~ About ~
Hello…I’m Lesley. I lived all over as a child, but have been grateful to make my home in the gently rolling countryside of Virgina for the past thirty years. I live in a patchwork house of very old and very new with my deario Douglas and (currently) a lively dog and only the spirit of hens, whom I miss greatly. Our sons have long flown the nest. The way I spend my days is changing, on the cusp of retirement, as I am. It’s interesting, feeling into it all.
After years of homeschooling my children, and taking care of my mother the last years of her life, I have found myself in a chrysalis-season, off and on, over and over again in the past ten years. Life feels somewhat messy and unformed at times, but always hopeful. Tho’ that is more challenged lately, and I am shifting this web-home of mine to reflect the chrysalis both I and the world are in. Less about what I am making and more about how I am finding my way through it all.
The photos I had on this page were out of date, photos of me in my fifties. Me in my sixties looks quite different, something I am still getting used to, to be honest. A work in progress, acceptance is. And this website is also a work in progress at the moment. I hope to make it a gentle, beautiful resource for trying to live more wholesomely in the 2020s…finding a kinder path around the interwebs…less barnacled with people’s greed and agendas…more personal…a smaller world, in a sense.
One of the innumerable things I appreciated in England when I was there in October was the more human scale of so much. It definitely felt like a smaller world, and I loved it. These photos are from that trip. The one at the top is me in Beatrix Potter’s doorway at Hilltop. The photo below is me communing with the heather near Haworth. Counting the days until I can return…
I first started talking and writing about wild simplicity in 2013, and had such high hopes that we would find ourselves, twelve years along, with the health of our earth on a steadier path, and a make-do-and-mend-the-earth lifestyle more common. Instead, we find ourselves tangled up with complexities we didn’t imagine then (or hoped wouldn’t find purchase in our everydays) in addition to little-to-no progress in caring for our earth.
Oh, I know there is always good news, and indeed, some progress (somewhere?) but on this rainy day in mid-February of 2025, so much feels precarious and very much other than what I dreamed it would be. And that is what led me to these glass pages, on an impulse…to bring them more into alignment with who I am right now…and perhaps to be a small lantern in these times.
xo
Lesley
rosehip :: noticer :: homemaker
lover of paper :: would-be crofter
sofa-potato :: simplicity-seeking
loving what is
(trying, really)
::
