Tag: book

Posted in art, authors, birds, book, Christine Valters Paintner, Family, health, monks, Physical, prayer, quote, season, Spiritual, summer, weather, write, writer

What’s Your Summer Story?

Posted on by deannagreensandgardenart

I joined a summer book club called Summer Art Club. I found the group through Substack. A small group of creatives meet together for an hour on Sunday evening via Zoom for a 12-week journey. We are reading The Artist’s Rule by Christine Valters Paintner. It’s about nurturing your creative soul with monastic wisdom. Thus far I really enjoyed the chapter that covers the sacred rhythms and the seven traditional praying hours for creative renewal. I love the nuggets of pure gold in this book as well as the sharing with this group of women.

“I want to live my life in healing rhythms that honor the limits of my body, the pleasures of rest, and the delights of play.” ~ Christine Valters Paintner

As I look out the atelier’s front window, I see the fat little hummingbirds make repeat returns to the two front yard feeders for more sugar water. My husband is trying to keep up with these hungry hummers. The children’s book Little Green by Keith Baker explains the repetitive nature of these little birds. In Missouri the ruby-throated hummingbirds come to us late spring and fatten up over the warmer months before leaving us in October. Their homes are in the warmer climates. Migration with the warm weather is in their nature, part of their story.

What’s your summer story? Are you zipping along with your days minding your own business, attending to your job duties, family matters, vacation, or your health? Are you in status quo or planning for or making a big change in your life? Me, well, two or three mornings a week I am zipping along with culinary work at the local senior centers closest to my home. With my writing I take on new contests, challenges, and projects. These fill my afternoons and some evenings. One of my recipes is featured in the July issue eMerge Magazine. A poem of mine is the 2nd place winner in a contest with the local writers’ group, Saturday Writers. I am writing short articles for The Hope*Writers magazine.

Family is a part of my husband and I’s everyday life in one fashion or another. A long weekend vacation is in the plans for late August. After these steamy humid days, the destination will need to be for someplace cooler. I am hoping to get to a lake soon, even though it will not be my favorite place which is Island Lake in Minnesota. We keep hoping to return to this northern haven from my childhood. Meantime, my kinky hair gets clipped up off my neck, and sundresses and thongs are my summer attire.

In regard to my health, I am trying to make positive changes. Eating healthier with loads of vegetables. I have been lacking regular cardio exercise for some time. I get weightlifting in with the heavy commercial pans filled with food enough for 100 – 130 people. I do stretches with an online program. But when I was at my healthiest in my adult years, I went swimming at least two days a week. This was 15 – 18 years ago. So, I have returned to the pool this month. I aim to keep this part of my weekly routine at least two days a week until the end of time, my time that is. I cannot afford not to. I only have this life to live. I am praying for long healthy days and years ahead.

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 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