Warm sunlight sets this calla lily aglow amid the surrounding shadows…
…and in it’s simple beauty it reflects the strength of the sun, reaching into dark corners and gently illuminating them.
Author: Anna Eastland
I'm a homeschooling mom of 8 and write at "Just East of Crazy Land: Adventures in Parenting." My younger daughters share their art and writing at "The Passionate Pencil" and the older ones at "The Writing Sisters." Enjoy! :)
Eternal Echo
Look up into the sky
with its whispy clouds
caught in still life ballet
Let the vast expanse of its azure stage
enter your soul through your eyes
Don’t you find
an inexpressible longing within
an echo of the eternal?
Can you tell me
with conviction
that you weren’t meant for Heaven?
If you do, my brother, my sister
I won’t believe you,
because I see mirrored in your eyes
pieces of my own heart.
Unblogging My Clutter
Whatever you can’t give away, you don’t possess. It possess you.
Ivern Ball
For years I’ve had the problem of having way more stuff than I could handle. I’ve spent endless hours shuffling around junk and not knowing what to do with it. I’m constantly sorting, recyling and giving boxes to the thrift store, yet I never do more than melt the tip of the iceberg. I get paralyzed by the tiniest decisions…like keeping or chucking this trinket or piece of paper, and end up shoving it back in the box and running away to cook dinner.
My friend Reiko remembers me doing the same thing in highschool. “It seemed like every Saturday you were stuck inside cleaning your room again” she told me the other day, when I told her of my renewed mission to declutter my house. I realize now that what I was really doing was “neatening.” In her book “Let Go of Clutter,” organizational expert Harriet Schechter defines this as follows:
Neatening: straightening, tidying, and/or hiding things away to create the illusion of orderliness.
In other words, pretending. Ugh. I hate pretending. Trying to create an illusion of something I’m not. Keeping up appearances. What I really need is real change….to be liberated from the suffocating hold of too much stuff. I need to declutter, and this time not a little bit at a time, but in a radical major way.
Decluttering: discarding, removing, or markedly reducing any accumulation of material objects.
If it’s so obvious and simple, why is it so hard? Schechter believes we are hard-wired for hoarding. It’s an old survival instinct…our inner squirrel packing away nuts for a snowy day. Your waste-not-want-not squirrel might say while you attempt to declutter:
But it could be useful one day…
But it’s not broken…
But it was expensive…
But it was a gift from Aunt So-and-So…
But I don’t want to be wasteful and make more garbage…
The problem is that we live in a time at least in many parts of the world, of abundance rather than scarcity. Hoarding in this context makes no sense. We end up with more that we know what to do with…and as a result spend hours and hours every year shuffling it around, looking for new storage solutions, sorting and resorting.
If I had $10-15 for every hour I’ve spent sorting mismatched kids socks alone, I could likely take a cruise. Schechter suggests you add up all the minutes each day you spend sorting, looking for lost things, and trying to put away stuff that has no place of it’s own. If you value your own time, you’ll realize that clutter is a luxury you can’t afford. An hour a day wasted adds up to about $3500 a year!
What is your clutter preventing you from accomplishing instead? Playing music, taking an art class, trying new recipes, taking a long walk at the beach, taking time to stay connected with friends, getting a promotion? How does a messy house affect your sense of self-worth?
While I know clutter is a waste of time, space and money, and a stressful source of tension, I find it hard to deal with alone. I feel overwhelmed:
I’m really blessed to have some awesome friends who are willing to get up to the elbows in junk and chant, “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” So with their help and you all cheering me on (and sharing your best declutter tips, please!) I hope to at last conquer my clutter by letting it go…unblogging my emotional blocks around “stuff” to create a clear and peaceful home…and heart as well.
Trumpet Lilies Rejoice
Welcome summer! Beautiful, wonderful, summer… nothing like sunshine beaming through green leaves and white flower petals.
There is amazing strength and resilience in flowers…no matter what goes on around them, what hatred or anger floats about the air, they continue to be themselves. Delicate and beautiful.
They don’t grow spikes unless they are meant to or turn black when those around them are harsh…but continue to be ever the same…vulnerable perhaps but strong in their vulnerability, because they won’t be put off course. They follow the plan inscribed in their tiny cells, and become the gorgeous things they were meant to.
May we all learn from this to be ourselves, our best selves, no matter what happens around us to pull us down.
Do you want to build a snowman?
Fun with flour….
…things that happen while Mummy is on the phone!
Watering Flowers by Moonlight
Tonight the evening air is dusky
and has a faint smell of smoke
as if someone was stoking their fire
on this warm May night
The slightly bulging half-moon
beams down yellow
and sleepy like me
I seek poetry in the shadows
and realize the smokiness
is the peppery scent of purple lupins
spicing the dusk with their presence
Lingering in the quiet evening
I take pity on my planter pots
and water my flowers by moonlight
lest in the heat of the day I forget
A little bath for the basil
a big sip for the tomatoes
and lots—with love—
for my Josephine flower
Pink Rose Blushing
This Sunday I saw a rose so lovely one could get lost in it’s petals, contemplating beauty while the blossom blushes sweetly. It had the rich scent of a real rose, the kind you want to just drink in again and again…the kind that makes you think of romantic English gardens and quaint little thatched cottages.
Thinking back, it was a funny little gift to see it growing there, just outside the church, where moments before I had been talking with my friend Sherri, and joking that all the pretty women were wearing roses that day. She had a beautiful white dress covered in red roses, and I had a rose pattern white t-shirt. She told me she wanted to dress up extra today, on the feast of Pentecost, for the Holy Spirit, with whom she has such a love affair. “He just always takes such good care of me,” she smiled.
“Today is my 10 year anniversary of baptism,” I told her, “10 years since I joined the church.” For her it had been almost 16. I remembered rubbing my belly with childlike excitement in the days leading up to my baptism…God Himself was coming to dwell in my soul! We marvelled at how lucky we felt, knowing God’s love, His desire to be close to each and every person, to bring depth and meaning to our lives.
So who is this person Sherri and I are enamoured with, who inflames and guides our hearts? Isn’t going to church just for stodgy old ladies…people who recite pious prayers but aren’t really spiritual? As a convert, I haven’t found this old stereotype to hold water, nor have I found the supposed opposition between being religious and being spiritual.
For me, finding the faith helped me begin a very intimate and interior journey, one of growing closer to God while at the same time becoming more free to truly be myself…learning to trust the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit, the one who nudges me to grow, to give, to respond to His creative impulses, to be optimistic and ready to dream aloud. To trust in something bigger than myself. To be willing to take creative risks.
Growing in my spiritual life has been essential to my growth as a writer. I find there is such a direct link between prayer and creativity, because prayer helps me be aware of the beauty around me, and to be still enough to let it enter my heart. Then it’s just a matter of sharing what’s inside. I once compared writing poetry to sitting still enough for a butterfly to land on you, a matter of receiving an inspiration and sharing it, a little gift…
So if I haven’t been blogging much at times, you can guess I’ve been letting myself get too busy, and you can write me a comment and say, “Anna, stop running around… sit still and pray more; we want some poetry! ”
When I don’t take time to pray, to be still, to talk to God about my life and especially to listen, my creative well runs dry. I run like a little hamster in a wheel, very busy but very superficial. It is exhausting and empty, and I think our souls need to love deeper…ha, that was a typo but still true: we need to live deeper and to love deeper. This is what helps us see the beauty in life, despite suffering; this is what helps us live for something bigger than ourselves, and in the process become more the people we are meant to be.
Maybe I’ll write more about this soon, but as we’re all busy people I’ll let you go for now. I hope you’ll find a little time to seek out that special stillness in which God whispers to our hearts and inspires us to help Him create a more wonderful world.
Aliens Among Us…
Summer days bring their share of funny sunny day surprises…like when your small children go outside to paint on paper, and reappear as aliens!
Eat your heart out, Moulder and Scully! There are truly aliens among us…needless to say, the bath water was certainly not blue that night!
Grace Pours Down like Sunshine
There is something about walking through the forest in the sunshine that reminds you that every day life is a gift. Thank you God for this beautiful precious experience of being alive. For all it’s pain and struggle, the exquisiteness of life is undeniable.
Quotes from the Peanut Gallery #2
Multitasking:
Me: Can you cut this paper dolly out for your sister?
6 yr old: Sure. I have time to do lots of things, but not time to do lots of things at the same time.
Weather Report:
4yr old: “Mommy the clouds turned purple. The clouds turned purple because they are angry that it’s not raining anymore.”
Royal Duties:
While training her 4 year old sister to be a polite princess, my 7 year old explained why the 3 year old couldn’t join in and be a queen.
“Because queens are really old, and it’s boring…actually it’s a lot of work. You have rule a village, and to sit on a bench all day and read newspapers…and eat chocolate all day until you get sick.”
“What if it tasted like coffee chocolate?” piped up the 4 year old. “That would be awful.”
“I wanna be a princess and dance!” moaned the distraught toddler.
Mouth Mumbles:
3 year old: “He has an ice cream lipstash…”
Just East Of Crazy Land 