Sunday Sunshine: Cultivate Joy

It's that glorious time of year when we till the soil, sow the seeds, and plant what will in just a few weeks become a bountiful harvest of flowers, vegetables and more. 

Whether you sport a green thumb or not, you have the opportunity each and every day to be a gardener, a sower, a cultivator. You have the opportunity to cultivate joy.

Fortunately, cultivating joy is easy. When you view your life as blessing, abundance, grace and love, you tend to feel happier, to feel more joyful. 

Happiness and joy don't just stay within you. Their good energy exudes from you and spreads to others. You cultivate joy, which in turn, gives others joy to cultivate, too.

The great thing is you don't need lots of money, a new car, a fancy house, fashionable clothes or the latest gadget. Most often, our greatest joys come from our ordinary moments. Look for those moments and begin sowing "joy" seeds.

Today, this week: Cultivate joy.

Fresh Thoughts for Your Monday: Plant the Seeds

As farm fields become dense with growth and gardens yield summer produce and flowers, consider the seeds that you plant.

Do you sow seeds of love, abundance and joy? Do you create an atmosphere that is fertile for kindness, encouragement and goodwill? Do you care and feed your own internal "garden" to maximize personal growth and enrichment?

Plant the seeds today that will produce bright tomorrows.

What will you do with this glorious, precious day?

Hoops

While Larry has been experiencing March Madness, with one eye always focused on the televised basketball games of late, I've been having my own version of hoop dreams as I drive past area businesses setting up their hoop houses for spring plant sales.  After a winter that has seemed to be harsher and longer than in recent years, I am relishing my own celebration of March Madness. To finally see bags of mulch being stacked outdoors is a moment for celebration in Wisconsin.  Now, as I take my evening walks, I see people raking their yards, taking down Christmas lights and engaging in the annual ritual of preparing their lawns and homes for spring.  Someone I spoke with recently told me that she had begun her spring cleaning by washing down walls and cleaning in the crevices, room by room.   Another person I spoke with told me that she has seedlings growing indoors.  On this last day of March, I celebrate that we're moving into the glorious month of April, filled with all of the hope and activity that spring brings with it.

Green Routine

I puttered with some plants by our front entry one recent evening, preparing pots for annual plants and moving sedums that had overwhelmed certain spots but had avoided others.  It's still a tad too early in this climate to plant annual flowers because spring in Wisconsin can hold many surprises -- warm and sunny one day, threat of frost the next.  No matter the weather, no matter the calendar, I still needed to plant and get my hands dirty.  There is satisfaction in such quiet pursuits.  I should have been fixing our supper, but thankfully, Larry had encouraged me not to hurry when he saw me with trowel in hand.  The minutes stretched and we were both hungry when I finally came inside.  But getting to dip my kind-of-sort-of green thumb into the soil was worth every hunger pang.

Garden Chatter

Attending the Garden Expo in Madison recently filled my head with garden chatter.  For days, I kept replaying all of the great things I'd learned from the many excellent speakers.  One of the seminar presenters, Mark Dwyer of Rotary Gardens, noted how vital it is that we know where our vegetables come from. We live among generations today that are sadly not as close to the land as our forebears were. Hence, we don't always know where our food has come from. Or if we do, we see that it has likely traveled many miles or is so processed that it wouldn't even be recognizable as food by previous generations.  I heard a child, in all sincerity, one time refer to flavored chips as vegetables. The young boy had obviously had very little exposure to eating vegetables, let alone fresh bounty that came from a nearby garden, so he truly thought that the chips he ate were vegetables. When we tend to a garden, harvest the bounty, can it, freeze it, prepare it, taste it, buy it from a farmer's market, we know our food and from whence it came.  The recent difficult economy has driven many people to try their hand at gardening.  School gardens and community gardens are sprouting up.  Canning is becoming more popular once again.  It would be my wish that every person would have access to high-quality, locally grown produce to nourish their bodies.  Now that would be something to chatter about.