The Way – Page 3 – A.M. Pine – Hearth Ridge Reflections

Winter Inspiration Possibilities ~ Advent, Reading, & Stretching Myself Creatively {Day 41} ❄️🌲♥️❄️🌲♥️❄️🌲♥️❄️

November 23, 2024January 25, 2025 amyofhearthridge8 Comments

‘Watch for the Light’ is my choice for Advent readings. All my children and I will be using some of Elizabeth Foss’ Advent reading plan/activities/recipes in ‘Real Learning Revisited’. My two older children will also be dipping into Biola University’s Advent posts.

Foss uses a lot of Tomie dePaola‘s books! Excited to read these.

I’m especially excited about this collection for dipping into a few times a week.

Remember how I said I wouldn’t overload my Winter DIY Woman’s Degree?! 😂🤷🏻‍♀️🤪🙄♥️❄️☃️ Never mind that! Here’s some of my reading ideas. I tried to categorize them here so it is easier for you to go to one that may interest you. I’m going to try crossing off/checking these off as I go. Some of these are planned possibilities and I also have my mood reading genres that I’m interested in currently. Quite a few of these are rereads, which I absolutely love doing. I realize this is excessive nerd overkill 🤓 and very detailed but I find it fun! It’s something to aim at and look forward too with the cold. I hold it super loosely and that’s why I call these ‘possibilities’. I didn’t include my Bible reading, Christian devotionals, or poetry because those three are always on the go.

Dec ‘24 – Jan ‘25 – Feb ‘25 Reading List:

Buddy Reads:

December 2024

~~Christmas Mummers by Charlotte Mary Yonge, online buddy read~~ ✔️

~~Christmas at Thompson Hall~~ ~~by Anthony Trollope~~

~~(online group buddy read) short story~~✔️

~~Last Christmas in Paris~~ ~~by Webb & Gaynor~~ ✔️

~~(online buddy read with Elizabeth B.)~~

January 2025

~~So Big~~ ~~by Edna Ferber~~ ✔️

(online group buddy read)

The Man They Called Thursday by Chesterton

(preread with local friend for our HS Lit Class in our Charlotte Mason co op)

Books I’d Love to Read to my Kids this Winter:

Finish ~~By the Shores of Silver Lake~~ ✔️and begin The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Continue/Finish The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

Read Story Girl and The Golden Road by LM Montgomery

Start the Narnia Series by CLS

Read The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery

Continuing listening to Penderwicks when we can get audiobooks from library ✔️✔️

Personal Study Challenge:

Start The Illiad (journal through it) Long introduction and 24 parts, I think? One a week over 3 months? Seems doable?

Possible joining of a few BookLoveJenna’s 2025 online book club – I’m interested in Praying with Jane Eyre, The Love Letters, and Letters of a Portuguese Nun in the winter selections. I’m very slow with nonfiction, so this group may help me finish? This is a very big maybe. I did too many buddy reads/challenges this year andI’m not going to put as much pressure on myself.

Till We Have Faces and Miracles by CS Lewis

Read a memoir: Merry Hall by Beverly Nichols and Isle of Dreams by Susan Branch

Fantasy:

I’d love to continue reading ‘The Stormlight Archives’ by Brandon Sanderson- I’m in the middle of Words of Radiance. My older kids are so excited for our preordered 5th book in this cycle. I think technically there’s some short stories/lore to be read inbetween the 5 massive books out. I enjoy his work, but they are a bit more intricate and political than I usually like so these are a loose goal mostly to be reading something with my young adults.

Reread The Fellowship of the Ring by JRRT

Ember Blade by Chris Wooding

Continue Dune Series with Dune Messiah

Reread Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Reread The Night Circus

Continue Byzantium by Stephan Lawhead

Victorian Things/Cozy Reads & Rereads:

~~Finish~~ ~~Nicholas Nickelby~~ ✔️

Finish Woman in White

~~Finish~~ ~~Deerbrooke~~ ✔️

Reread Anne Series

Reread Emily Series

Finish Moominvalley in November

~~The Enchanted Sonata~~ ~~by Dixon~~ ✔️

Skating Shoes by Streitfeild

Start Elizabeth Goudge Reread/Complete 2 Yr Project with Pilgrim’s Inn, Gentian Hill, and Towers in the Mist

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

Start Romola by George Eliot

Current Reading Moods:

Classic/cozy mystery/spy

Cozy domestic & holiday

Dips into creativity/writing nonfiction shelf

Cozy fantasy

Deep middle grade/children’s literature, classic or with classic feel

Victorian Lit

This above is a CRAZY unrealistic🤪, but fun “bucket” list for this winter! Haha! 😆 What are some things on your list? I haven’t made many home keeping, home educating, or health goals yet. I’m still thinking on that. I think I have my focus phrase for the coming year, so maybe I’ll share that eventually. I’d like to update here on the blog as a fun way of checking in and narrating/processing what I’m learning or enjoying. We’ll see. Holding it all loosely, remember, Amy?! 🤣

How about you? Do you plan things out a bit? Or fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants? I really love making seasonal lists! Chat with me in comments, please! I’d love to hear your thoughts! ❄️🌲♥️❄️🌲♥️

Soil Work {Day 37}

November 18, 2024November 17, 2024 amyofhearthridge3 Comments

Love 💕 occasionally reading quickly through the Gospels in KJV…

I jumped on the shovel edge in my daughter’s pastel rainbow crocs. I found myself falling backwards, feet up and over, crocs, scattering. I burst out laughing, after mentally checking my ache-y, forty-something self for injury. I sure hope nobody I know saw me in the front yard of my parent’s home. 🤪😏👀 I planted the bulbs with my five year old as he stared at me with wonder. “Ok, ok, kid,” I thought, “it’s pretty unusual to see your mother shoveling and sweating, not to mention falling over.” Ha. 😂

We just finished this as a read aloud. We all adored it! 🕯️🪔🕯️

I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ parable of the sower {Matthew 13:1-9} in relation to being a mother. Could it be that the enrichment of their soul earth is our primary, creative work? Our magnum opus? It’s sweaty, unseen, thankless soul-shoveling work. We add manure, pull out weeds, we prepare the soil with truth, beauty, and rich, good things. Why? By faith, slowly, we trust that eventually it will be ready to receive the seed of God’s Word.

My daughter made bread and I used up leftover rice for chicken, veggie, rice soup… 🥣 ♥️

Weaving in and out of this preparation, we grow in our gardening skills ourselves. We limp around on our bruised backsides 😏, callused palms smarting, and keep strewing bits of life and light. We stretch and use all the God has given us. RM’s song “Wildflower” stuck with me deeply after it was first released. He is speaking on his creativity journey, but the idea of growing a lasting, perennial ‘flowerwork’ instead of an instantaneously burnt out flaming firework. The bright and flashy is gone in a second. Long, lasting work takes a kind of death and humilty. Once the seed is tucked into the earth, it’s a work of long trust and patience. Motherhood and our creative work both need this mustard-seed faith and fallow season.

“Flower field, that’s where I’m at

Open land that’s where I’m at

No name, that’s what I have

No shame, I’m on my grave.”

~RM, English translation, Genius.com

The character Isobel in the YA fantasy, An Enchantment of Ravens, found out through her painting, the stark emptiness and abject horror of immortality. It’s not glamorous to work, live, grow old, and die while serving, creating, and loving, but it’s human. The created of a Creator creates. That makes it enough. It’s prayer and worship. Thankfulness by fullness of being. So much around us is so empty and vacuous. Without true meaning. A life of meaning means toil, back breaking, long-haul work with faith.

“I ask where you could be right now

Where you go, where’s your soul

Yo, where’s your dream?”

~ RM

Four years of reading journals! Blue sparrow one is my new one… ♥️♥️♥️I left Goodreads and have loved this tactile way of creatively engaging with my reading.

So, where do our dreams go? They are still right here. Transformed into something human AND Spirit-powered. They may change form, a weaving in and out all that we are doing. Seasons of our servanthood with the gifts we’ve been given promise new morning mercies. Just as I can surely count on the perennial return of my mom’s tulips and daffodils, I can trust this slow, quiet blooming process is working in my children and in me, too. Thanks be to God.

How about you? How do you view relationships and creativity? How are you cultivating a culture of creative work while maintaining closeness and connections to your faith, family, and friends? I’d love to hear any thoughts! I’m still trying to flesh out what this all means…

Word Salad {Day 36}

November 11, 2024November 11, 2024 amyofhearthridge7 Comments

Hello, my old friends, I’ve {finally} come to talk with you all again! 😄🖤

These last few weeks have been a mash up of glorious warm, leaf crunching, rattle-and-rolling weather with a side of gorgeous rain. November is definitely here in all her glory. The clouds and sky have been spectacular!

I’ve been hunkered down a bit with family, homeschool, and church responsibilities, so my online fun 😅 has had to be kept to a minimum. I’ve still been reading, and it’s been a lovely respite to our full and busy days. A few of our outside responsibilities are lighter during the last part of November and December so that will be nice to catch my breath.

I’ve been struggling a bit to get the jumble up here *taps brain* to down here *taps blank page* and all I’ve got is my ‘word salads’ as I call them. I’ve been dumping impressions, ideas, words, what’s going on in the moment, etc etc etc into my ‘dump/empty’ brain journal. It’s kinda all I got currently. I see a few phrases in these riots of ramblings that I might want to use/explore later so it’s a start, right?! Ray Bradbury loved his lists and worked on stories from them YEARS later. I’m counting on this Bradbury Magic to transfer to me. 😂 Of course, Mr. Bradbury wrote a 1,000 + words everyday no matter what. ☺️😍🥰

I’ve been thinking a lot about mirrors after revisiting The Mirror Visitor Series, how Ophelia can only travel through them when she sees her true self in the mirror, no disguises or wishing for something different. It’s been tying into the opening chapters of my reread of A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle. She’s speaking on creativity/writing here:

If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me, ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die. ~ L’Engle, p. 28, A Circle of Quiet

Commonplace journal. 📓 A beautiful, new-to-me, song!

How ‘bout you? How are you doing? Any creative threads to follow lately? I’ll leave with a few more photos and a wish and prayer that your week is full of true Joy no matter our circumstances. ♥️🖤♥️

A favorite spot for prayer and contemplation. 🖤😌🙏🏻 So many friends and family in heavy circumstances.

I want to read this whole book! A friend is reading bits at our Charlotte Mason co op and it’s gorgeous.

Happy Monday, my friends. A new week, with no mistakes in it yet. ♥️

“And straightway the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

Mark 9:24

…find my way back…{Day 34}

October 22, 2024 amyofhearthridge22 Comments

Somehow I’ve lost my way with writing (and in general, creativity). Words and the authors (all artists, really) behind the ink have watered my soul in ways I can’t even begin to express. I want to find my way back to putting pen to paper, expressing memories, emotion, ideas, and ultimately, hope.

I’m starting by finding a few things to spur me on, but really just writing down anything each day. You start by doing. You continue by consistency. It can be randomness, but it’s out of my brain and it’s concrete.

Collage is probably the best way of describing the way I want to write and create. A simmering ephemera soup of colors, ideas, and encouragement. Incidentally, I also make collage art. I’ve just started doing it a bit more consistently. I recently realized that I’ve always collaged in some way, through scrapbooking, junk journaling, quilting, collecting words, and a little bit through photography, too.

How ‘bout you? Are there creative areas you want to resurrect in your life? Have you considered how different seasons of life, and circumstances (for me, covid, years of all little kids, distracting social media, health challenges) have made it difficult, but not impossible to come back to these areas.

I’ve been privileged
this year to write and collage for this letter!

Please chat in comments! I love 💕 to hear what you’re thinking and doing!

~♥️~

…joy in the morning… {Day 33}

October 17, 2024 amyofhearthridge11 Comments

Hello 👋 ~ it’s been awhile! Life got a bit life-y and I had to step away. I’m back, though, and excited by all the bits of loveliness and joy around me, if I really take the time to see.

Gratitude list..

~reading about the prophet Elijah the Tishbite, in 1 & 2 Kings~

~Irish Spring soap 🧼 smell, packaging saved for bookmarks~

~Elizabeth Foss book lists~

~ October loveliness over at Elizabeth’s Inkberry Hill Cottage ~

~fat, jolly pumpkins and gourds~

~twinkle lights, flick & flare of my alpine forest candle lit first thing~

~older kids watercolor class~

~ reading Sam Campbell’s nature memoir together, a new-to-us author that we are loving~

~ nature ramblings with local friends~

~ library hauls, especially picture books~

~cardigan, sweatshirt weather, hooded little people, stocking-capped big kids~

~ 5 yo’s new habit of putting hands in pockets, so cute~

~ trying to resurrect a writing practice, lost my way in media jungle, Neil Gaimen’s Instructions intrigues me and is inspiring~

~using my older son’s Bluetooth speaker~

~my Kindle, trying A Portrait of the Malefactress as a Young Women by Karilyn M. Van Brugge, currently~

~ Victorian literature, especially Sylvia’s Lovers by Elizabeth Gaskell, just so cozy and rich in character~

~photography eyes, peeking around corners~

~shaking pumpkin spice into my ground coffee before brewing~

~kids and I journaling to Vivaldi, a child told me it helps them concentrate 🥹♥️~

~Christmas gift secrets beginning around the house~

~long talks with 17 yo on commute to church~

~watching a Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episode on YouTube with that same son~

~dipping into Susan Branch’s Autumn 🍂 book~

~ ‘try a 100 pages’ rule working well to weed out reads that aren’t for me~

~1/2 hour of reading/quiet while waiting for violin lesson to finish~

~first frost on pumpkins~

~Tombow Fudenosuke pens, swoon~

~podcast episode with my favorite musician~

~bringing all my geraniums indoors~

~feeling of pizza dough as I knead it~

~YouTube/Instagram breaks~

~Michael Hague deep dive with younger kids~

How about you? What is reaching out to you? 🍁♥️

A Mom’s Commonplace {Day 28}

September 27, 2024 amyofhearthridge10 Comments

Is there anything more cozy then journaling and journals? 😄♥️ It’s no secret that I’m a journal fanatic! We are trying something different this year in our home learning of combining our multiple journals into one. I’ve had the opportunity to journal alongside my children and it has been such an enriching experience. I don’t often share my children’s work, as that’s their own, but don’t mind sharing what I’ve been recording myself. 😆 So much richness! 😍I’m learning every day right along with my children. I have music lyrics, quotes, drawings, etc in here already! I treasure it. Do you journal?

What you learning or diving deep into? Isn’t life grand? 😄♥️🙌🌿🍄🌻

What’s bringing me joy lately… {Day 24}

September 17, 2024 amyofhearthridge2 Comments

Gorgeous new stamps!!! I have a few penpals to catch up on! 😍✨♥️💌📬🖋️💕

Always the stacks patiently waiting 😍♥️📚

Just the lovely, jolly, friendly pumpkins 🎃, so many seasonal ‘friends’ appearing

Unexpected delightful moments alone – HP #1 book and movie are my favorite of the whole lot. 🪄🧙‍♂️

Homeschooling 🥰💕♥️ aka lakeschooling – I’m so grateful for spending time with my kids

Oak leaves, the smell, shape, colors, crunchiness…♥️

I could go on! God’s gifts are never-ending. How about you? Anything bringing you joy recently?

🍂♥️📬🎃📚🌿💌🌅💕🍁🕸️🕷️

Saturday Examen + Homeschool Snapshots week 2 {Day 22}

September 14, 2024 amyofhearthridge6 Comments

Prayer for the coming week…

“The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me, his word was on my tongue.”

King David, from 2 Samuel 23:2

Hello, Friends! ♥️☕️🌻I realize I’ve been a bit scarce as we dive into our new home educating year, I hope to get back to my 180 Day Project soon. Here’s a few shots from our week…

How was your week? Ours was good, albeit looong! 😁♥️☕️🌻🌿

Tuesday Tidbit {Day 21}

September 10, 2024 amyofhearthridgeLeave a comment

Beware of any hesitation to abandon to God. It is the meanest characteristics of our personality that are at work whenever we hesitate, there is some element of self-interest that won’t submit to God.

🌿🍂Oswald Chambers🍂🌿

Saturday Examen + Homeschool Snapshots ~ first week {Day 20}

September 7, 2024 amyofhearthridge4 Comments

“No one ever cared for me like Jesus
His faithful hand has held me all this way
And when I’m old and grey
And all my days
Are numbered on the earth
Let it be known in You alone
My joy was found”

~Stephanie Gretzinger

Song that has been carrying me through this week. 🥹♥️✨

We had a great start to our homeschool year this week. I changed our multiple journals that we’ve used in the past to one (plus a group one) for each of us and that is going very well! We so far are enjoying our books…the clear favorites of the week are our continuing a summer read of Jane of Lantern Hill by LM Montgomery, By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Around the World in 80 Days audiobook by Jules Verne. I attached some things to meal/tea time and it’s working well. I so enjoy reading public library picks with my youngers in spare moments. I’ve worked out a rhythm for working through individual work my youngest to oldest and it’s working wonderfully. We still have some wrinkles to iron out as my 12th grader 😭♥️ is working two days a week this year and we haven’t hit the co ops we are in yet. They start next week! Overall, I’m pleased with the forward motion. How was your week? Bless you as you put your hand to YOUR plow! ♥️✨🌻📚🥰☕️💌🖤