I find flowers to be very healing, we are made for beauty and we crave beauty, there is something about the beauty of flowers that speak to our souls. If you don't beleive me get some even if it is at the grocery store and set them where you will see them often and you will see what I mean. Needless to say I may not be arranging flowers...

Oh May... for me, the month of roses... After the craziness of April ending with the loss of my mom in quite an unexpected way, I have found myself not only facing Mother's day this weekend but also getting over the most horrible stomach bug that hit our family in years, it took us all out for almost a week. So, I found myself trying to keep my rose colored sunglasses, to look for the beauty in every day, the wimsical, the lovely. And when I can't find it, I make it my challenge to create it, because life is too short to live in survival mode, blah, and frankly there is so much yuck out in the world now. We need a reprieve, we need beauty, little pockets of whimsy, to be able to take a deep restful mental and emotional breath... it is so needed for our souls. I firmly beleive as humans we were made for beauty, we crave beauty, it speaks to our souls!  So that's what I did this week... when I felt like life was just missery and we were all fiscally and emotionally down I pul...

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks. Dr. Seuss Well, it is safe to say Dr Seuss would be proud of us...  We literally have books in every nook and cranny of our house. Maybe it is understandable given the size of our cute house in which books have no real home of their own. Although, Is it because there is no more space to fit bookcases? Or if we had a bigger place would we run into the same problem?  Hmmm I wonder, I wonder…  given the amount of books we have and the ones that seem to sneak into our house in the middle of the night while no one is looking, it might be a safe assumption that maybe the size of the house is not the issue. Maybe if we had a bigger house it would just mean more books? although I am not quite sure about that theory, seeing that the size of the home and the number of books seem to be in no way correlated to one another.  One thing is safe to say, this situation grew exponentially with the decision to...

As I walked amongst the "plumpy" blackberries (like we like to call them) taking deep breaths of their sweet smell mixed with the recently watered garden dirt. While I filled my mouth with the black honey of summer straight from the sun kissed branches,I watched my little girl happily humming to herself beside me with grandmas colander overflowing and trying to figure out how she could cram just a few more without them rolling off. Just then couldn't help but think of how romance doesn't just die, we let it, oh and how easy that can happen when we are not intentional in finding the beauty and wonder in the simple, monotonous, and humdrum rutine moments in our everyday life that seem meaningless and ordinary but are actually the opposite, those are the moments that we will look back to some day, those are what memories are made of. We are a tad spoiled, I have to admit, by thornless blackberry bushes! What a joy to pick berries without bleeding ...