Sunday Sunshine: Bloom and Grow

Spring is the season of tilling and planting, greening and growing, blossoming and flourishing.

Take a cue from nature and bloom where you’re planted. Rise and shine! 

Your gifts are needed in this world. Make that place where you are right now better through the beauty of your talents, generosity and kindness.

Be your best self, your very best self. Think about what you think, say and do. Is it your best self? If not, make adjustments. As you grow and become, you will bloom and grow. You will rise and shine.

Today, this week: Rise, shine! Bloom where you are. Be your best self.

Sunday Sunshine: Look to Nature for Nurture

So much in life is bright and beautiful, just as the season of spring shows us through nature’s magnificent palette. The loveliness found in a spring day refreshes and renews.

Look to nature for nurture. Get outside. Breathe in the spring air. Watch the loveliness of the season unfold around you. Then, carry that beauty of spring with you in your heart.

When you fill your mind and heart with spring-like thoughts and feelings of the bright and beautiful, you invite them to feed your spirit and positively affect your mood and outlook.

When you choose to experience the bright and beautiful in your day, your eyes will begin to focus on those moments more and more until they naturally become what you view.

Today, this week: Enjoy these lovely spring days and carry them in your heart.

Sunday Sunshine: Spring in Your Step

For some of us, winter has taken its own sweet time to exit so that spring can walk through the door. Long, dark nights and cold temperatures, laced with a stiff wind, can wear on even the most resilient soul.

Spring comes along to remind us of renewal, the return of light, a time of birth and growth when everything springs back to life.

As you experience the vernal equinox  and the first official day of spring later this week, how do you plan to celebrate this change of seasons and the welcoming of a greening and growing time in nature and in your own life?

Happy Spring!

Sunday Sunshine: Rest. Renew. Recharge.

March is here -- that glorious month that heralds the beginning of spring. It’s easy now to begin filling your calendar with commitments, celebrations and activities. It’s easy to feel as if you’re running yourself ragged.

There is a gift, however, that you can give yourself, wrapped in a pretty spring bow. Give yourself time to refill your spiritual well and recharge your battery. You are more productive when you engage in self-care.

Spring is a season of renewal. Take a cue from nature.

Each day, make room in your busyness to take care of you. Read a chapter in a book. Take a walk. Listen to some good music. Write in a journal. Spend time outdoors. Close your eyes and meditate. Take a cat nap.

Today, this week: Rest. Renew. Recharge.

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.

Sunday Sunshine: Focus on the Good

For Christians, this is Holy Week, the week that will conclude with Easter next Sunday. 

Whether Christianity is your tradition or not, you may resonate in other ways with this season of rebirth and renewal, this time for greening and growing, this opportunity for planting seeds and watching the natural world burst with color and spring beauty.

There is so much goodness for us to enjoy this day, this week and during this season of spring. There is so much beauty for us to witness all around us and to emanate from inside of us. 

When we focus on the good, more of it seems to become visible to us.

Today, this week: Focus on the good things and they will grow in abundance.

Spring Bouquet

Spring arrives with the same exhilaration I feel when I receive a gift of flowers. I have said time and again in this blog how much I love spring and how it is my favorite of the seasons. I particularly love the hopeful, spring-green color that emerges in the hillsides when everything starts to wake up and come back to life for another season of growing and blooming.

While I know that spring officially arrives in March, in our cold climate, spring doesn’t start to make itself obvious until sometime in April.

My love of spring began when I was a child, perhaps because my late mother and I enjoyed spring birthdays. More likely, however, I love spring because my mom embraced the season fully with a joy that could only rub off on those around her.

My late mother, Barb Naidl (right), and me, posing in front of one of the lilac bushes in our backyard.

Spring meant an ever-cascading array of flowers in our home—lilacs, lilies of the valley, branches of forsythia and flowering current, and stems of iris, some dark purple and white and others brown and yellow. All of these flowering beauties grew without much assistance in our spacious backyard. They seemed to know they were welcome there, so they flourished pretty much on their own.

Me, lounging in our backyard. The beds of iris are visible behind me.

Beginning in April all the way through May, Mom would fill antique pitchers of all sizes with flowers, including one really large white porcelain pitcher that nestled perfectly into a large porcelain bowl, even though the bowl was not its original mate. That pitcher was so heavy that it required two hands to carry it safely.

This heavy bowl and pitcher held sprays of beauty during all seasons.

My favorite spring flowers were the lilacs and the lilies of the valley because of their heady scent. Mom would carefully cut, trim and then arrange small branches heavy with lavender and white lilacs in her precious pitcher collection and then place them strategically in nearly every room in our house, thus filling each space with fragrance.

There would be delicate milk glass vases filled with lilies of the valley, offering a lovely white-on-white contrast to the dark walnut antique commode chests on which they would be featured in our home’s living room. My mother loved antiques, so our home was rich with them.

Spring also meant the early budding of our yard’s three willow trees. Although they tend to be messy, I’ve always loved weeping willows. In the spring, they are among the first trees to hint that the seasons are changing, with their delicate yellow hue. 

The weeping willows in our yard provided a place for me to play and imagine.
In the early spring, they were among the first trees to hint at spring when they
turned a gentle shade of yellow-green while everything else was still brown.

Violets played a big part in my childhood springs and they still do today. As if overnight, our backyard would transform into a sea of white and purple as the violets began to bloom. Our family would wait to mow the lawn for the first time in the spring until the violets had had their time to shine.

Aside from nature’s welcoming changes, spring also meant a change in wardrobe, particularly represented by a new dress to wear to church on Easter. I can still remember how special I felt in one particular Easter outfit. The dress was made of a linen blend, the top portion of it white splashed with large, navy blue polka dots and the skirt portion plain navy. Over the dress was a matching navy linen blend coat. I wore a white hat decorated with a wide, navy blue grosgrain ribbon. The outfit was topped off with white anklets, white shoes and white gloves. I felt snazzy!

One of my favorite new Easter outfits from my childhood.
I felt so dressed up with my hat and matching dress and coat.

Despite my fond memories of new Easter clothes and the remembrances of how special I felt in them, when I reflect on springs past, it’s the flowers I recall most vividly and how my mom would bring them inside to transform our home into a special, fragrant and lovely place.

There are signs of spring sprouting everywhere now. Spend some time in nature, watching the changes unfold, the flowers bloom and the increasing signs of earth’s reawakening.

And as the earth transforms, contemplate what that reawakening of spring might mean for you.

Fresh Thoughts for Your Monday: Bright Desires

Spring is that glorious time of year when we witness new beginnings as the earth springs forth with growth and beauty. We tend to our gardens and we watch the plants grow.

Now is also a glorious time to look at what needs to spring forth in your own life and to cultivate and grow those desires and dreams.

What hidden, bright desire do you want to bring forth into your life? Perhaps it’s a new hobby, a new relationship, a new community, a new job, a new book to read, a new hill to climb.

Spring into action! Your season is here!

Today, this week: Be your true, best self. Don’t waste time or energy on regret. You can make great things happen!

Fresh Thoughts for Your Monday: Bright and Beautiful

So much in life is bright and beautiful, just as the season of spring demonstrates to us through nature’s magnificent palette.

Fill your mind and heart with thoughts and feelings of the bright and beautiful. Allow them to feed your spirit and affect your mood and outlook.

When you choose to experience the bright and beautiful in your day, your eyes will begin to focus on those moments more and more until they naturally become what you view.

Today, this week: Carry the beauty of spring with you, no matter the season. 

In Bloom

If there's ever a month that conveys the hope of spring, it is April. For those of us who live in south-central Wisconsin, spring often takes several weeks after its official arrival in March at the vernal equinox to make itself truly known. 

April begins, of course, today with April Fool's Day on the first. Sometimes, April does fool us by hanging onto March's lion-and-lamb tendencies -- first hinting at warmer weather, then clobbering us with one more heavy, wet snowstorm.

As April gets used to itself, however, it gets over its last-attempt winter tendencies and becomes what it was intended to be: the month of blooming joy. 

From the wood violets and Virginia bluebells to the tulips and daffodils, April settles in as its colorful and happy self. It is the month when nature's palette moves from gray and tan and brown and white to red and yellow and deep purple and bright green. It's as if everything awakens, and with that awakening, April decides to put on its best finery and make an appearance.

April is also the month of warm sunshine and refreshing raindrops. Both are needed for this month of renewal.

At this time of year, I can no longer stay inside, content to simply look out the window. I've already done 90% of my spring cleaning during the deep, dark winter months. I surely don't want to waste a single day or minute of glorious April stuck inside cleaning. 

April is meant for long walks, big dreams, deep breaths and blooming energy. Soak up its loveliness.

Welcome, April! 

Fresh Thoughts for Your Monday: Time to Grow

Just as the grass is beginning to grow, the trees are budding, and the early spring flowers are starting to lift their heads out of the soil, we, too, have opportunities to rise and shine during this glorious season of growth and renewal.

Today is a new day. Today marks a new week. Look for opportunities for your creative energies and ideas to form. Look for ways for you to grow as a person.

Today, this week: Be Spring! Bloom! Grow!

Seasonal Sprinkles: Spring's Here!

Spring has officially sprung today!  

With the vernal equinox, the birdsong seems louder, the sky seems bluer and the leaves begin to sprout on the trees. 

Now is a time of new beginnings, a time of renewal, and a time when nature leaves its quiet mode and bursts forth with color. 

This is indeed a time of new life, an opportunity to explore our own renewals and to raise our voices in jubilation for all of our blessings. 

Happy Spring!

Fresh Thoughts for Your Monday: Get Rid of the Clutter

Now’s a perfect time to let go of what you no longer need. A clean space and mind allow for something new to enter your life.

Live a life free of clutter. You have what it takes to thoughtfully and easily remove those things from your life that no longer suit you. Those things may be actual objects, but they can also be negative thoughts clouding your positivity or over-commitments weighing heavily on your shoulders.

Consider spending time today removing the tangible and intangible clutter from your life and get to the essence of what’s important to you.

Here We Come, Spring

The signs of spring are all around us and I, for one, am ready for them. Whether winter holds us in her tight grip for months with a heavy dose of harsh temperatures and mounds of snow or not, I'm always ready for the return of warmer weather, green grass, blooming flowers and longer daylight. I am a spring person at heart.

I love all that spring represents, from Daylight Saving Time's return to the spiritual experience of Easter to the tulips that bloom in every color from white to pink to red. Spring is the time of renewal, of new possibilities, and of an optimistic view of the world. It's no wonder the season bears the name Spring, for everything springs up and forth and forward (including the clocks). 

At this time of year, I love visiting with my neighbor who has planted a wide variety of spring wildflowers over the years, thus creating a colorful cascading succession of bloom, from bloodroot to Virginia bluebells to jack-in-the-pulpits. She calls me each time another plant begins to show its colors. That prompts me to walk over for a look-see and a long conversation with her about the miracles of nature.

Now's the time to open the windows—if only for a brief while—to bring in the fresh air and let loose the old, stale, cooped-up winter air. Now's the time to clean out the cupboards and closets, wash the curtains and windows, roll up the throw rugs that collected winter salt and sand at the doorways, and begin to get out the spring skirts and dresses. Now's the time to think about gardening, hiking, camping and summer vacations. Now's the time to embrace the warmth of the sunlight as it touches your face. 

As a child, spring meant my mother would wash the kitchen curtains she'd sewn, pressing them and placing them back up in the windows to billow happily once the windows could be open for summer. Spring meant my getting a new jump rope and Mom spending after-school hours twirling one end of the rope while the other was tied to our fence so I could practice any new jump-roping tricks I'd learned from my little girlfriends at school. Spring meant getting a new dress, white gloves, hat and shoes for Easter services. It meant having an Easter lily or two in the living room. Spring meant watching and waiting for forsythia, flowering currant and lilac blossoms to spring forth so that Mom could cut sprays of them to display in antique pitchers and vases throughout our home. Spring meant the weeping willows revealing their springy yellow leaves far before anything else even dared to blossom or bloom.

Spring is clean and fresh and lovely. I gladly welcome its return this month.

What are your thoughts about spring? What are some of your favorite spring memories? What does the season mean to you? 

Fresh Air

     When you live in a cold-weather climate, there's nothing as lovely as opening windows for the first time in the spring and letting in fresh air. My routine spring tasks include sweeping out the mounds of sand from the garage floor that had accumulated over months of snow, washing winter salt off of the car and putting screens back on casement windows. I practically dance whenever I do these chores, for it means one thing: spring! Warmer weather is on the way. It’s a time of newness.

      It's been our habit in recent years to remove the screens from our home’s windows in the fall, washing them down and storing them for the winter so we can get the most out of the precious daylight streaming through our windows during the long, dark months. Whenever I hear the temperature is supposed to soar into the 60s, I wash the insides of the windows, reinstall the screens and then let in the fresh breezes to release the stale, cooped-up winter air.

      Such activity makes me think of the stale energy that might be cooped up and cluttering my mind and heart.

      A few years ago, I didn’t want to admit I was stuck in a rut. Things were difficult in my life at that time between my own illness and caring for a dying parent. I felt stuck in chaos. In looking back, however, I realize I was indeed stuck in a rut. I was stuck in the mindset of how I thought things should be in my life, not how they actually were.

      Once I identified my true feelings and set into motion some new thoughts, I opened my mind and heart, letting go of the difficult things that weighed me down. That new perspective brought about an acceptance and gratitude that helped me through a tough time. Rather than staying stuck in “what should be,” I found peace in “what was.”

      When I breathe in gratitude and change my way of thinking, it’s as if that old energy dissipates and a new, affirming energy sweeps in to take its place. I grow by gaining new insights. Where I had been stuck, there is now release. The windows of my world become clearer. The salt and sand stuck in the crevices of my old mindset are swept away. That’s one type of cleaning that doesn’t have to wait until spring.

Trowel in One Hand, Rake in the Other

In the autumn, those still-falling leaves become an annoyance. How many times does one have to untangle them from shrub branches?  In the spring, it's another matter. I couldn't wait for the weather to cooperate long enough to, you guessed it, untangle last fall's leaves from around our shrubs' branches. There's something about spring that just makes me want to get my face close to the ground and smell the rich, musky aroma of the soil. We live in a condominium where there isn't much opportunity to do yard work, but what little I could do, I was out doing it recently. I also swept the sand from the garage floor and cleaned the inside of my car (including deep cleaning the driver's side floor mat and removing last year's state park sticker). Then, Larry and I wandered our condo association's grounds, making the "official" list of projects for spring and summer. This year, they range from touch-up painting to shrub trimming to re-seeding and fertilizing the lawn. As I take my evening and weekend walks, I see other eager beavers out in their yards, trowel in one hand, rake in the other, thankful that another winter has passed and the hope of spring has sprung forth. 

Resurrection Song

For the past several days, the hymn "Easter People Raise Your Voices" has been going through my head. The jubilant nature of the song coincides well with the joy of the Easter holiday and of the spring season when all comes alive. It is at this time of year when thoughts of resurrection take on special and deep meaning. In a letter our pastor wrote to the congregation, she suggested that we "remember 'resurrection' is a call to new life and an appeal for us to practice resurrection here and now." I witnessed signs of new life as I took an Easter afternoon walk yesterday.  There was the purple crocus peeking out of a crevice, the daffodil clump in bloom, children on swings in their Easter go-to-church clothes, teenagers playing baseball and shooting hoops, adults on front porches and on patios, dogs barking as they raced around their backyards, the scent of a barbecue grill in the distance. As Christians celebrated resurrection yesterday, the Earth celebrated a resurrection, too, in the form of a renewal from the quiet of winter to the awakening of spring.  This is indeed a time of new life, an opportunity to explore our own renewals and to raise our voices in jubilation for all of our blessings.

A New Season

Spring has officially sprung today and I can't be happier. The birdsong seems louder. The snow seems to melt faster. The sky seems bluer. All seems right with the world now that spring has arrived. Spring is my favorite time of year, for it is a time of new beginnings, a time of renewal, a time when nature leaves its quiet mode and bursts forth with color.  I can't be outside enough at this time of year. So, I am giving myself the gift of more time outdoors.  As part of that gift, I am applauding the fact that winter is "officially" behind us with all of its relentless darkness, freezing cold, feet of snow and raw winds. Consequently, I will reduce the number of blog posts I'm writing to twice weekly, posting only on Mondays and Thursdays, until further notice. Instead of sitting in front of my laptop, I'll be outside taking walks, breathing in the fresh air and watching spring unfold with all of its beauty and new life. It's a new and glorious season, one to enjoy to the fullest! 

Even Longer

Today has been a day for friendship.  It began with getting together with my lovely friend Kitty who brings me joy every time we get together.  She has the passionate heart of an artist.  Everything she touches turns into something beautiful.  My times with her calm and feed my soul at the same time. Larry and I have also been invited to a party this evening.  It was to begin as a going-away party of sorts, but due to various circumstances, has turned into a party to celebrate spring with friends. I'm grateful for any reason to get together with these wonderful friends, for we have been close for many years. Their invitation made me think of how important friends are to my happiness.  We can be individuals, we can be independent, but there is nothing like the blessing of friends to share the good times with you and buoy you up during the not-so-good times. All of these friends with whom I will have spent my day and evening have been just that in my life. As Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet said in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, "We'll be friends forever, won't we, Pooh?" asked Piglet. "Even longer," Pooh answered.  To all of my Even Longer friends, thank you.

New Season

When I awoke today, a new season greeted me. Today is the vernal equinox, the first day of spring.  Spring is my favorite season.  I love the return of the robins, the increased daylight, the warm breezes, the gentle rain, the blooming flowers, the budding trees, and the overall cast of light spring green (my favorite color) that covers the landscape.  Inside tasks fall lower on my priority list because all I want to do is be outside to celebrate this wonderful time of year. Spring is symbolically a season of renewal.  The harsh reality of winter is cast aside for the hope that spring represents.  With the beginning of this new season, I have decided to give myself a break from the daily postings on this blog.  When I started writing Time to Be nearly 1 1/2 years ago, I had hoped to blog daily for a year (done) and then I hoped to compose 500 blog posts (done). I'll still keep writing, but not daily. I hope you'll check in now and again to follow along on my writing journey. I realize that I need to revel in all that spring has to offer right now and draw inspiration from this favorite season of mine for future blog posts.  Meanwhile, I'll simply enjoy some Time to Be.