The Friday Five - Truth, Beauty and Goodness for your weekend

This wild and precious life; Becoming a Masterpiece & a no stress creative activity; mountain towns and saving a beetle; thought-provoking & beautiful quotes; shared thoughts on quitting social media

When the air conditioning goes out on the second floor of your home, you live on the first floor. And make forts. Because, life is too short to not make forts.

A personal note

Happy Friday! I love this time of reflection, thinking back over the last 7 days. I’m always surprised and often delighted when I do. While reflecting, I’m reminded of a quote by Blaise Pascal that I think about often, which I’ll share fully below among the Friday five,

“Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Our weeks consist of the priorities. This week we had in person therapy appointments, zoom family therapy sessions, work, and my husband and I volunteered for vacation bible school this week.

Then, there are the experiences we made time for: tie dying t-shirts, organizing our shells from our recent beach trip and setting out our nature journaling items, creating art in the art studio when it was too hot to be outside, playing baseball, and harvesting the blackberries from our bushes.

But we can’t forget the unexpected, unplanned things that happen in a week, like: our microwave blew up, our air conditioner on the upper floor went out causing us to camp out on the first floor, on a dog walk, I discovered a new bird I’d never heard before when I stopped to use my Merlin sound ID app to record the meowing call it made and ultimately ID a catbird, and during a quick trip to the grocery store where my husband and I split up and took a boy each in efforts to make the trip actually quick, both groups walked by the most fragrant peaches we’d ever smelled at different times, and met at the check out line with way too many peaches. But none of us wanted to put any back. We’ve been living off peaches and blackberries this week. And I’m here for it.

Therapy brought tears and frustration, smiles and breakthroughs. VBS brought joy in so many ways, but especially when our family would dance and sing the theme song we’d learn in the kitchen with with full unbridled joy. Blackberry harvesting brought belly aches I didn’t even know one could get, but in the best possible way. Tie-dying left us with stained hands and clothes but they’re the marks of memories being made. Microwaves blowing up made us toast tortillas on open fires, flipping them with metal tongs, and enjoying fire-roasted flavors we don’t normally get to. Broken air conditioning forced us to bring sheets, blankets and pillows down to the living room where we’ve piled up and watched episodes of The Chosen snuggled up with each other. My husband and I tiptoe in the dark first floor of the house at night, passing the sleeping boys, jumping from spot to spot to avoid the creaky wood floor sounds. We laugh at each other looking like fools. Oh, I can’t forget the forts these extra coverings have inspired (see below). And I cannot describe in words the joy this catbird brought me this week. I mean, an actual bird, meowing! And when it wasn’t meowing, it was chitter chattering the most lovely birdsong nonstop. I was awe-struck. Grateful. Thankful for being alive. In all of it.

This is it folks. This is our one wonderful chance at living. There are things we must do, things we create space for, and things that happen unexpectantly. They all keep us alive. But are we living in the moments of them or are we wishing them away or wishing something else would hurry along, or worse, are we living through them, eyes wide shut, and one day, we realize we’ve missed it all? Even the painful therapy sessions we attended this week that I mention in my article, Becoming a Masterpiece, have a beautiful and meaningful purpose. Aren’t you so grateful that all of it, every ounce of it, is under the sovereignty of a God who loves us more than our hearts and minds can fathom? I want to be alive in the hard, alive in the beauty, and alive in the unexpected - because then I know I am truly living my life, my one wild and precious life.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver

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In case you need to hear this…

You have permission to live your life and not post about it. You don’t even need to take photos of the life or moment you are living. You can simply live it and that’s enough. In fact, that’s wonderful. Don’t underestimate the power and freedom of living your life and not making a public record of it. That’s all.

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1. This week, I wrote from an artist’s perspective on becoming a masterpiece through the beauty and the bewilderment painted on the great big canvas that is our life. I also shared a fun, no stress creative activity using an unconventional canvas.

2. Driving back through the mountains of Asheville, NC last weekend my mind flooded with memories of growing up alongside the mountains. It inspired my poem, Mountain Towns. I’m curious, did you ever play ‘Cows and Graveyards’ (a footnote in my poem) as a child in the backseat of your family’s car?

I also wrote a poem, I did my part for nature, which includes a little Naturalist’s note at the bottom. As a master naturalist, summertime is when everything is alive and buzzing. It’s the best season, IMO, for observing the natural world and it’s an endless muse for writing.

Mountain towns -

Dairy Queen and laundromats.

Generations of families

never leaving

never living anywhere else.

Square little homes and

chain link fences,

stuck in time.

Knee high weeds

growing along the street;

part of the scenery,

beautification

or stagnation?

On Main Street

where they know everyone and where

they sell

boiled peanuts by the pound,

that transient tourists buy and

spit out the shells in brown paper bags.

A man spits on the ground in front of the car repair shop,

dirty white t-shirt,

stained black fingernails.

The rest gather out front,

cigarettes and laughs,

hard faces, brown and wrinkled

from too much sun,

too much drink.

Mama, with her three babies,

one is asleep in the stroller - on its last leg from pushing all of her babies-

two are down to the cone,

white ice cream all over their sticky faces

and shirts.

CVS looks out of place with its

bright gray façade, lit up at night,

a contrast

when everything else has a blue cast

from the mounds of mountains backdrop.

Mountains with cool springs and breezes,

every road has a pretty view.

Are hearts here fond of the mountains that watch over them in their sleep?

Or are those great blue masses like angels, watching but no one notices?

Up and down these mountain roads

runaway trucks have a place to go,

But everyone dies here,

their name engraved in stone

buried beside relatives.

The cemetery is the town’s record keeper,

of generations on that hill,

keeping mountain town secrets, too;

secrets the city folk won’t get

the tourists can’t know

and passing through,

all I can do is stop counting cows, now

I feel a pang -

is it sympathy? nostalgia?

maybe jealousy?

Memories of a simple childhood flood in,

where all my needs were met.

My mountains taught me how to drive,

switchbacks and lower gears,

coasting down, down.

My mountains taught me how to hide,

I can keep those secrets, too.

Yet in my mountains,

all I noticed were the bats flying around the tall poles at the ball field -

the one ball field we’d all played on for generations -

and the mountain laurel, bursting like Fourth of July fireworks;

Not the screeching sound from the chain link fence

when it opened and closed.

Nor the run down car shops

with the tires and rims piled out front.

Roadside weeds made the best bouquets,

and the views,

the ones I missed only when I left those mountains,

take my breath away, now.

Mountain towns,

unchanging,

grit in a flashy, digital world.

We could learn a thing or two

from them -

that all you need is what you have;

people who know you,

and a place to bury your bones,

with a Dairy Queen and a laundromat.

3. Here is the full thought-provoking quote that I mentioned above:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

―Blaise Pascal,Pensées

4. Thoughts on social media, algorithms, quitting and staying

I’ve mentioned a few times now how I’ve been tracking with conversations around the web and here on

Substack

about folks quitting their social media platforms, namely Instagram. I spoke about my relationship with Instagram briefly in my podcast chat about trauma recovery and how for me, while I have been living in and recovering from trauma and PTSD, I have to set super strict boundaries in order to keep myself sane.

I allow myself very little time to be on Instagram, usually enough to post a quick post, scroll for a minute or two (and sincerely hope that what/who shows up in my feed during the few minutes of my allowance are what my heart and soul need or want to see), and get off. I have ZERO interest in playing games for algorithms determining my content’s value who views my posts, so I know that by not playing the game, I will have very few likes. My posts of late seem to reach about 12-20 people total, and I average about 4-8 likes. For some, I know that may be hard to sit with. It was for me a while back.

I used to maintain two Instagram pages and both had a decent amount of followers. I had enough that I pretty consistently had folks reaching out to me to do collaborations or giveaways or other posts that conjured high-volume visibility and likes. It was utterly exhausting to keep my head in the game and be the creative I wanted to be so when trauma reared its ugly head into my life, I had no choice but to step away. And I did. While I was away, I experienced freedom. It took a while to get there, however. There were certainly moments of FOMO and even grief as I had been using my platform to educate others on the medical diagnoses we faced. I felt like Instagram had turned in to a way for me to minister to others who were dealing with something similarly, so I felt like I had left some people hanging when I left. It was also the place where I met some absolutely lovely, truly wonderful people. People who walked alongside our family through heartache and loss and even sent packages to us with gifts of books and toys for our kids when we lost everything from the mold. So yes, it was hard at first, but it was necessary. And out of necessity, came a new-found freedom.

I joined Instagram again recently when I felt I had a little more air in my lungs after being wiped out from trauma. But my goals are different this time around. It’s more a place were I post to keep a visual journal of my art and creativity, and a way to inform those who do follow me that I’m posting new things here. And, as I mentioned, I love seeing posts from those I follow, but sadly, because I need those boundaries for my mental health, I don’t see a lot.

In our podcast chat,

Kris Camealy

mentions, and I’m paraphrasing here, that a positive of Instagram is that it can be a place where those of us, like me, who may be hopping on for a few quick minutes while we’re on a healing journey and respecting those social media boundaries, can collect ‘crumbs of goodness’ by those who are posting not merely to consume followers and get the likes, but to share goodness as an offering. If you are using social media, what are you posting? Will it trigger others, or be soothing, helpful, insightful or beautiful for others?

I do have goals with my Substack, perhaps to sort of take Instagram’s place, but since I am so new to writing, I am still trying to figure it all out. Thank you for bearing with me along the way. I am extremely grateful for you! And, I’ll ask again because I’m learning how important it is to ask: if you are ever blessed by anything I’ve shared, please share it with others. That’s how I’ll be able to reach more folks.

OK, long overdue…here are the conversations that I’ve enjoyed reading lately on these topics:

1. I loved this post by

   Shawn Smucker
   ‘on caring less about platform and more about craft” in, That Thing I Never Should Have Done

2. Drew Brown
   in his article, But what about my followers?, writes about his experience giving up Twitter, and how he hopes to be a generative (vs. corrosive) influence with his writing and not “collect us as followers” but “honor us as humans”. So good.

3. Tsh Oxenreider
   has been very open and willing to share about her experience quitting Instagram and even answered some FAQs for her readers in her post, Leaving Instagram One Year Later

4. Tsh pointed us to one of her readers

   Katie Marquette
   who shared her experience in her post, Why I deleted my social media

5. And lastly, an absolutely lovely nature journaler / artist, Julia Bausenhardt, whom I’ve followed for a long time, and now can only find her through her blog posts that come directly to my email (how convenient), shares her experience on her blog in her post, Why I quit social media

5. OK, there are two quotes this week in my Friday Five because the first one is thought provoking and this one is simply beautiful and relevant to my opening note. Here goes,

“If you could possibly understand how precious and powerful your experience of this one lifetime as yourself is, you wouldn't be trying to go anywhere else.
If you could know the perfection of time and space,
You would slow each moment down
To drain every possible nuance of juice and flavor from it.
When you leave this place, your body and mind and the earth which holds you, you will look back and only wish you had known the immense richness that you hurried through trying to find other better states of being.
But this is the best bite.
Heaven is here.
Nirvana is now.
As soon as you know that for sure
Your life will never be the same again.
In fact, in every way it seeks to get your attention. begs you to awaken to the magic right before your eyes.”

―Jacob Nordby

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Question for Reflection or Journal Prompt:

Do you invest in reflection time each week? Let’s do it right now…

what wonderful things happened in these last seven days? what unexpected things happened? what brought you joy? what was painful? where did you see God? what new thing did you learn? what did you overhear that you want to remember?

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Try this…

Next time you are in an elevator, or standing in a line, or a waiting room, or anytime you are around people you don’t know, try striking up a conversation with them instead of pulling out your phone. You may be surprised at how much and how many people want to talk to others but they don’t often have the opportunity, outside of their own family and work environment.

When we always close ourselves off from others, we are missing opportunities to love, help, serve and learn; four things we should be striving to do well, always.

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Photo by E Vos on Unsplash

Naturalist’s Note: the hoverfly

The other day I observed someone swatting and ultimately killing a hoverfly because they thought it was a mosquito, or some other menacing biting creature. After wild bees, hoverflies are the second-most important pollinator¹, so it’s important to know this beneficial insect when you see one so it’s not mistakenly killed.

Hoverflies are the little flying critters that ‘hover’ close to your face and body. I always tell people they are curious and like to come close to check you out, when in fact, they are trying to land on you to lap up your delicious sweat.

Although they look like wasps and bees, they don’t sting or bite so they are perfectly harmless to people. Their wasp-like appearance is a survival adaptation called Batesian mimicry. Looking like a wasp keeps predators at bay. Nobody wants to mess with a wasp, even other wasps.

One last great benefit of hoverflies, their larvae help control aphid populations in our backyard gardens. The female lays her eggs near an aphid colony and when the eggs hatch, the maggots devour these little tasty treats. So, they keep your plants thriving without needing to use pesticides (ladybugs are also aphid-lovers, too).

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Shots from our wild and precious life this week

Our first batch of sweet and juicy blackberries from our garden. We are new to this house and the previous home owners planted these berries years ago. This was the first year they produced fruit!

Hello, Andrew!

Every time we do this, I forget how messy this process is.

The boys sorting shells. We all find this activity incredibly relaxing.

I ADORE when we set up nature journaling, watercolor and other drawing supplies on the table on the porch in the summer. It keeps the table un-usable for eating, but it invites so many opportunities for strewing and being creative.

Our hydrangeas bloom at different times so at any given time we may have a dying bloom, a fresh vibrant bloom, and an in-between bloom, covering an entire spectrum of lovely colors. All of them sing to me.

This longhorn beetle inspired my poem this week.

This is the creative activity I write about in my article this week, Becoming a Masterpiece.

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1. Resource here