Is there anything more optimistic and hopeful than planting a garden? 

This weekend, my husband and I prepared our largest garden bed for fall planting. We had to dig out the old soil, pull up the tree roots creeping into the bed, put down cardboard to slow their return, and refill the bed with a mixture of the old soil and a good helping of fresh soil from our compost heap. It was hot, drippy work, but we were left with a beautiful, ready-to-be-planted bed.

That’s what we’re hoping for, along with a few other Florida cold season crops.

There are many garden-to-life metaphors/parallels/life lessons, such as: in gardening as in life you have to get your hands dirty if you want things to grow, or gardening and life both have “seasons,” and so on. One of my favorite lessons, however, is that beautiful things can come from unprepossessing beginnings. Tiny, dead-looking seeds produce luscious tomatoes, beautiful blooms, crunchy carrots, and aromatic herbs. This makes me feel hopeful that when I feel parched and withered, with the right care and nurturing I can produce something beautiful and delicious, too. Even though each seed contains new life, it will not sprout unless its growing conditions are met. The spark of creativity and life within me must be nurtured as well. All I need to do is look around me for the nurturing I need to grow and bloom. And, sometimes the hardest part, allow myself that nurturing, whether it is a delicious meal, an afternoon nap, a coffee date with a friend, or half an hour spent daydreaming and listening to music.

I’ve been feeling tired, parched, and withered lately. While I have been allowing myself time for dormancy, for just chillin’, I’m ready to leave this stage and move on to the next. My favorite season—fall—is coming and with it, the cooler, drier air that always gives me an energy lift. I want to feel that spark of creative energy wake up inside me, and I want to grow and bloom the way our garden will (I hope). While I’m waiting, I’m going to pay careful attention to my growing conditions.

Between rain and humidity this week, I’ve spent most of my waking hours inside. (And all of my sleeping hours, come to think of it.) I haven’t spent all my time online, but perhaps a bit more than usual. I plan to make up for that IF we ever have a fall. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to explore this collection of links I found interesting, inspiring or just plain fun.

Don’t fall into the comparison trap.

Spoken.ly is a website that allows you to make your own illustrated inspirational quotes for social media. I made the image that illustrates this blog post there, and I can’t wait to play around with it some more.

Have you heard of StoryCorps?  It’s mission is “to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives.” It’s a national independent nonprofit organization that has collected and archived more than 50,000 interview with more than 90,000 participants. Stories are recorded on a CD and preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and can be heard on your local NPR radio station, or on their own Listen pages.  StoryCorps has also compiled several books from the stories.

Wise words about mistakes from my friend Laure Ferlita.

Check out these 50 simple ways to celebrate life. My favorites: number nine, number 13, number 22 and number 50!

I love manatees, and this site combines their cuteness with encouragement. Manatees for everyone!

This isn’t new, but it made me smile. Practice your insanity!

Happy Friday!

“We do ourselves a great disservice by judging where we are in comparison to some final destination. This is one of the pains of aspiring to become something: the stage of development we are in is always seen against the imagined landscape of what we are striving for. So where we are—though closer all the time—is never quite enough.

“The simple rose, at each moment of its slow blossoming, is as open as it can be. The same is true of our lives. In each stage of our unfolding, we are as stretched as possible. For the human heart is quite slow to blossom, and is only seen as lacking when compared to the imagined lover or father or mother we’d like to become.

“It helps to see ourselves as flowers. If a flower were to push itself to open faster, which it can’t, it would tear. Yet we humans can and often do push ourselves. Often we tear in places no one can see. When we push ourselves to unfold faster or more deeply than is natural, we thwart ourselves. For nature takes time, and most of our problems of will stem from impatience.” 

—Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Well, no.

There’s a time for pushing and learning and stepping outside comfort zones, and there’s also a time for chilling out, for hanging together with no agenda. For me, that time is late summer. I’m exhausted from nearly four months of unrelenting heat and humidity and all I really want to do is rest. And not sweat.

Surely Tank must appreciate a break as well. I make sure he maintains a certain level of respect and manners, but he’s a good guy and a mature horse. He does that almost automatically. I think he enjoys his work overall, but even when you enjoy it, isn’t it nice to have a break?

So, yes, this is our fallow time. The time we spend doing nothing, or perhaps having a water bath from the hose. The time for me to listen to the cicadas, watch the dragonflies, smell hot horse. The time for him to search for the most succulent grassy patches. No, I won’t feel guilty about this after all. There will be plenty of time for games and longeing, for practicing our jumping or lead changes, when it’s cooler and we both have more energy. For now, we’ll roam the property looking for shady spots to graze, walk up and down the dirt road looking at the cows, slurp down carrots and bananas, and chill (as much as we can when it’s 95 degrees).

It’s only been a couple of weeks since my last Happy Little Things post, so instead of posting about one thing at length, today I’m going to share five mostly little things that are giving me hits of happiness right now. After all, life is so much better when we stop and enjoy the simple pleasures. 

1. Fresh flowers. I love fresh flowers but don’t often spend the money for them. This week, though, for three dollars and change I brought home these gorgeous hydrangeas:

They should last at least a week, if I can keep Prudy out of them!

2. Doctor Who. I know, I know, Doctor Who has been around a lo-o-o-ng time, but it’s only been this summer that my husband and I have made his acquaintance when we started watching the reboot of the series that started with the Ninth Doctor. We’re about to move on to the Eleventh Doctor (oh, how I will miss you, David Tennant). We’ve been borrowing DVDs from the library and have quite a few seasons to go before we catch up to the current season. Which is a good thing, because we don’t get BBC America and we won’t be able to watch the current Doctor until he comes out on DVD. (If you want to know why there are so many Doctors, you’ll just have to watch the show. It’s “timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly stuff”…

3. Pumpkin Spice Lattes at Starbucks. I used the last of a gift card to buy one this morning. Yummy.

4. Freegal Music. This awesome service, accessed through my library system, lets me download three free songs every week. I’ve significantly expanded my music library, three songs at a time. You library may also offer this, so check it out at Freegal.com.

5. Airplane reservations for California! In less than a month, I’ll be visiting my family—I can’t wait. (Better start choosing books to take with me, right Danielle?)