The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.
Abraham Maslow
Tags: Quoting
Hello, and Happy day before Thanksgiving for my fellow celebrants! Are you knee deep in preparations? After a bit of blog work, I am heading to the kitchen to make pie crusts, definitely pecan, maybe a wee pumpkin, too.
It is a snowy day, the fifth in the past few weeks, which is a bit excessive for November, just sayin’.
We’ve had a lot of activity, with Greg flying to Florida for a week of biz-ness ( I did miss him!), a weekend visit from Jett and his girlfriend Peyton, a sleepover at Michael and Mary’s. All very good things that have kept me occupied.
Let us begin. Firstly, with a most colorful selection of windfall apples from around the neighborhood that were turned into the equally colorful jelly above. It is quite delicious!
I am a slow adopter of technology, and since the library very frequently only has electronic copies of books in my Goodreads queue, we resorted to buying a tablet for such reading adventures. One day, while browsig the ridiculously vast collection of media on offer, I stumbled upon the Kitten and the Bear Cookbook, a diverse collection of jellies, jams, and scones. This is their apple jam, which, to my mind, is a beautiful and delectable marriage of jelly and apple butter, made extra special by the addition of apple chunks, sadly not made from windfalls, but store bought. You can’t have everything, at least not all at once, peeps.
That dog is super fly…
This was our first snow, which, like the song, went on and on til the break of dawn! Seriously, we got 24″, the icicles pictured below, and a ridiculously long melt time.
Indulge your imagination in every possible flight.
Jane Austen
Tags: Quoting
One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.
John O’Donohue
Tags: Quoting
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don’t want to look around any more: I don’t need to look around for anything.
Sylvia Plath
Tags: Quoting
