This made me smile.  Two tiny blossoms, picked by two small hands with grubby fingers.  Together, we placed them in this Lego chalice.  Art at its finest.

The death of David Bowie had me feeling sentimental today.  I turned on some tunes while I made lunch for the kids.    As soon as he heard me blasting “As the World Falls Down” (Labrynth)  Doug entered the kitchen.   That was the song we began our married life with.  First dance as a couple.  


Aww.  


I was so desperately nervous to dance in front of all those people watching.  David Bowie’s music calmed me down.  What were Doug and I thinking?  Two artists, in our 20’s, getting married and dancing to Muppet music?  And the song was called “As the World Falls Down”?  Really?


Here we are, seven kids and a few decades later.  Yes, the World Has Fallen.  I cast aside the sandwiches and lettuce, like a bride tossing her bouquet all over again.  And Doug and I begin to dance.  In the kitchen.  No one is watching, so it’s all good.  


“Ewww!  Time to leave!” one child cries.


“It’s so romantic!” says another, dreamily.  


Small One appears out of nowhere, an Easter basket full of Kleenexes on her arm.  She pulls a tissue out of the basket with great pomp and circumstance, and throws it on the floor at our feet.  Again and again, she rains down Kleenexes around us as we whirled around in front of the dishwasher.  


“I’m your flower girl!”

When she asked me to put on my wedding dress, I just laughed.  Perhaps my arm might fit in the skirt part?   She was thrilled when I suggested it might fit her better, instead.  Oh, the twirling that ensued.  Just Joy.


Thank you for the music, Mr. Bowie.  

It's a lovely world, even though it has fallen down.

Happy New Year!

Are there no flowers of joy in your life today?  
Do not despair.  
The seeds are all around you.  
They may be in the snow for the moment, but when the heat gets turned up, and the fertilizer gets dumped on,
A thousand more flowers will bloom.

Patience...

Here is a small thing that I found in my garden today.  

It doesn’t belong there.  It’s just a weed, winding its way into my garden from the ever-moving, encroaching woods.  There are a million of these things out there.  I rip them out without thinking of anything but the tomatoes I planted, that are ripening somewhere in the forest of weeds.   

“Stop!” one of my kids yelled in dismay.   He had come to keep me company.  “Don’t pull the Elephants!”

“What? What elephants?”  

“Mom! That thing in your hand!  You’re ripping out the beautiful Elephants!”

I stopped and took a closer look.  

“See Mom?  Two big ears, and a trunk?  These are baby elephants!  Don’t pull them out, they’re my favorite.” 

He ran off to play, and I was left, standing in the weeds, thinking. 

Admiring the elephants.

Why hadn’t I seen these before?  How could I miss these magnificent elephants, living right in my front garden?   

Each flower is only about a centimeter across.  They grow on thin vines, tangling all through my garden.  I just dismissed them as weeds, never taking time to look more closely.  But now, I was seeing things through my child’s eyes.  He sees the world differently, more clearly.  His sight is not clouded by experience and utilitarianism.  

He sees only wonder and magnificence.

It’s right here, all around us.  Wonder and Magnificence.  The God who created you and me is an artist who cares, right down to the intricate details.  This tiny, unnoticed elephant flower living in obscurity in my garden is living proof of the Creator’s love and care for us.   Wow.  Kids see things so clearly.  Life is so rich and beautiful when I have someone to help me see it.

I’m going to check for elephants in my living room now…

No headlines, no news today.  
No schedule, no stress. 

Just happy summer peace.  

These moments exist.  Not often, but some rare days are just sunshine and butterflies.  Resting in the Proverbial Pastures...lying down in the restful green.  

I want to hang on to this day for a very long time.  Perhaps in the dead of January, I will need to be reminded that today actually happened.  Even by tonight, I will get caught up in busyness, crankiness and laundry, I will sink into the abyss of endless work…  yikes.

I will forget that there was peace.

So here you go:  Remind me, please, that I sat around in the sunshine today, just waiting for this butterfly to land.  

I did. 

I hope you, too, get a chance to sit in the pastures and just be.  

Peace out.  

Some flowers live in lovely gardens.  They are well-tended, fussed over, and taken care of.  They are often ostentatious and very appreciated.  Everyone notices them.  They are protected and treasured.  Everyone loves them. 

Not these little guys. 
I found these small wildflowers growing in the dark, near a woods, and in weak soil.  They grew all by themselves, with no one to look at them or appreciate their loveliness.

Until now.

Will you just take a moment with me, to notice the wonder of these tiny blossoms?  They are delicate and small.  You could crush them with a boot, and not even notice.  I had to get down on my knees to really see them, to snap a picture.  

They ask nothing of the world.  They only live to seek the sun as it shines, blooming where ever they are planted.  

They are truly lovely.  

If you slow down and get down on your knees, you might find Beauty in your day, too. 
It grows everywhere.

I miss you, Blog Friends!  I hope you are having a wonderful summer vacation!  Life is good out here in the sticks.   

The Mud Pies are made fresh, daily.   In their little bakery that is the front yard, they line up their baked goods on rocks and steps, drying in the summer sun, topping them off with the best blooms from the garden.  This week, however, I turned my back for 15 minutes, and the entire bakery staff and their customers decided to use the pies to make Celtic war paint.  In fifteen minutes, a mighty battle ensued, wherein many kids were plastered in mud.  One child enjoyed this so completely that he covered himself in it.  Head to toe.  Mud.  He was so pleased.  By the time I returned, it was clear that my bathroom was going to be the complete and total loser.  Sadly, the outside water was too cold for me to turn the hose on them, and when they had all cleaned up enough to go home for supper, the bathroom was a wreck.  “Please don’t make me wash!”  the dirtiest child had said, with a smile.  “I want to show my Mom!”  Oh, no, you don’t.  

Watch out for mud pies.  
They make excellent weapons.

Career opportunities abound here.  The laundry pile is climbing half way up to the ceiling, with no signs of stopping.  If the average American washes two loads of laundry per week, (a conservative estimate)  then it is reasonable to assume that I should do sixteen.  Not counting sheets and towels.  Those add up, too.  The dishwasher runs, merrily, three times a day.  It actually doesn’t load itself, though, so good workers are always needed.  And for those career-minded individuals with a “Big Picture” mentality, the heavy traffic around here means the floor is always dirty.  All of it.  From front door to back.  Please send help.  And some Clorox Wipes.

“Success is when your knees are stained green and brown at the end of the day,”  says a local twelve year old.  With that ideology in mind, you might be surprised that so far, only one arm has been broken this summer. But it required surgery, with pins, so that child’s status as a Tag-Playing Superstar is quite secure.  

Did I mention I am working this summer?  Yes, the fridge is empty, unless you want a sandwich.    I have given up grocery shopping entirely to illustrate another (beautiful and amazing) children’s book for Behold Publications.   It is like entering another dimension for me, drawing the Little Flowers saints and virtues.  Very peaceful and gratifying.  And no mud pies anywhere in sight.  

Well, that is the news from the sticks.  

I wish you many days of restful Summer-Vacation sunshine…

Life is good.

This week, I found five unexpected surprises in my yard.  

2.  Bleeding Hearts.  Every year, Dog makes a bed out of this plant, wrecking it entirely.  He starts out by losing his tennis ball nearby, and tears up the earth looking for it.  This plant has always gotten in his way, and become nothing but a sleeping mat for Dog.  And I always get angry.  But not this year.  This year we outsmarted him by enclosing the plant with rocks.  We win!

3.  Poison Ivy.  Yep.  This is what Dog chose to roll about and play in, since he couldn’t reach the Bleeding Hearts.  Dog has had two very soapy baths this week.  He was alternately pleased, unhappy, and confused.  We lose.

4.  I will never go out in the woods again.  This girl wasn’t afraid of my camera in the least.  I am the one who found her, and I am terrified.

5.  Someone planted a garden here, long ago.  It’s only when I am too busy to breathe that I get surprises like this.  When I have no time to weed the garden, when I just let the green little sprouts alone, the strangest and most beautiful surprises pop up.  Sometimes it’s good to be too tired to meddle.  Lovely Things happen all by themselves.  

What is the point of all this rambling, you ask?

I’m getting there.  

Usually I just write about the Love, Joy, and Peace that I find.  

And I do find it!  Even in the strangest places.

That doesn’t mean that other things don’t exist for me.  The proverbial Poison Ivy, black eyes, creepy spiders…everyone has them. 

But we all get to choose what we want to keep in our pockets and memories.  I want to remember the Love.  I want to cherish the smile and contentment of a girl who played hard and won.  I want to treasure Joy in the plant that actually survived the Dog!  I want to remember this blueish flower.  It’s unique and exciting, and I did nothing to create or nurture it.  It needed me to step aside and let it be, in Peace.  I can appreciate that. 

So now you know.  Love, Joy, and Peace are here, right in the middle of everything creepy.  

And you get to choose what you want to hold on to. 

It’s April.  Spring has arrived, at last!  I picture a scene of pastoral promise:  The ground is being tilled…furrows dug, seeds sown.  Gentle rains fall, quenching the thirst of bright green sprouts… I may as well imagine a rainbow up there somewhere.  

Reality check…  

This is Minnesota.   It’s 35 degrees and windy.  

Our gardens are inside where it’s warm.

My friends and neighbors plant their seeds inside, in trays of tidy, parallel lines in April.  They light them up with hanging fluorescent “grow” lights.  They water them each morning, so by May, the little sprouts will poke their noses out of the soil.  In June they will be transplanted into real, outside gardens, to grow during our two good months of summer.  By August, everything is so hot and dry that the plants get baked into the parched and crusted earth, just before the Autumn freeze.  That’s right about when Winter shows up for another 9 month stay.  

If you blink, you’ll miss the whole growing season.

This year, I outsmarted the whole system.  The kids and I planted our garden in January.

Okay, maybe it had nothing to do with smart.  We just were bored with a bad case of cabin fever, so we got out the seeds and dirt and had ourselves some fun.  Watching seeds sprout up and grow was much more exciting than watching snowflakes fall and accumulate into mountains.  And we didn’t have to shovel it.  So anyway, now it is April, and our garden has grown.  

And guess what? 
 Just like nearly everything else in Minnesota, it grew up to be Norwegian.  

Tall, thin and pale.  


If the little kids’ feather pollination works, we should have spaghetti squash and tomatoes and corn on the cob by Mother’s Day.  Maybe we’ll get to carve pumpkins on the Fourth of July, before snow comes again.  

In the meantime, Happy Spring!

I haven't posted any flowers in a long while.  Here is one of my favorites.
This was my dad's Crown of Thorns plant.  It covered his desk, sprawling over his workspace,  soaking up the sunlight on the south side of his office, where the sun shone most brightly.  

Under this plant's ferocious gaze, Dad chatted on the phone, buying used hospital equipment like X-ray machines, Geiger meters and pancake probes and ultrasound machines.   He would load the heavy machinery up from metro hospitals, clean, repair, refurbish, and resell.   He loved that job.   It somehow gave him so much joy to take what someone considered "junk" machinery, and to work with it and recondition it and make it something valuable.   He frequently sold to hospitals in impoverished areas, or to countries that otherwise would never be able to afford something as expensive as an ultrasound machine.  He followed up with service plans, because he knew each machine so well, and kept them in good working order.  He took "junk" and helped save lives with it. 

When Dad passed away, I took his thorny plant home.  
It's in my studio now, and still sprawling, covering the desktop, producing thousands of thorns and occasional tiny red drops of flowers.

I like this plant's daily reminder that somehow, God does the same kind of job that my dad did so well.  God takes the thorns and the garbage and "junk" of my life, and with his tender care, he makes it into something worthwhile.  He knows my faults, he can correct them.  He knows my brokenness, and somehow, he can find a place for me anyway.  He knows that someone, somewhere needs me...
And so he turns me into something valuable.  
Thorns and all. 

  

I have been too preoccupied and excited to write much lately.  The ice is finally melting!  

The caverns of ice and the dark places of the earth are disappearing, washing away downstream.  What began as a single trickle now melts even the thickest ice, the coldest corners.  Nothing can stop the sun and the light and the warm breath of spring.  May your heart feel the hope of Spring today...  

It is here!

"The secret to everything is good compost," my grandfather used to say, as he crushed up old eggshells into the soil around his roses.  

Good Compost. 

Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Who likes compost?  Isn't that just all the garbage and refuse that nobody else wants?
Banana peels, used coffee grounds, potato peelings and grass clippings?
Good for nothing, if you ask me.

And I don't want any of that compost stuff in my life, either, thank you very much.  Emotional garbage and hurts and sorrows...uh, uh.  That's garbage on a real-life level. Leave me out of it, I say. 

But what if I am wrong?

This Lenten Rose pushed itself up out of the thick leaves several years ago.  It seemed to come out of nowhere.  No one remembered planting it.  And yet, there it was, in the middle of all the rotten leaves... it was delicate and beautiful.  I read that it will only grow in soil that is rich in composty-garbage.  Like the almost forgotten edge of the leaf pile.

What if life is like this Lenten Rose?  What if the aches and garbage of this world are actually gifts, given to us to make us gentle and delicate and truly beautiful?  What if the very best and sweetest parts of us are born from pain and sorrow and broken hearts?    That would make our suffering the compost of this world.

My grandfather could be right...

Maybe the secret to everything really is good compost. 

Yes, they are old.  You may think that they are over, and they are done.  
But these hydrangeas just keep giving.  In the dark and cold and thirty degrees below zero wind chills,  they give life.  
The shrub feeds a pair of cardinals and other birds.  It gives them a bit of shelter to hide from the wind... a bit of comfort in a sometimes frigid world.  The birds are joyful about it, too.  They fluff about and huddle deep in the branches, their clear songs ring out, breaking the silence of snow.  
Hydrangeas remind me of my grandmother.  She is gone now, but the seeds she planted and the memories she left still remain.  They warm my heart on the cold days, reminding me that I was loved.  The teeny tiny, gentle woman wore pastel and liked flowers and wrapped her fluffy hair in toilet paper at night to keep the style safe after she had it set at the beauty parlor up the road.  She painted her fingernails pink, but she was fiercely strong.  
She had wanted to be a nurse, but when the War came along, she worked in a factory instead.  She married a soldier who she met when he was dancing, wrapped up in crepe paper in a pub on Halloween night.  Then this woman, who had wanted to be a nurse and go dancing,  lived the rest of her life taking care of others instead.  She cared for her children, her mother in law, her mother, her grandchildren, and even touched the lives of her great grandchildren, showering them with love and food and a place to call home.  She cared for the immigrants and the poor, she taught children and fed the birds.  And come hell or high water, she went to Mass to pray every day.  
Now she is gone and it is winter.
But the seeds of her love are here still.  I remember her big pots of soup, homemade noodles drying on paper bags all over the kitchen.  I remember her gentleness, her "Ach, Schatzie!  You're such good kids!"  She dropped everything and moved in with us whenever my mom was ill.  She stepped in and adapted to our teenage lives, doing what she could to make it better.  In cooking and cleaning and doing all the monotonous small things, she gave us structure and stability when life was tough.  She surprised me once with a pink satin dress for homecoming, when my mom was in the hospital and my  world was dark.  She pushed aside my black combat boots, and said, "Put on a little pink lipstick, Dearie.  The world is a beautiful place."  

That's why I wanted to share my hydrangea with you today.  
It may be old. 
But it's a good place to find shelter from the storm.

I found this flower out in the shadows of the woods.   He faithfully turns up every summer.  He stays in the filtered and dark places, the forgotten and lonely places, raising his leaves like flags to the world.  

Jack in the Pulpit, they call him.  Three leaves clustered together for the Trinity.  He holds those Trinity leaves up all summer, in rain or in wind, even until the frost comes and changes the flower to a heart of bright, blood red seeds.

After that, he fades away in the snow. 

But I know he'll be back around the time that Easter returns.  
Just watch.  

He's faithful.

Sometimes, you may not feel it.  Sometimes, you might even doubt it.
But you are loved.  
If you can't see the truth in this, then perhaps you are looking in the wrong spot.

Because everywhere I look, I see how much He loves you, and how much he wants you to know that he does.   It is written in the leaves, in the flowers, in the stars.

And if today, no one else tells you this, I want to be the one to give you the message.  To deliver your beautiful valentines.  To show you how much he cares.  
You are loved.  

He's whispering his love into the wind.  He's writing it into the woods.  Can you hear it? Can you see?

This is for you.  
Yes, you.  Has anyone ever given you a flower before?  
You deserve it.  
Even if you don’t think so, I would still like you to have it.
Because you are beautiful.  
You have been created for a specific purpose on this earth, that 
Only you can do.  
You are important.


Recently, someone I know died way too young… and I wonder
If he knew that he was important.

Irreplaceable.

I wonder if someone ever gave him a flower, and told him everything was going to be okay.

It will be okay!

When I look into this flower, just one flower in this big, crazy, painful world,
I see peace.
And beauty.

And I see that God cares.

He loves you.  
Flowers are like his messages of Love, reminding you that you are worth it.  They grow everywhere…  For you.

They grow in places where there are wars and hatred and violence and fear and chaos.

They need nothing from you, just a bit of dirt and a rainstorm or two, and there they are.

Beautiful.

Bringing you a message of Hope.

If they can rise from the dirt, you can too.

Just like God, who is watching you, loving you.

And it’s all going to be okay.

I promise.

Someone wants to give you flowers!  
So this Morning Glory and  Brown Eyed Susan are just for you today.  
Have a wonderful Sunday!

A kind neighbor left this beauty on our doorstep last summer.  It's for you!

Today's Sunday Flowers for you are unopened gifts.  Oooh, the anticipation!  Waiting is so difficult...

Wildflowers are the sweetest.  Here is some wild Columbine for you.  Hope you like it as much as the butterflies and hummingbirds do.  

You are loved.

A Sunday flower just for you.  Pass it along to someone you love!