2022

…and I’ve been quiet here for all these months…

…but noticing and tending…

…gathering and celebrating …

…beginning new things and continuing on with all of the beautiful, beloved ingredients of our everydays…

…beautiful in spite of all of the darkness that comes along with the light of life. I’m writing today because I have a deep desire and need to get all of my ducks in a row, and a note to you is the last of my online ducks to tuck into place. This season of change and bloom and some surprising news we received a month ago have drawn forth some clarity and decisions I didn’t know I needed.

My deario needs heart surgery, to repair a valve that is damaged and weakening his heart. So we are on an unexpected path of consultations and tests and surgery in a hospital in the city next month. He should be just fine after his long recovery, but it’s turned our world a little upside-down. And I am finding I need to be a helpmeet more than ever, and want to be so.

I want to pour all of my spare hours and energies into paring down and making our home and garden as peaceful and well-tended as possible, to make the weeks of Doug’s recovery as restful and untroubled as they can be made. Realizing this led to the understanding that I would need to put down some other responsibilities…and then I realized that it would-indeed-feel like putting down a burden to take a rest from making for awhile.

And not being one to hesitate once I’ve made a decision within myself, I’ve brought it into being in the outside ways. So my Etsy shop is still open, but only for digital goods, including a new digital planner! I’ve been discovering this year (is that a shock?) that digital notebooks and calendars can be really helpful in certain ways (which I explain in the description of the Wings & Wildflowers planner, if you are interested) and have been slowly learning how to use mine. If my days allow, I will get another digital notebook and calendar in my shop in the months to come. In the meantime, I am just grateful for the ease and delightful prettiness of these, for me and for all who receive them.

If you are a current Daybook customer and think there is something you might want before I return to making in the early Autumn, please send me a note (just reply to this.) I will let you know when I open the shop for Daybook orders for just one day in May, to gather orders that I will work on filling before the summer booklets are needed. Does that make sense?

Wisteria & Sunshine will remain as it is, a place of beauty and encouragement that I am pleased to spend part of my days creating and tending. But now, the other portions of those days I can immerse myself more deeply in my homemaking and land nurturing, mending dresses and making herbal concoctions, practicing mowing the lawn and pumping out the basement and other tasks that Doug has always takes care of so well.

Even tho’ Doug’s diagnosis isn’t dire, anything in this realm brings ones mortality into greater awareness. And the birthday cake you see above was made to celebrate my 63rd trip around the sun. I am both a bit weary from twenty years of making and wanting to have more time to get to the things that often fall by the wayside when I am tired or muddle-headed from doing business online these days. And I know I will come back from my respite eager to see what the next chapter of my work will bring.

For now, I will just let you know that you will find a new film at my you~tube channel, and that until you hear from me again (which hopefully won’t be so very long) I am sending love and heartfelt wishes for a sweet spring to you,

Lesley

xo

Click the photo to watch to my film…

…and the photo above to visit my shop…

My wish for you.

Hello again! And a happy and gentle new year to you. After a long and very restful break from work over the twelve days of Christmas, I am back in my studio and glad to be sending out this missive to you…

After a lovely, ease~ful Christmas with family…

…our long, holiday rest included our first snow…

…lots of reading by the fire and watching on the cosy sofa…

…and gratefulness for the wintery light of all kinds, twinkling on tree branches, falling on old floors and walls…and firelight and candlelight, always…

There were many quiet and introspective hours (and more to come) spent with notebooks and papery bits…

…and delectable Christmas treats…

…and the New Year was seen in simply and deliciously…

And here I find myself on the twelfth day of January, Christmas mostly put away, the blooming paperwhites placed here and there for fragrance and beauty…a few days into our Gentle January and growing peace and clarity in my home and my mind…and quiet joy to be celebrating this…

I had no inkling when the idea came to me in late 2011, and I opened the doors on January 14th of 2012, that Wisteria & Sunshine would still be here ten years along. There was nothing like it online at the time, and we’ve been through many incarnations over the years, but it remains a beautiful, quiet, inspiring place to belong to. There are many other private gatherings on the interwebs now, but I take heart in the messages I receive from members about the particular value of our peaceful rooms.

This is especially good to know because I can’t imagine not continuing to tend and create there, even when I flirt with the idea of retirement in other ways! : ) So, I am grateful, happy and looking forward to another year there of sharing my life, my ways and my heart in this confusing world. And I thought I would share the post I wrote there a few years ago, as it gives a glimpse of what it is like within our doors and it expresses all that I am feeling as our anniversary approaches.

If you would like to join me, as we continue our Gentle January, I’ve created a discount for new members. Clicking the banner below will take you to the signup page where there are all the details you could wish for about the coupon and joining…

This was written in 2018…

Some glimpses from my days this week past. In the way of life, there were moments of such clearness, satisfaction and growth…

…and then it all swirled into muddiness yesterday. And who can explain this so familiar pattern? Not I, tho’ I more and more quickly accept it, knowing it is natural, perhaps even scientific…but I let it remain a mystery.

Something comes along, a rock thrown in the clear pool, and if there is muck or tangled old grass there, it is stirred and the clarity is gone. The rock, the stone, the pebble may come from within or without, but I don’t spend much time pondering it anymore, knowing that all that is stirred will settle again, and I will be able see where I am again…

…the house will swing back to the other side of chaos…and my days…

It is the way of things. It is the weather of our womanly lives, or our seasons, or our own phases of the moon. Truly, all of them together and more besides…

And when it isn’t feeling otherwise, it feels such a gift, a privilege. And I am realizing that moving through these seasons…the ones within us and around us…whilst keeping or always finding again our peace and wisdom, our caring our ourselves, our loved ones and our earth that carries and keeps us all…that is the heart of Wisteria & Sunshine.

I didn’t really know this when I began. I thought it was more about tending our homes more thoughtfully and deeply, sharing our love of books and poetry, discovering together more simplicity, honoring the circle of the year and banner days within that circle…and it is all of that. But it’s grown to be so much more. Because you came and continue to come…because we keep opening to the lessons of this particular time in humankind’s journey…and to those of our own hearts and bodies and lives.

We’ve celebrated before…and sometimes not. Some years I haven’t even remembered our anniversary, but I’ve been watching this one coming for awhile. Six years feels substantial, like a house that has settled in, layered with the spirit of all the conversations around the table, the afterglow of candles lit and fires read by, the breadcrumbs left by each picture placed the wall and each cosy spot created.

I am feeling humble and happy and quietly excited about our adventures ahead. Adventures that one of our first members described this way…

“I should also like to set out upon this journey, this amazing adventure … to share, and discover, to honour our earth, our home, our lives, with the love and care they deserve.”

Hoping you feel the same…

xo

If you are still reading, I’ll let you know that I will have a new film up at my you~tube channel later today (with glimpses of my Gentle January) and another later in the month sharing the beauty of the snow we had a week ago. I took so many films of during the snowfall and the cosiness inside that I couldn’t fit it all in one film!

xo

Lesley