my life is much too fast paced.

I must  s  l  o  w  down

and remember the words of St. Teresa of Avila:

Let nothing upset you;
Let nothing frighten you.
Everything is changing;
God alone is changeless.
Patience attains the goal.
Who has God lacks nothing;
God alone fills every need.

and  s    l    o    w   down even more.

wendell berry love

I'm only two chapters into Bringing it to the Table by Wendell Berry and I'm already loving it. 

Here is a glimpse of the greatness:

"Of course, agriculture must be productive; that is a requirement as urgent as it is obvious.  But urgent as it is, it is not the first requirement; there are two more requirements equally important and equally urgent.  One is that if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well.  A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, and must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well."

That is what I hope to do someday.  I aspire to be a small scale farmer, eating only what I grow and maybe being a regular seller at a farmers market.  That's the dream, anyway.

And, Berry sums up in a paragraph one of the main reasons I am a vegetarian:

"To concentrate food-producing animals in large numbers in one place inevitably separates them from the sources of their feed.  Pasture and barnyard animals are removed from their old places in the order of a diversified farm, where they roamed about in some freedom, foraging to a significant extent for their own food, grazing in open pastures, or recycling barnyard and household wastes.  Confined in the pens of animal factories, they are made dependent almost exclusively upon grains which are grown in large monocultures, at a now generally recognized ecological cost, and which must be transported to the animals sometimes over long distances.  Animal factories are energy-wasting enterprises flourishing in a time when we need to be thinking of energy conservation."

If you haven't read Wendell Berry, you should make a trip to your local library right now.  Seriously.

i am twenty!

 

  

I figured now might be a good time to blog about my birthday- considering it was two weeks ago.  My birthday was Sunday July 18, but the festivities started on the previous Friday when my Dad took me to St. Louis for a father/daughter surprise date.  We ended up at the airport for "dinner," but during dinner Joshua (my boyfriend) showed up.  It was the best surprise and exactly what I needed.  It had been a month since I had last seen Josh.  A month is a very long time. There aren't enough words for how happy I was to see him and to get to spend 4 days with him!  Since Josh lives in Seattle we've only gotten to see each other twice this summer (including the birthday surprise).  Josh said we were stealing time from summer on my birthday weekend.  We spent our blissful four days swimming in the lake, riding bikes, hanging out with friends and family and staying up late.  On my actual birthday friends came over and we made a delicious dinner.  (peanut chicken saute, vegetable curry, grilled tomato sandwiches, focaccia bread and cookie dough cupcakes.)  After dinner we played Norwegian Table Manners and Spoons.  Fun games and fun friends.  I am blessed and so thankful for amazing family and friends.

Also, on a crafty note, I am loving paint and moleskin cahier notebooks together.  These pocket notebooks are the perfect size for short-ish quotes and what not.  I buy them in packs of three on amazon.com.  I recently got small bottles of acrylic paint on a super sale (5 for $1!) at Michael's, which is what I have been using to paint these beauties. 

Look for these in my shop!

thank you's + a quote.

These lovely thank you notes were inspired by this card and I'm planning to donate them along with some other cards to The Supply Education Group for an awareness event they're having in August.  I kind of just want to keep them and look at them.  I guess that means I should make some more.

These cards were pretty easy to make and SO cute.  First, cut the cardstock to the size you want.  Then the fun part- choosing the paper for the circles.  I used a tiny circle stencil and cut out the circles by hand.  Some people have a special dye-cut machine thing, but not me.  I'm too cheap for that.  I picked a coordinating neutral color for the strip in the back, glued it down and stamped "thank you."  I arranged the circles  and then glued them down.  I added some buttons and tied some string (embroidery floss) around the card just below the "thank you."  

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."  -Mother Teresa

a quote for the day.

What do we live for if not to make life a little bit easier for each other.
-anonymous