Sunday, March 27, 2011

Odd moments of beauty #7 & 8

Spontaneity--staying up until 1:30 a.m. with dear friends and ringing in Jim's birthday. Waking up to the person I love most in the world.

Friday, March 25, 2011

odd moments of beauty #6

Quinn and Logan making molasses cookies on their own AND cleaning up their mess!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

odd moments of beauty #5

A ruby-throat hummingbird drinking nectar from our rosemary blossoms outside our kitchen window.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

odd moment of beauty #4

Taking a post-dinner walk along the river with Jim & boys. Abundant wildlife from ducks to beavers were spotted!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Odd moment(s) of beauty #1

Running on the first day of spring. A trio of daffodils in a field of green. An owl hooting as we ran by.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Always within Never

I am not one for New Year's Resolutions. I don't have a philosophical aversion, it's simply that I try to live my life with integrity so that I don't need to make "major corrections" at the start of each year. That being said, there are still some less than desirable habits that I pick up along the way and an occasional purge is necessary, which leads me to a new challenge I've set for myself.

Being that I tend to over analyze and can get stuck on the myriad possibilities for each decision, I can sometimes become more cynical and skeptic than I know is healthy. I'll sometimes catch myself as I'm barreling down this track, and at times I can switch gears, but there are others where the dark ink of all that is wrong in the world blots out all that is right. Thus my new challenge. I am committed to noticing at least one event/moment/interaction a day that is uplifting and beautiful. Of course, there are many beautiful moments that happen throughout one's day, but it is too easy to overlook them, hence my desire to seek them out and NOTICE. I just finished the book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- which I highly recommend -- and in it there was a line that struck me: "Always within Never." It was part of a passage that I should share because it so succinctly sums up my desire to take notice.

....I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it an always within never....

I'm not going to go through each day assessing and analyzing each event and wonder, "is this the moment I need to notice?" That would completely defeat the purpose. No, I want to this to be organic and natural, I simply want to adjust my thinking and seeing to be able to recognize the odd moments of beauty that grace our lives. I'm going to capture those moments here in this blog so that I make this a habit. The always within never, the odd moments of beauty, the elsewhere, the reason why...