When I was young and would play outside in the snow in the winter, I remember occasionally looking towards the house and seeing my mother standing and watching us through the big bay window. Yesterday, Alan and Indy went outside to dig us out before we headed to the Ash Wednesday service at church. They weren't out there for long, and I only watched them for a few minutes out the window, but I think I had my first genuine moment of feeling like a parent, feeling like I was standing in my mother's shoes for just a fleeting second. Standing there in the warm, dim house, with Tenny wrapped on my back, him watching Indy over my shoulder, it was just so quiet, quiet enough to actually hear myself think - a rare moment in the life of a mother of young children. It was a moment of feeling very present, with this comfortable, settled feeling, anticipating the mother-henliness of welcoming my loves back into the warm house with dinner steaming on the table, and peeling Indy out of her soggy snow clothes. I suppose I felt very blessed.

Later, during the sermon, our Bishop was speaking about the idea of "keeping company" with God in relation to prayer. When you keep company with someone, you don't always have intention for it, sometimes you just talk about the weather, because the point is just to spend time with the other person. I like the phrase, and I'm a girl so I don't compartmentalize - instantly my brain was a web of applications; I thought about that moment earlier, standing at the window, how I could draw closer to God and keep company with Him without needing to really pray anything. I thought of this space, and how that phrase applies to what you do when you come visit me here - you keep company with me - and this space can also often mirror my feelings about my prayer life: I feel all of this pressure to have great intent, something thoroughly crafted to say, a clear end goal, and if I don't have that then I just don't write or I don't pray. If I free myself of that pressure then I am free, free to come here and write and free to pray, about the weather or plants or food or deeper thoughts if I have them, and growth happens naturally. In fact, even the act of writing here can be prayerful, spiritual, if I invite God to keep company with me here, too. When I write here, I'm inviting you into moments of my life, an act which mirrors what I'd like my relationship with God to look like: the practice of continually inviting Him into every moment of my life.

(1. Farm fresh eggs, every morning. 2. Solo cutie tea party. 3. My new tea love - tastes like weeding the garden in July. 4. Tulips - pretending spring is here already! 5. Alan's 30th birthday gift on friday - I made him a calendar with a different herb for each month.)

Pictures have been totally random and disconnected. I know. My vision and intentions for this space are always changing, always growing with me. I don't fully remember my thoughts when I initially decided to start this venture, but I do remember at some point during the first year feeling like the blog controlled me rather than the other way around, and at that point I gave myself permission to always let it be whatever I needed it to be at any given time. I come here to preserve memories, to keep myself creative and to share ideas, and to connect and find community. I've been doing this for some 2.5 years or so now! I hope this place has matured with me and continues to reflect me as I grow and settle into my own self. The last several days and weeks have found me doing a lot of verbal (and maybe embarassingly angsty) processing with Alan about my life, usually while I pace around the kitchen and do a decent amount of dramatic hand-gesturing. I jokingly call it a quarter-life crisis, it's really a stirring in my gut, a longing for. . .? I'm not sure? To understand where I fit, what I'm good at, what I want to accomplish? Maybe I'm just restless! Alan says this happens to me every February. I don't remember, but he might be right. Perhaps I just need some fresh air. Or perhaps every February it just gets so absolutely dead and quiet that I'm forced to process my life just a little bit more, in a two month chunk every year. Anyways, as I was waxing on about these things Alan gently reminded me that I'm a mother, and sometimes that is enough. It was a good reminder that I certainly needed. I am not a mother only, but neither am I "only" a mother. In the midst of finding myself thinking, I have no legacy! What will it be? I am reminded that my children are just that. I have other passions, other goals, and perhaps I will be remembered for other things as well, but I refuse to accept that voice that says that the work of being a mother is somehow "less than", or that children are not a worthy legacy. I'm not the first to say this, but since I still struggle with feeling it, perhaps it needed repeating.

So that is where my mind has been, in this deepest, darkest end of winter, and I am finding beauty in snapshots, which is being reflected here. I can hardly believe that in 4 months time this space will be bursting forth with verdant garden pictures, and surely my heart and mind will bend into summer and this space will be just what I need and will reflect that, too.