Tag: sunshine

Trumpet Lilies Rejoice

On By Anna EastlandIn Photos, Ponderings6 Comments

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.

Grace Pours Down like Sunshine

On By Anna EastlandIn Photos, Ponderings4 Comments

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. 

   

   

Early Evening Glory

On By Anna EastlandIn Photos6 Comments

Last week, after a vivacious spring day of intense showers interspersed with golden sunshine pouring through steely grey clouds, I snuck out while my kids were having their bedtime snack to drink in the early evening glory of the garden.    

       

I love the peppery purple scent of lupins…they always make me think of high school graduation because they were blooming abundantly in our back yard when I was finishing grade 12. We took pictures of me in my velvet green ( :> !) grad dress in front of a pink, purple and blue sea of lupins in our garden. 

        
Everything is glorious after the rain…the delicate ferns curling their fingers artistically…the billowy cotton candy clouds that look so bouncy and fluffy you could surely dance on them, if you could only get up there….the little pansy playing peekaboo underneath the blooming thyme bush.
Is it any wonder, with a garden like this (I take no credit; it’s my green-thumbed and maybe even fingered landlord) that taking out the compost is my favourite chore? 

  

  

Wishing you all a beautiful Mother’s Day Weekend, with many flowers and gorgeous sunsets! 

Remember

On By Anna EastlandIn motherhood, Poetry3 Comments

Here is a poem I wrote last year, before I started my blog. I stumbled upon it and thought I’d share it with you now, as the growing warmth of the sun is hopefully bringing up happy childhood memories of summer in all of us.

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Remember

I remember sprawling in the grass
in my shorts and t-shirt
making a perfect imprint of myself in the ground
seven years old and utterly at home
as the afternoon sun pulsed red
through my closed eyes

Nothing but the singing of birds
and whisper of butterfly wings in my ears
no thoughts
nothing beyond the moment
perfectly content

Now I’m thirty-two years old
and nine months pregnant
leaning back in my lawn chair
as my toddler snuggles in my lap
and gives me Eskimo kisses

Our resident hummingbird sings heartily
unphased by the vroom and bang
of townhouse construction next door

The faint familiar scent of cut plywood
wafts over the fence to blend with the smell of garden manure

My five year old feeds the chickens
one scrap at a time
and gives me a play by play:
“Rosie ate a piece of lettuce off Chickeny’s back
and the brown chickens are fighting over a tomato.”
“Mmmm…so funny,” I reply sleepily.

That same afternoon sun pulses down
red on my closed eyelids
and out of my mind
too tired for thoughts
begins to float poetry

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A Joyful Day: Bussing with Kids

On By Anna EastlandIn Family Life4 Comments

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Today as I was riding the bus with the kids I struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting next to me. It was a gorgeous March day, full of the smell of blossoms and the tentative warmth of the newly emerging spring sunshine.

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“So did you order the weather?” I asked.

After a few pleasantries about the beautiful day, how spoiled we are on the west coast, and what an amazingly diverse city we live in, he turned and smiled at the kids. One in the stroller, more on seats, one in the snuggly on my chest.

“You’ve got your hands full.”

“Yes, I admit I do!” I laughed, having heard this phrase countless times before.

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But then the elderly gentleman surprised me. He followed this banal, overused cliché with one of the nicest things anyone has said to me about parenting.

“But every day is a joy,” he said in the voice of one who remembers.

“It’s so true. They say so many funny things, and are always making tons of cute pictures just for me, and are all amazing.”

I can’t express how much his comment made my day. How that simple phrase affirmed that life is beautiful and worth living. How it pointed out that there is joy in giving, joy in loving, joy in sharing life in a family.

How despite things sometimes being a crazy zoo, full of shrieks and laughter and chaos, running over with spilled juice and bath water, and littered with stickers and Cheerios that stick to my socks (try that for fun!), life in a big family is a beautiful thing, and each day is a joy.

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“Poèmes en Route de la Poubelle”

On By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Poetry2 Comments

You know when you’ve been stuck inside for a few weeks with sick kids, and your world has become very small and stuffy (yes, we’ve been keeping the window open, but still…), and you almost forget that anything exists behind your front door? And then you have the chance to emerge, even briefly, into the sunshine to take out the trash, and everything is so fresh and crisp and incredibly beautiful that you start spouting poetry? Well, that’s been happening to me lately.

The neighbours must shake their heads as I gaze around like a love-struck mole emerging from her tunnels and start blabbering ecstatically:

It’s so beautiful! There’s a whole world out here! The sun is so shiny and the birds are so chirpy! My soul rejoiceth whilst removing the rubbish…

Aha, there she goes again. The garbage poet. It’s pathetic. Always writing about trash.

Well, as long as my poems don’t actually belong in the garbage…

Perhaps Oscar the Grouch and I could write a book together. One of those great debate books…two opposing figures hash it out about life, love and excursions to the garbage can.
We’ll be fancy and call it “Poèms en route de la poubelle.”

I had been feeling a bit like this:

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So I took a brief back yard escape:

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And saw green and growing things like rosemary:

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And winter kale:

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A pretty statue:

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A little escapee who flew over the fence of her coop:

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The others watched her so longingly as she grubbed for worms that I released them, too.

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They made such a mess mucking about in the fresh manure in the garden that they had to return to their confinement, and me to my duties…Meanwhile my three year old had snuck upstairs to my friendly neighbours, wailing in search of her missing mummy, whose aforementioned excursion outside was of unacceptable duration…

Ah, but it was beautiful while it lasted…