April is the Cruellest Month

This year, Eliot is right about our weather in MN. I find spring in general particularly cruel since I can no longer ski, but the roads are still too gritty/icy for me to ride my bike safely. This spring is taking its sweet time to unfurl and, at least here in this northern 'burb, the birds have not yet heralded its arrival. It's a silent spring, but the squirrels are enjoying the errant bird seed, and doing what squirrels do this time of year, which is make more squirrels.

It's a hard time for the winter-lover's mind, especially for those of us who endeavor to live in the moment. I try to find things to like about this in-between season, but I can't conjure much. In a way, spring is the bookend to fall, and since I adore that season, I tried to convince myself that I could enjoy the same things about this season. Unfortunately, my mind is not easily distracted with such sleight of hand. The average temperature is about the only thing that fall and spring have in common. Fall is crisp, spring is damp. Think of those two words: crisp/damp. Which one is more appealing? And the sun, when filtered through changing leaves, or even dancing around dead leaves blowing on the ground, seems somehow more like a warm glow, as opposed to the rays of the spring sun, which blaze down in blinding white oppression.

Maybe it's a failure of my attempt at living in the moment. No matter how hard I try to enjoy the cool air and appreciate the lack of insects, I can't shake the realization that winter is going away and the days are getting longer.  Summer is inevitable. And with the long days comes the end of cozy tea-fueled nesting, reading, creating, and dreaming. These are things best done in the dark months. The summer sun invites us outdoors, which is where we should be, tending to other living, thriving things.

Everything has its season. Be here now.

NANOWRIMO

Maybe I won't exactly finish a novel this month, but I did take the opportunity to start on my next one. Due to popular demand, I am going to try to continue the story of Maggie and company. The working title of this one is Winter at the Weir Farm. It's both exciting and daunting to embark on another novel, but the time seems right and the ideas are coming, so I look forward to seeing what evolves. Thanks to everyone who read Dog Days and for the encouragement to keep going with the characters from that book. Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone!

Simplify

While perusing one of the few big box bookstores that still remains in these parts, I noticed that there seems to be a trend afoot in the magazine world (yes, magazines, those archaic paper things that are rumored to be dying) toward a rustic, reminiscent, back-to-the-land, hands-on crafty lifestyle. I find it particularly interesting that these are physical magazines and not just online products (though they all do seem to have corresponding blogs and Pinterest accounts). My theory is that as a result of becoming inundated with technology at every turn, we yearn for something simpler, more tactile, in a sense, more real. These magazines create dreamworlds that we can insert ourselves into when the beeps and pixels start to overwhelm us. Some of the notable ones I've run across are The Simple Things, a magazine which accomplishes what Real Simple probably wanted to be, before it became another medium for ad copy passed off as journalism. There is also Land Scape and the confusingly similar in title and content Land Love. It's obvious that people are seeking a connection with nature, either because of our reliance on technology or because so many of us live in cities and have physically moved so far away from what we normally associate with the natural world. So we start a backyard garden, or chicken coop, or beehive in an effort to reconnect with that essence of who we really are as a species. We are realizing that we do not and cannot exist separate from the Earth and the rest of its inhabitants. Even if we manage to exist on fake food and spend all of our time indoors, eventually our inner selves crave that natural connection to where we came from and where we are returning to.
In a way, I think that our popular culture obsessions with zombies and post-apocalyptic scenarios are also a response to the way our lives have become complicated and sped up. Even in our nightmares, we dream of a world where technology has lost its mojo and life is reduced to the simplest of needs: food, water, survival.
We live in interesting times, where it sometimes seems as if we are seeking balance on a ball that keeps moving faster than we can find equilibrium. The interesting thing about that is that we simply need to remind ourselves that we can hop off the ball at any time.

Stolen Time

 Having Mondays off still feels somehow illicit to me. I don't know if I will ever feel otherwise. I sort of hope not, because there is a delicious pleasure to be gleaned from slipping away from the city on a weekday that is not in the middle of vacation season. The roads are free of traffic. Everything seems quieter and slower.

What's even better is to have a partner with whom to enjoy these exquisite moments. I am lucky enough to have that as well.

Today we ventured East to the St. Croix river valley. It is one of those fall days where the sky is overcast, but not so much that the sun doesn't shout out once in awhile from the cozy blanket of clouds to illuminate the salmon, vermillion, tangerine, chartreuse and lemon-hued leaves. The fall colors do not appear to be daunted by this year's drought. Or if they are, then the blasts of brightness they provide is sufficient to awe me, anyway, into forgetting any other fall that may have outdone this one.

We were eager to check out a place that was new to us-- the appropriately-named Pleasant Valley Orchard. We were pleased indeed to be greeted, not by a crush of humanity looking for parking spaces, as has been my weekend experience with other local orchards, but a quiet crunch of gravel under the tires as we pulled right in front of the red barn.

A smattering of oversized squash lay on the grass, next to a charming hay wagon filled with big orange pumpkins, and a crate full of pale white pumpkins. It was the goldilocks of squash display-- neither too many to overwhelm, nor so few that it felt sparse. They looked radiant lying there in the sunlight. So I asked my sweetie to lie down next to them for a photo. Lucky for me, he's game for such spontaneity, and the picture turned out great.

I started looking through the bin of white pumpkins for something that would make a nice companion to the mums I bought last week for the front steps, when my sweetie uttered something that made my head swivel away from the pumpkins. "Goats!"

Sure enough, inside a small pen next to the little red barn were three goats. One white, one black and one brown. We made a quick beeline for the critters, as we've both become fascinated with them ever since we saw a series of you tube videos featuring talking and fainting goats. While reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, my sweetie even found a phrase that somehow has gone out of vogue, and that we like to resurrect whenever possible: "more fun than a goat."

We did not feed them, since a nearby sign implored us to leave them to their vet-approved diet, but they were chewing on something, so any begging they did through the fence was purely for extra snacks. We got close enough to look into those crazy goat eyes. What a creature.

After wandering around a little bit, taking some shots of the crazily photogenic apples bursting out of the trees, and watching a bird of prey soar over the river valley, we decided on some treats to take home. The turnover and caramel apple, however, were never meant to make it to the car.

Happy trails! I raise my glass of cider to illicit Monday adventures.

Restoration

Just spent a lovely weekend retreat at the Audubon Center of MN near Sandstone. It was only a few miles off the interstate, but the mental distance from the buzz of the crowds was much greater. I attended a Loft writers' conference on nature and environmental writing. It was much more informative than I could have imagined. This conference had my favorite kind of workshops, where there was no journaling, writing, practicing or otherwise empty time. The sessions I attended were packed full of useful, inspiring information by successful, experienced writers and editors. Kudos to the Loft for creating such a great gathering!

Thanks to this weekend, I have started considering the possibility of doing some magazine writing. It makes perfect sense to write the type of thing I love to read. It just took awhile for me to come around to that obvious fact. The weekend workshops demystified the whole query process for me, which was a major stumbling block. Sometimes you can't learn all you need from reading, it actually helps to talk to people!

So I'll dig out the articles I wrote for the Yoga Center magazine over the past couple years and try to cobble together some sort of portfolio to get the ball rolling.


I'm already seeing stories everywhere.

My book is now on Amazon! You can actually search for me or for the title and it comes right up! Wow. If you really put your mind and effort into something, you can achieve it. I dare you to try!

bARTer

I was down a rabbit hole on Amazon last night, which started with me looking up the book "Twelve by Twelve"- an account of a man who lived in tiny cabin in the woods. I ordered it from the library, but I'm number 22 in line, so I may not get to read it for awhile. That book led to "Possum Living" which was written in 1978 by an 18 year-old woman who lived off the grid with her father in rural PA. I spent about an hour reading what I could on Amazon. Then I ended up looking at a slew of other books about simple living, including a new John Robbins book about how to deal with living in new economic circumstances. The preview function in Amazon can be an incredible time suck, but it is a useful tool in determining whether to buy a book.

After the Amazon research, I realized I had two credits at Audible that I still needed to use. In the new releases I found the book "What's Mine is Yours" which I remember hearing about on NPR recently. It looks at the rise of social media and the explosion of sharing, bartering, co-owning and freecycling. It immediately got me to thinking: how could I work out a barter system for yoga? I know that many people love yoga, but cannot afford to spend $12-17 for each class. I was one of those people. I took community ed yoga in order to have a regular class at an affordable price, but it was taught on a carpeted floor of an elementary school hallway-- a far cry from the gleaming hardwood floors, surround sound and showers of places like Core Power. "You get what you pay for" is what came to mind.

There has to be a way to give people a satisfying yoga experience without the expense. I think barter may be a solution. Almost everyone has something they can offer, even if they aren't aware of it. I am going to ponder this a bit more and try to figure out a way to work out a system for providing yoga without emptying pocketbooks.

Namaste,
Kate