Category: walk

Posted in book, God, home, memoir, provision, quote, scripture, season, walk, warm, weather, write

My Hiding Place

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

These days into mid-autumn have been slow. We all went through the painful federal furlough. It was like walking in the dark bumping into the furniture. And for many not without injury to their budgets and daily necessities. Dean and I buckled down on our spending the past 6 weeks. We cooked from scratch, had the crock out a few times to make that whole chicken stretch for 3 or 4 meals, cheap entertainment like reading books, writing, and a free visit to the art museum with friends. The cooler weather made it easy to stay indoors, but we did manage to get a few walks in the neighborhood and on historic Main Street in our hometown of St. Charles on those warmer days.

“You are my hiding place. You will protect me from trouble, and surround me with songs of deliverance.” ~ Psalm 32:7

Buckling down also made me more aware of those provisions God gives daily, hourly, and every minute of my day. Another morning to wake up to, a warm bed to sleep in, running water, a heating pad for my arthritic joints, hands that still chop and stir for the seniors in our community as well as Dean and I, and other simple pleasures of home. The Almighty’s power and that soft power of home that provides daily. I am surrounded. I am in His hiding place.

Posted in art, atelier, battle, blessings, challenges, Christian, corner, creative, eyes, faith, garden, gardener, gift, give, God, heart, Holy Spirit, husband, mind, passion, path, prayer, road, share, time, walk, words, works, writer

Round The Corner

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

“Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Hard work can be disguised in a hobby. Passion and interest can occupy one’s attention, energy, and time. One starts on a project of great detail. Maybe a cup or two of coffee or tea to keep the momentum going. Then 5, 6, or 8 hours later you are scrambling for a bite to eat and cannot believe what time it is. This is how it has been with baking, gardening, birdwatching, crafting, reading, and writing for me. New brain pathways travelled, mysteries are discovered, prayers said, challenges are overcome, and beauty is found in whatever has been created.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” ~ Thomas Edison

Still round the corner awaits another adventure. One that God has placed in my life, your life. A path waiting to be uncovered and walked on. There are bends and forks in the road, and the Holy Spirit is our guide and protector. With eyes of faith an atelier at the cottage here or elsewhere is in the making. A place designated to work on these projects the heart has passion for. A place of our own to create and bless others with God’s gifts. What is around your corner?

Posted in clean, daughter, dirt, feelings, flower, God, health, heart, Holy Spirit, Jesus, life, mother, quote, redeemer, renew, scripture, unworthiness, walk

The Dirt of Life

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

Life can be messy sometimes. For some folks, maybe more so or less than you. We all have it. No one is immune to it. Dirt, the stuff that causes disorder, turmoil, feelings of unworthiness, unclean inside and/or outside. My daughter gave me a framed picture for Mother’s Day that says these words, “Every flower must grow through dirt.” What a lovely reminder, that beauty can be found in the midst of a mess. And fun, too. Remember those mud pies you made as a child? Also, healthy foods come from the dirt.

You can find dirt in my life, and I know there is some in yours because we are human. But let’s focus on the beauty that is present day. First, because of the gift of Jesus and His life, death, and resurrection, I am redeemed. You are, too! Psalms 25:8 tells us “The Lord is good and does what is right; He shows the proper path to those who go astray.” I am asking God, what are You leading me to, and what do You have planned for me today? The speed I go is not important, it is that I take step by step with His guidance. I am moving forward, are you?

“Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

Psalms 51:10
Posted in age, anxious, art, body, change, community, connection, crazy, creative, Family, garden, God, health, heart, Holy Spirit, home, hospitality, house, Jesus, job, life, listen, live, Martha, Mary, nourish, People, quote, renew, resources, rest, scripture, season, sin, soul, stillness, time, walk, words, works, worry, write, writer

A Day In A Life Of This Retired Martha

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

People ask, “What do you do with your day now that you are retired?” I have always said I will never completely retire. I may not get paid for my labor but will always find a project or two worth working at. I am semi-retired at this time of my life. In June 2021 what I retired from was multi-tasking 5 or 6 days a week. My body and mind had enough, literally my heart and my doctors were telling me to slow down. My employee wellness job with the local government kept me overly busy with 4 or 5 projects at a time, an income not reflecting what I did for over 4,000 employees and 2,500 retirees. Since retirement from full-time work, I ask the Holy Spirit to fill my days with what God deems worth my time, resources, and energy. A person’s value or worth to this world is not based on how much income they bring in. Value is placed on what God says is worthy. I know worth is found through Jesus, who died on the cross for my sins and yours, because of His love for me and you. I believe most people have a “Mary” and a “Martha” side to them. I have been a “Martha” by necessity since 8 years of age and have to allow the “Mary” side to come out more. That is the side where my soul gets refreshed and my writing plays in the script. When I allow myself plenty of time to reflect, the words flow. For me at least one day out of the week, it is a steady stream.

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and upset about many things, when only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Luke 10:41 & 42

My hobbies of gardening, cooking, crafting, reading and writing provide several projects, but not all at the same time. Each day is different than yesterday. Those daily routines of making the bed, laundry, meals, bills, and quiet time, are consistent. I am attempting to make brisk walks or lap-swims a regular part my life again without making it such a regiment, just a natural flow in my day. I started working a wellness-related job, but just 1 or 2 days a week. That’s enough multi-tasking for me. Developing and teaching culinary classes at the local community college is limited to just 2 or 3 classes a month. This summer I took on work with senior citizens in our community through an organization called Papa. Using an app, I sign up as needs arise, assisting with household chores for 1 or 2 local women in my community during the month. Recently I signed up to bring meals to our pastors twice a month. Then one weekend a month Dean and I rent our vintage home through Airbnb, a good reason for a thorough cleaning before and after the rental weekend. This allows tourists a quaint home to stay in for the weekend while visiting our historic town. I know what I like when Dean & I travel and try to make our home just that for others. We recently have made “super host” status. My newest art craze are button journals. I design those and attempt to sell them through a local hand-craft boutique. And there is our big family with all those social events such as birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries in the mix. So that is the day in the life of this retired Martha, never the same each day. I am not retired from life and enjoy living a Mary life more and more each day.

Posted in authors, blessings, book, change, children, community, Crescent Dragonwagon, daughter, Family, feelings, God, grandchild, granddaughter, happy, house, husband, job, People, silence, solitude, walk, write, writer

New Pace And Space

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

I have taken on a new opportunity this summer, and not just for this summer. On June 1 I retired from my full-time HR position in order to slow my pace down. I have more time for the activities I love like gardening, cooking, antiquing, and writing. Even with these fun hobbies, I am learning to pace myself so I get enough sleep, exercise, and make healthier food choices and proper time to consume. For additional income I am teaching culinary classes part-time with kids’ 1/2-day camps this summer. Come the fall semester, I will teach culinary classes 2 evenings a week to kids as well as adults.

More time for family is the another reason to slow my pace down. My husband and I already spent a weekend at the lake with his three children, spouses and three grandchildren. Next weekend I will be opening a booth in an antique mall with my daughters and granddaughters. But this week, is time for myself. I signed up for a writing residency at the Writing Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. I learned of this place over 15 years ago. This place has been in existence for 20 years. I could almost pinch myself, to check if it is real. I am actually staying at the Dairy Hollow house made famous by author, Crescent Dragonwagon. I am taking a week’s residency in the comfortable culinary suite creating some recipes to share in a book of short stories with a culinary theme. My first book. See what becomes of this week. It has been productive so far.

I take casual walks in this enchanted town of Victorian wrap-around porches, bungalows with inviting archways, crevices filled with wildflowers, groves of trees and moss-covered cliffs laced throughout the town. I do some porch sitting, watching the hummingbirds and song birds feed. While on the front porch yesterday afternoon sipping iced peppermint herbal tea a doe and her fawn meandered between the two residency buildings. Later this afternoon I hear the readings of one of my fellow writers at the Carnegie Library a few short blocks away. I will make it to the farmer’s market and a couple of local shops tomorrow morning before returning to the laptop for my story writing and making a peach-blueberry slump. Visits with the other writing residents have been at dinner time. We sit and dine for an hour at a long table filled with delightful foods prepared by an excellent cook from the Old World. Yes, life is good. I feel God’s blessings.

Posted in body, capture, change, courage, day, differences, faith, God, grace, heart, hope, husband, life, light, meditation, night, old, pain, prayer, rest, scripture, silence, solitude, spirit, strength, understand, vision, walk

Clearer Vision

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

During this week off from the everyday grind, I am present moment many moments of my day, and days plural.  My senses are wide-open.  I hear my husband’s heart beat in the silence.  My vision becomes clearer by the hour in the solitude.  What a difference capturing a subdued vacation dedicated to the rejuvenation of the mind, body, soul, and spirit.  Old thoughts are changed to clearer vision and direction. Faith in my God and myself restored.  Life is punctuated with grace, hope, and love.  Courage and strength for the walk ahead.  I see the path.  One of prayer.  Pray the Word of God.  Meditate and then pray Psalms 119.  Today’s verses 11, 18, & 148 …“I have hidden Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You … Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in Your law … My eyes stay open through the watches of the night, that I may meditate on Your promises.”

Posted in authors, book, community, demons, Emotional, fight, health, hope, lesson, life, meditation, Mental, mind, Physical, quote, Spiritual, walk, write

Writing a Book

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

As an employee wellness coordinator for a large-sized government entity, I keep myself versed on health and wellness topics and periodically take certification courses.  Depression and mental health are major issues in the United States.  A person can know this by listening to the news or viewing social media at any given moment these days.  More and more training in the health and wellness fields are focusing on the “7 dimensions of wellness” that make a person “whole”.  If any of these are lacking, it affects the other dimensions of a person, and the community around.

7 Dimensions of Wellness

These past few weeks God is urging me to write, more than I have written before with my journals, blogs, letters, and poems.  I am writing a book about wholeness, the physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental healing for a woman with post-traumatic stress disorder which affects the social, intellectual, occupational, and environmental dimensions of her life.  It is based on the true story of a Christian woman and her struggles after a traumatic event.  Subsequent therapy reveals more than this sexual assault trauma, but the dysfunction she is living in her marriage.  It is a story of hope despite the reality of trauma, and the fight against shame and demons associated with  sexual assault.  Life’s lessons are learned in every situation and circumstance, if we listen.

I have applied for a writing fellowship at a writers colony in Arkansas, and hope to hear good news by November.  If awarded I will be granted 2-weeks stay at this writers lovely retreat center.  My calendar will allow for this next spring, if I am awarded.   If not granted the fellowship, well I may take 2 weeks off and hide out in my husband and I’s cottage to focus on this work with greater depth.  Projects with my employer have shifted with earlier deadlines, so spring will be a lovely time to write, take walks, meditate, and write again.  “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” Ernest Hemingway is quoted.  For me it will be my pen and journal, and pecking away on the keyboard of my laptop.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Posted in authors, darkness, daughter, Family, God, house, husband, life, prayer, silence, Spiritual, walk

Silence

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

“Cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms.  I call these noises silence …wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking… the silence is all there is.  It is the alpha and the omega,” writes author, Annie Dillard.  We had a few summer storms this past week.  In the night, awaken to the pitter-patter of raindrops on the window next to my bedside.  Then the thunder claps and echoes in the darkness.  And the silence follows.  Awaken to pray.  Most of the time I know who for and why.  Other times I do not, and await to hear the still small voice.Rain on Screen

My husband and I have downsized our own living space by moving into a 4-room house. Not sure if to call us “minimalists”, but having a smaller home has slowed us down. We are more focused on our relationship, and that was our intent.  More quiet time, more silence than what we have lived the past 4 years while sharing our bigger home with my daughter and her family.  No pets in our new space either, we enjoy the neighbors’ pets during our walks.  Just the Mr. and I, simple or elaborate meals prepared in-house depending on the mood, less eating out.  Projects and chores or snuggling on a love seat watching a classic movie.  And the silence. “Slow living … opens up the prospect of slow love, the most sustaining sort of love … a love that comes of unhurried and focused attention to the simplest things, available to all of us, at any time, should we choose to engage:  family, friendship, food, music, art, books, our bodies, our minds, our souls, and the life that blooms and buzzes all around us … slow love comes out of the quiet hours, out of learning from the silence that is always there when we want it,” writes Dominique Browning, former editor of a major design/decor publication.

We all need the silence.

Posted in authors, book, challenges, change, day, easy going, Family, father, house, lesson, life, mother, People, quote, understand, walk, words

History Lessons

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

Life evolves, perpetually moving.  Hopefully, forward.  But maybe we would rather live in the past, the good ole’ days?  I dream of the whimsy of unhurried days.  Summer afternoon napping in a hammock under a willow tree.  Leisurely walking the shoreline combing the white sand for a treasured seashell or starfish left behind by the ocean blue waves.  Sunday autumn walks spotting the brightest red leaved tree.  Hot tea and freshly baked scones for a winter snack gathered with my youngsters.  Life is not so easy-going while working full-time hours as a human resources professional.  Commuting, family obligations and responsibilities, bills, and then keeping house for our two homes.  I am sure it is not easy as a carpenter in the summer heat.  Or the 1000 sandwiches prepared for another hungry crowd.  Or the school teacher putting together lesson plans and then teaching them to the 100 & 1 needs of the students you are responsible for.  The disabled or elderly making doctor appointments and their thinning budgets.

Do we really have it all with our careers, 2000 + square-foot homes, high-ticket sports events and concerts, organic foodie plates at $50 per, high-tech computer programs, phone apps, texting, social media posts, networking breakfasts, and so on & so on?  Recent weekends while antiquing for my husband and I’s newly acquired get-away house has prompted history lessons. We ask each other why this piece of furniture or household tool was used back in 1940 or another era.  Think back on those less hurried days, many items make sense.  I better understand my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.  Their tight-fist around the piggy bank,  renovated solid wood tables and reupholstered chairs, no big screen TVs but large radios for the living quarters’ entertainment and news, dishes galore because they did not “go out” to eat, and a plethora of tools to fix that broken whatever.  Maybe life was unhurried because it could not be with the lengthy meal preparations and length of time to repair or build?  Maybe life wasn’t so easy back then.  Maybe it just seems that way, because life is not easy now?  Pioneer author Laura Ingalls Wilder once wrote, “Sometimes I wonder if telephones and motor cars are altogether blessings … When my neighbor gets into her car, it is almost sure to run for twelve to fifteen miles before she can stop it, and that takes it way down the road past me.”  Mrs. Wilder recognized how modernization changed her social connections.  I know it affects mine.

I read non-fiction books and articles to find out who I am or who I want to be (or not be).  Marie Kondo encourages us in her book The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up, “the space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past”.  Such an easy concept, live the now and look to the future rather than the past.  But I would have to challenge those words and their meaning.  I agree with the concept of this book, de-cluttering and making your home or office space functional, becoming a better person.  But the past is why we are who are now, and this will carry to the future.  I rather filter the past, keep the nuggets of wisdom of the past generations, use for guidance.   Learn from and not repeat their mistakes, but I will surely make my own.  That antique end table or butter dish reminds me of past generations’ input into my life, directly or indirectly.  Their legacy, history makes me and you who we are now and what we will become in the days to come.  I ask you to think on someone in your past or from your history lessons.  What is one sentence this person would say to you right now that can effect your today and tomorrow in a positive manner?

Posted in challenges, day, God, life, live, meditation, People, prayer, purpose, secure, thankful, walk

Present Moment

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

Three or four days of my work week I am able to break away from the St. Louis County benefits office located in the middle of Clayton’s business district where buses, delivery trucks, cars, financial institutions, niche shops, eateries, entrepreneurs, visitors, and government employees blend.  These 1-hour get-aways can include lunch in or out, meditation and prayer at the corner church, possibly a catnap in a quiet loveseat down the hall, and almost always a walk.  Today I brought lunch from home, egg salad made with white bean hummus (yum!) and whole wheat crackers.  Afterwards I took my daily stroll.  I chose to leave my cell phone and water bottle behind, my security usually a tote on my constitutionals.  It is a brisk 50 degrees this cloudy March Friday.  I can survive without H2O for 20 minutes.  And the cell phone, what did I do for the first 4-1/2 decades of my life without one?!
I have my Fitbit on, but do not check it during this short walk.  Besides I have these Clayton blocks memorized, either 3000, 2000, or 1000 steps depending on what direction, destination, and how far I decide to go.  I made a conscious effort to be present moment on today’s walk.  Four blocks north of my office and back.  The church bells chimed louder.  Other pedestrians’ voices and footsteps were clearer.  I was aware of how many people waited at each of the traffic lights with me, what shoes and jacket they wore, and the colors of the vehicles that passed through the intersection before the crosswalk signal switched.  The birds chirped feverishly.  Flowers popped out at me as if I was the sun.
In contrast, I feel the sharp, damp air on my face, hands, and the tops of my feet.  My joints ache, but this provokes me to keep moving these arthritic parts, and not stifle what God has created.  “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  I know this clearly.”  Along that thought … What have I been created for these later autumn years of my life?  I think of the human life span as the seasons.  Spring is my childhood.  Summer is my young adult up to mid-life years.  Autumn is my mid-life up to retirement.  And the winter will be retirement and elderly years.  See how the cold, moist air on my arthritic joints brought me to thoughts of my future retirement during this walk?  It is a challenge for this planner and organizer to stay present moment.  Yesterday my heart’s desires bubble up among projects and schedules.  A sketch of the next 5 years came to me.  I have been asking God what am I to do after employee wellness and benefits at the County.  Only 132 weeks until my retirement to be possible.  I give tomorrow’s blueprints to God, my Creator.
Back to present moment … thankful … for this moment to walk, breathe, love, and live fully.