Saturday Examen {Day 15}

“Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is a spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life.”

Thomas Merton 🌿

Music for for your weekend . 🌿

What’s bringing me a bit of joy currently…{Day 10}

I saw 👀 that Abigail Carroll has new poetry book out (Cup My Days Like Water) I can’t wait to read it. Saving up my book 💴 for it!

I’ve been absolutely loving pink and purple pens lately! I have LePen and Tombow and have been making monochromatic and a mixture of the two colors spreads in my prayer journal/ planner-memory journal. I love these colors SO much, what colors represent your life currently? 🩷💜🩷💜

Speaking of color, I’m wondering if I ‘need’ an autumn cardigan in Kristin’s dress color? 🧡😂👀 I love looking at my imaginary closet on Pinterest. 🤩🤩🤩

I can’t tell you how much my Daily Pocket Moleskine had meant to me this year! Just a teeny place to record my to dos for the day, do a little creativity, and store lots of memories! I’m really stretching the binding, but I’m soooo happy with its bursting self! I don’t love Monday start calendars, so that’s the only downside. I’m planning on getting the red one for 2025!

This cartoon has been keeping me sane lately! 🥰♥️😭💔🌿 We are just passing through, friends, and it’s a painful and glorious journey, but precious Jesus is with us every step of the way. ~

Monday Ponderings {Day 7}

“Words are one way we leave tracks in our world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

Sol’s face remained far away. Her cheeks were white and hollow, but her eyes shone a bit, I was fairly sure.

Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

•sweetness• {Day 2}

Lord, you do not withhold your compassion from me. Your constant love and truth will always guard me.

~Ps. 40:11

The Lord will send his faithful love by day; his song will be with me in the night – a prayer to the God of my life.

~Ps. 42:8

What secrets fly out of the earth

when I push the shovel-edge,

when I heave the dirt open?

And if there are no secrets

what is that smell that sweetness rising?

~ Mary Oliver

Monday Ponderings {Day 1}

The times are so unfriendly. Play me something, would you, Rainy?

Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

{starting my 180 Days Project! More about it as the days come and go! How are you all? Blessings over your week. Don’t forget to ‘play a little music’ against these unfriendly times! 😌♥️}

•plans•

One of the greatest things in human life is the ability to make plans. Even if they never come true – the joy of anticipation is irrevocably yours. That way one can live many more than just one life.

Maria Trapp

I found this in an old journal from 2016 surrounded by lots of those very same types of bygone plans. It made me smile. 🌿♥️

•inexhaustible•

My husband’s cousins gorgeous garden. 😍

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, it’s filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 140-141

•gentle•

Beauty reassures us that goodness is still real in the world, more real than harm or scarcity or evil. Beauty reassures us of abundance, especially that God is absolutely abundant in goodness and in life. Beauty reassures is there is plenty of life to be had. I believe beauty reassures us that the end of this Story is wonderful. The French impressionist Matisse “repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.”

Beauty is such a gentle grace. Like God, it rarely shouts, rarely intrudes. Rather it woos , soothes, invites; it romances and caresses. We often sigh in the presence of beauty as it begins to minister to us-a good, deep soul-sigh.

John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back, p.33

•most•

Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most.

Abraham Lincoln, emphasis mine