Monthly Archives: June 2012

The Art of Making Mulberry Paper {A Fair Trade Giveaway!}

Posted on by
3

I nestle into my quiet spot on the balcony. My book and pencil are invited, as usual. Graphite settles into grooves in the margins of bound paper, all these pages made from former branches cut from the trunk and given new purpose.

Skinny trees along my property line reach long arms toward me. The one nearest offers teeny purple berries.

A picture from the past flashes: stripes of red on finger tips and blotches of purple on the sundress, colors of a childhood summer.

I walk over and snap a mulberry from the twig, close my eyes and let it burst on the tongue. Better than any flavor off the ice cream truck. I help myself to another, then toy with the torn seam of its leaf.

I remember other leaves like this chewed through like swiss cheese. Before the island hopping, my sister and I rode tuk-tuks on dirt roads in the mountains of Thailand where artisans carved out creative pause under open canopy.

There, mulberry leaves fell to little creatures bent over in labor, spinning thread for the loom. It was a sweat shop really, my sister mumbled when we got a good look at the silk worms. So, we got out fast and went on to the happy garden where sunbathing orchids wrapped their roots around splintered wood.

Around the bend, artisans set out new creations to cure in the sunlight before the next monsoon. This product started with mulberry branches torn from the tree, bleeding sugar water, pale flinders cracking in open air.

Women peeled the bark back like skin off a potato and threw the branches into water, plunging them deep. The branches came apart in ribbons the color of newborn skin. There was no rest. It was all rapids.

The ribbons swirled through the metal canal and hurtled toward fangs that gnawed remnants of wood down to pulp. The bits sprawled into a slurry and cascaded down, not looking like much of anything.

But all of the hurry, the movement, the fragmentation came down to this one place. When it looked like nothing but murky water, there were hands that moved sure, ones grooved and browned like the bark of a tree, hands that grabbed hold of a sturdy frame and lifted it from the turbulence and into calm air. Water gushed down from the frame’s wire screen. Feathery wisps settled in, enmeshed. Frenzied fibers interlocked and found rest after  madness.

Without this stillness, there would be no becoming, only falling apart.

Artisans in straw hats arranged the sheets in the sun, each frame propped against another, forming a village of A-frame tents. And in the warmth of day, in the stillness, strands that once came apart in chaos now bonded together in a whole new way…becoming mulberry paper.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ENTER THE SOULCARE JOURNAL GIVEAWAY!

Experience the benefits of solitude (and the beauty of mulberry paper!) by winning this beautiful hand-crafted, recycled, fair trade journal and the thoughtful booklet “Write for Your Soul: The Hows and Whys of Journaling” by Jeff and Mindy Caliguire, courtesy of Soulcare. Plus, I’m throwing in a little twig pencil, one of my favorite finds of late.

To enter today’s giveaway, comment on this post before midnight on Friday, June 29, sharing one way you practice solitude in the midst of your frenzied life. The winning entry will be selected at random and revealed on this post on Saturday, June 30.

For more entries, simply “like” Message in a Mason Jar on Facebook or follow @darcywileywords on Twitter and re-comment here to let me know you did so.

And the winner is…Amber! I’ll be including another SoulCare journal set in the Gift from the Sea giveaway at the end of our easy, breezy summer book club. Stay tuned….

Finding Islands {Gift from the Sea 3: Moon Shell}

Posted on by
57

Within the first ten minutes, while the hood of the van cooled under the shade of a palm tree, she broke free from our grasp and went for the deep end. She steadied herself upright in her life jacket and churned her legs through the water like the blades of a boat motor. If she would have known the phrase, she would have said, “Told you so.” She had kicked in our arms, pushed for freedom, demanded that we let her swim with the cousins without us holding on. And she did it, swam until her tiny fingertips were “all raisins.”

At night, we  kissed her sunwarmed cheeks and watched her heavy eyes finally give in. But a few hours later, her scream tore through the sound of soothing waves and bolted us from our sleep. We cradled her, two pairs of arms and hands sweeping away bad dreams. The next day she jumped right back in the pool and buzzed around in the middle of the action.

Night two was the sleepless sequel. This time she wailed for 45 minutes straight, inconsolable. Her cry echoed out to the beach until my husband pulled the storm door on the balcony. We calmed her and put her back in bed, only to be shaken from our sleep an hour later. We talked her through, offered water, hugged her. She hyperventilated.

After a long night of short bursts of sleep, I awoke in the morning with puffy crescents under my eyes, like the moon hanging over too long into morning. We needed an intervention. I packed two lunches, strapped Farah into the car and waved to the boys as they walked off to another day in the sun with the family. We headed toward the bridge.

When my husband’s grandparents first brought their young family to vacation here in 1957, they had to wait in line at the old swing bridge to get to Fort Myers Beach. And to get from here to Sanibel, you had to take a ferry. “How wonderful are islands!” Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote from Captiva, “Islands in space, like this one I have come to, ringed about by miles of water, linked by no bridges, no cables, no telephones.”

At a stoplight, I fiddled with the map on my phone and studied the pulsating blue dot that told me exactly where in the world we were at that moment. Our islands are so connected now. We are never out of reach. And how can we expect to live “like a child or a saint in the immediacy of here and now” when we are busy thinking of how we will document the moment and share it with a few hundred friends on social media?

I turned off the radio, listened to the sound of rubber tires flapping over road seams. Farah asked where we were going. I glanced down again at the interactive map. We were headed deep into Sanibel, off the main stretch to a place of calm. Even as we approached, there was a sense that we could be wasting the day, one of our mere seven days at the beach.

But before we know “the quality to fullness that the Psalmist expressed: ‘My cup runneth over,’” we have to start toward the beginning of Psalm 23: “He makes me lie down.” First there is this giving up of overactivity, a giving in to stillness. We must lie down and rest and admit that the world will go on without our scurrying about.

Farah needed to rest today, to find another rhythm. And I learned from this, too. For weeks, I had spent my creativity on ideas for our road trip. And these couple of days at the beach, I had been worrying myself with a whole new set of challenges. After all, our vacations have changed since we welcomed our little ones to the family starting almost five years ago. There is more to fuss about now. Gone are the days of taking a novel and a towel out to the sand. Now we load our arms with life jackets and cans of sunscreen to keep the kids safe, and we turn this way and that to make sure we don’t lose anyone.

We pulled into the parking lot of the shell museum and toted our lunch to the garden area. A bench waited for us among glossy leaves and delicate flowers. We listened to the sound of trickling water. I felt it in the quiet: “He restores my soul.” Inside, we sauntered slow, touching everything, taking it in. We marveled at a clam shell bigger than Farah. We traced the growth of a mollusk from baby to adult. We matched lettered olives and conches and channeled whelks with their friends.

This felt like the purposeful giving that Anne Morrow Lindbergh noted. As I walked with Farah in this quiet space, and even as I was not fully alone, I experienced the benefits of solitude. This “belongs to the natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give–like milk in the breast.” The author wrote more, “Even purposeful giving must have some source that refills it. The milk in the breast must be replenished by food taken into the body. If it is woman’s function to give, she must be replenished too.”

Why does this sound so audacious that we should carve out some time away to be refilled? After all, “Every paid worker, no matter where in the economic scale, expects a day off a week and a vacation a year. By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off.” And doesn’t this time off makes us better fit for work and relationship when we return? Whether it be a run in the morning or reading time at a cafe in the evening or a personal retreat sometime during the year, we serve ourselves and our families well when we set an appointment for time alone.

In order to find fulfillment in whatever our calling may be, we must carve out an island of time for contemplation and creativity. And in order to be truly away, it may not be a bad idea to turn off our devices, those bridges that keep us over-connected. Anne Morrow Lindbergh said that we should “…consciously encourage those pursuits which oppose the centrifugal forces of today. Quiet time alone, contemplation, prayer, music, a centering line of thought or reading, or study or work. It can be physical or intellectual or artistic, any creative life proceeding from oneself. It need not be an enormous project or a great work, but it should be something of one’s own. Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day….” We women come back from solitude with souvenirs of a clear mind and renewed spirit…and maybe even a piece of art.

When we arrived at the pool, Farah ran to the family to show off her shell bracelet. It was her little memento from our refreshing day away. The night was my souvenir, my little girl sleeping through, every deep breath rising to the rhythm of ocean waves.

{This week’s post is based on Chapter 3, “Moon Shell” in Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. View all entries in the series here.}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, what’s your take? Pick one or more of the reflection questions in the comments section and enter a reply to share your thoughts. All subscribers’ comments on the weekly Gift from the Sea posts (shared on Mondays in June and July) will be entered for a drawing at the end of our Summer Book Club 2012.

The Yarny Yarrow: Vintage Delight in the Garden of Simplicity

Posted on by
6

What was it about that lanky weed? I had seen it last weekend at the garden shop and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I know it spreads, sowing its seed wild, and stretches its roots wide. But I couldn’t be put off.

Maybe it’s the way the tiny florets circled together like knotted embroidery thread on a vintage blouse. It reminded me of old times, simpler times when the family yard was more like a domesticated meadow.

When we walked the grounds of an outdoor history museum a few weeks ago, my mom pointed to the clover laid out all over the lawn like scraps of fabric sewn into a quilt. When she was growing up, all the yards in the neighborhood looked that way. Simplicity allows room for natural growth, welcomes a bit of wild. Now, many of us douse our grass with newfangled chemicals, always another to-do on the list if we want to keep the lawn presentable.

I see this specimen, the Gold Yarrow, on a vintage botanical print…all the stages of its cycle, the segments of its form, its tough stems, ferny leaves, clustered flowers, all drawn out and labeled. In another era, its silvery foliage was crushed into a salve for healing wounds, or a tea to ward off colds or melancholy. It’s no wonder, the way this peculiar plant makes my dimples show.

I’ve been thinking on the shape of a happy life this week, pondering Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s advice that we should think hard before we add something new to our schedule or home. She speaks of a shell, the channelled whelk, that she will carry back from the beach to remind her of “the ideal of the simplified life.” And she vows “To ask how little, not how much, can I get along with. To say–is it necessary?–when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity.”

Many of us need to clear out our schedules and homes and start from the basics, a practice something like dividing the overzealous plants that have taken over the garden. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s question is certainly helpful. But I fear we may deprive ourselves of much beauty if we only ask, “Is it necessary?”

Another idea came to mind this week when I couldn’t get that yarny yarrow out of my mind. Was it necessary that I head all the way back to the garden shop, with the kids in tow, to find again that vintage delight of a plant? No. Yet the endeavor felt simple, somehow. Why? Because it brought me joy. It wasn’t drudgery or another to-do to make me sigh. I was fueled by delight. These two ideas are companion plants in the garden of simplicity: Is it necessary? Does it bring me joy?

Back home, I set the newbies in full sun. The flowery herbs stretched tall, leaned toward light, a thousand little yellow sponges soaking it all in. The simple life makes room for joy.

{How about you? What questions do you ask yourself when deciding what to allow into/around your home and schedule? Share your ideas in the comments section.}

And be sure to spread the love by “liking” Message in a Mason Jar on Facebook!

Write it girl Linking up with “Write it, Girl” today. :)

West Palm Runaway {Gift from the Sea 2: Channelled Whelk}

Posted on by
53

In the year that I turned two, I bid farewell to both of my grandmothers. Elsie flew away to Heaven. And Mamie bought a one-way bus ticket to West Palm Beach. If you would have asked me as a toddler what made her pack her bags for the Sunshine State, I would have said it was the palm trees, their coconuts bouncing like beach balls, their long arms waving toward the shore. I remember being there and running across the street to them when nobody was looking. Where there were palm trees, there was water. And where there was water, that’s where I wanted to be.

In the comments on the Stars Dancing in the Water post, one friend talked about the “water effect…that sense of clarity and calm that people possess when they’ve been in the presence of water.” Maybe that’s what my grandmother had in mind. Or maybe she was looking for a better fit like “a little hermit crab, who has run away, leaving [her] tracks behind [her] like a delicate vine on the sand.” She and her heartache had seemed to outgrow the Indiana neighborhood she had called home for so long. Had she, like the hermit crab, needed a change of shell? “Did [she] hope to find a better home, a better mode of living?”

She had come with only a suitcase, the perfect beginning for simplicity. But two years later, her tiny apartment was already overstuffed. And when we visited again when I was 18, we had to put our lanky teenage arms at our sides to make it through the narrow passage inside the door. Boxes, books, papers and tins all teetered in precarious stacks that reached to the ceiling.

Outside, a woman whizzed by on a bicycle, calling out to a neighbor in happy Spanish. Inside, my grandmother waddled about, shuffling newspapers and file folders and needlepoint kits, making rooms for us to sit. Grandma was a woman trying to pedal a bike with a wobbly wheel. She had lost a spoke to broken marriage. And she had let her relationship with every one of her four children bust loose.

She had not endeavored to solve Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s question: “how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.” Without dealing with the complications of her life head-on, she could never fully change. She hadn’t come to this place to simplify and reflect on her life. She had come to laugh with the bubbly surf and pretend the hurts never happened. She had come to escape her life altogether.

I feel fortunate that I haven’t had to face those shocks and deal with such difficulties, but even “the life I have chosen as wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.” I have to catch my breath from merely reading the author’s summary of a mother’s work…let alone attempting it. How can it ever be done? And that’s not even to mention my desire to find “creative pause.”

Here, we can walk alongside Anne Morrow Lindbergh as she seeks “inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony,” and “inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.”

This then affects the way we interact with our environment and our responsibilities. I know too little of the “first happy condition” in which “one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide…” And I know too much of “the opposite state” in which “one can hardly tie a shoe-string.” Too often, I feel that centrifugal force pulling me off center. Too often, I feel more like I’ve been sucked in by an undertow rather than the sensation of surfing on a great tide.

“It has to do primarily with distractions,” the author wrote, “The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children, the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls–woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.” But does it have to be this way? What if we could look at our activities and accumulations and ask “how little, not how much, can I get along with. To say–is it necessary?–when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity.” When we endeavor changes in the outward life, we learn about the inward life.

If we can simplify our homes and our schedules, we have more room to invite people in, the friends with whom we “can be completely honest.”  If we can start the day in prayer and de-clutter the inner life, we come at those relationships unencumbered, able to be authentic, to avoid “the most exhausting thing in life…being insincere,” and to shed the mask. If we sit a bit with our Maker and get His take on how our time and talents can best be used, we come with new clarity to the “ever-widening circles of contact and communication….not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals and so on.”

For Anne Morrow Lindbergh, her simple “sea-shell of a house” is the perfect place to consider all these things. But she knows the place is not one for dwelling permanently. After all, “total retirement is not possible” for a woman who wants a life with her family, “to share with friends and community, to carry out…obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.” As she said, peace comes not in “total renunciation…nor in total acceptance. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return.”

I think my grandmother only realized this at the end, as my family bridged the waters between us and her, that we needed her to return from retreat in one form or another, to shed her mask and experience authentic relationship. On my last visit, as my husband rolled her wheelchair back into her room at the nursing home in West Palm Beach, my grandmother, normally full of jokes and laughter, began to sob. She pushed herself up onto her feet, shuffled over to a corner and opened the lid to a messy box of stuff, the only remains of her cluttered life.

She pulled out a framed needlepoint rendition of the poem, “Footprints,” and handed it to me as a souvenir. My eyes flowed too. Her spoken words and the work of her hands in that frame were evidence that even if she hadn’t yet figured out how to mend her family relationships, she had found a starting point, a trust in Jesus. In this simple, over-used poem, my grandmother had discovered a metaphor for her need, that when her wheels went wobbly and she grew too old to walk straight and she didn’t know how to return from retreat, she could trust Him to carry her to a place of simplicity…all the while marking out a path with those not-so-lonely footprints in the sand.

{This week’s post is based on Chapter 2, “Channelled Whelk” in Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. View all entries in the series here.}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, what’s your take? Pick one or more of the reflection questions in the comments section and enter a reply to share your thoughts. All subscribers’ comments on the weekly Gift from the Sea posts (shared on Mondays in June and July) will be entered for a drawing at the end of our Summer Book Club 2012.

Surprised by Summer

Posted on by
7

I started last summer with a list.

Cloud gazing.
Firefly catching.
Bird watching.
Running through sprinklers.

I was all set to lead my kids on a tour of the season’s simple joys.

Strawberry picking.
Bare feet on grass.
A boat ride on the lake with friends.

I had plans for them to take it all in.

Fresh-squeezed lemonade.
Buttered corn on the cob.
Growing a watermelon from seed, then sinking teeth into the ripe red.
Walking to the local parlor for ice cream.
Cotton candy at a carnival.

I was writing their future memories.

Reining in the wind with pinwheels and kites.
Waving flags and watching the parade.
Swirling their sparklers and gasping at fireworks.

It was all I planned for summer, these little pleasures, this simple list. I needed this intentionality to kick me out of the phase of weariness that had carried over from the previous fall and winter and into spring.

But then the first week of this new season started with surgery to uncover and leash my unruly canine tooth, the one that had been hiding in my palate since childhood, one that we meant to pull forward to join the rest of my teeth. A few weeks later, I learned the surgery was useless and that I’d need another.

I felt a bit foolish to look at my summer’s simple joys list now, to revisit all of the idealistic pleasures I had planned…. What did it matter if joy came near, anyway if I couldn’t smile?

As soon as I’d stumble on a happy event and my lips dared to open, I’d slap my hand over my mouth to keep people from seeing my flared teeth and the horrible empty space in the front of my smile. Behind the scenes, it was even worse. One of my teeth had been pushed so hard from orthodontic treatment that it was thrust outside of my arch, its root protruding, almost piercing my gums.

But in the midst of the leftover cloud of anesthesia, the haze of pain meds and the almost-daily visits to the surgeon when the recovery went awry…in the middle of it, joy found me.

I visited my newborn niece and talked misty-eyed with her mom about the pretty things that hang on discipline and hard times, and I thought how pain is often the backdrop that makes joy stand out all the more. And vice versa. As I shared in the comments section of the Stars Dancing in the Water post the other day, in Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis wrote, “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”

When joy finds us, we feel the full meaning of the moment. We soak in the good, but we also feel the pain of knowing that all is not perfect…yet. These little joys in the middle of hardship, they are glimpses of the full redemption to come, when we will have these gifts as they were meant to be.

Like Ann Voskamp and her list, I was starting to keep one of my own, not things I planned to find, but things that found me….

My little beauty playing behind the sheer curtain in her room, looking like a veiled bride.
Her eating strawberries right from the field, this confidence that all He makes is hers to enjoy.
My little boy clipping his sailboat tie on his T-shirt before heading to the playground, a creative-type surely starting a new fashion trend.

And then, if only you could have seen my son when we went to the farm to visit Hoover, our original unruly canine. My boy saw the open fields and he didn’t need a list of summer’s simple joys to tell him to do this, he just felt it, real freedom, and he ran with all his might and turned himself upside down in somersault after somersault after somersault, open-mouthed grinning all the way.

And, sometime I want to tell you the whole story, how my children piled puppy after puppy on my lap that night, all eight of the little Hoovers, just days old. I want to tell you bit by bit how I went to the farm that night with teeth gritted and shoulders squared, a fighting failure of a mother and homemaker, and how they piled those sweet, sleepy, trusting puppies on me and made me know my worth. I ended the night with open hands, fireflies landing in them and taking off again over fields of soybeans, a joy hoped for that summer, but until then, not yet seen.

The summer went on. I kept on playing despite the pain and uncertainty. We read Feathers for Lunch, made nests out of salad and got to our bird watching. We ran through sprinklers. We twiddled our toes in grass. We walked to town for ice cream…more than once. We grew our watermelons and chewed them down almost to the rind where they curved like toothy little grins. We waved our flags and swirled our sparklers, checking off some more boxes on our original summer to-do list. And still, the spontaneous surprises came.

I clapped at the sight of my friend and her new husband kicking off their sandals on the dune where they said “I do,” laughter and grains of sand soaring. Afterward, my non-dancing husband twirled me and pulled me close in the low light of the bandstand. I laid my head on his shoulder, trusted his lead. Earlier, at the wedding ceremony, I had read from Joel, and the words came again to me now: “I will make up to you for the years that the locust has eaten.” I needed to trust His lead, too, to count on Him to make up for the months ruined by my unruly canine(s). And soon, He would do it– He would lead my family to one of our favorite restaurants, not even on our usual night, and cross my path with a friend who works for a different orthodontic provider.

I felt we were getting somewhere, but then, on my birthday, I lay in bed depressed again. Unlike my old provider, this new one was confident he could lure my tooth back into the arch, make my smile presentable again and even close my bite. But my first two years in braces would count for nothing. We were starting from below ground zero. I would have to pay the full price for a completely new orthodontic plan. This had been weighing on me for weeks, me feeling like a money pit.

Then the phone rang. I wiped my eyes and put some cheer in my voice so as not to give my mood away. It was my husband. He had gotten a call from his boss just then, an unexpected raise, six months before review time. And it covered all but twelve dollars of the monthly fee for my new orthodontic plan. A surprise…just for me.

The boss didn’t know it was my birthday, but God did. And He knew just what I needed that day. The attentive One who sent me a heart-shaped tomato in the garden in the heat of summer, He had a birthday gift picked out for me, an all-expense-paid trip to healing and wholeness. I needed to know I was not a burden and that my situation hadn’t escaped His notice and that I didn’t have to plan or provide for myself. He knew all that.

He has a list, too, these simple joys He’s just waiting to give. And when He surprised me with it all last summer, in the middle of trouble, I couldn’t help but smile…with my teeth showing.

{So far, this summer is much less eventful than last! Have you ever been surprised by what a season had in store? What do you have planned for this one? Share your story in the comments.}