musings

The first beginning was in 2006 when I created my first blog, The Bower, at blogspot.com. Then in 2013, there was a new beginning when I made this space and unofficially changed the name of my blog to “My Rosehip Diary.” It was the year after my mom died, I was just entering into my menopause journey. I felt the need to make my home here fresh and spacious in the same way I was doing with my real rooms. There would be fascinating and challenging adventures ahead, I felt sure. And so it proved to be.

What I didn’t see coming was how confused and tangled my online life would become, tho’ it has become a common experience by now. If you’ve been a longtime reader here, you will know how sporadic my posts became a few years ago, the many good intentions I had to begin again…all the plans. But as with most everything for me, plans go but so far…it is feelings and awareness that bring things to fruition. I shared those feelings and awarenesses recently at Instagram, which was the right place to begin this most recent conversation about online life. But I want to finish and deepen with it here.

So I’ve copied and pasted my last Instagram post below, with the link to the first part, as well. I wanted there to be something new to find here while I rearrange rooms, tidy up pages that have become muddled or out-of-date, generally have a good freshening up. Sometime in the Spring, I wrote out these intentions in a Daybook page…

…but a few months ago, I tore off the monthly title and simply keep it on the mantel in my studio, because it is the work of this season of life and can’t be contained within a certain calendar measurement. Who knows how long it will take me to know I have accomplished my menopause? Or to feel as tho’ I’ve woven enough of the threads of my life into a shawl to keep me warm into the years? I don’t feel the need to know or set goals or deadlines around it, but am just enjoying the weaving.

And I hope you will enjoy it, as well. I’m trying to capture it in words and pictures in these glass pages, and in the posts you shall find here more regularly…for all of the reasons I share below and in the linked conversation. So grateful for your continued presence, and your interest in my work and words…

I’ve been mulling over our conversation and remembering other facets (there are so many!) of this online life. The publishing of this latest edition of The Bower (digital! I know!) brought it to mind. I wish I could remember how the idea came to me to create The Bower, and how I found subscribers way back in the late nineties…but I can’t. All I know is that I was finding wisdom and delight in the writings and illustrations I was coming across as I read the vintage magazines and books I adored.

This lovely impulse to share the helpful, moving, beautiful things we come across seems to me to be at the heart of why we are on Instagram. But as I weigh the social media/blogging choices in my hands, I see that one of the negatives of social media is the ease of it…both in the posting and the reading. Therefore, there is So Much goodness out there and it becomes something else we have to contain and set boundaries with.

Back in 1997 when I wanted to create The Bower, there were no computers or printers in my world. I talked to a newspaper man I knew and learned about cutting and pasting up pages. I would go into town after my little boyos were in bed, basket of antique books and magazines in tow, and spend hours copying the illustrations and words I wanted to share at Kinkos. I’d bring those photocopies home and cut and arrange them into pages, teaching myself how to layout the pages to be in order, type up the bits of my own writing and thoughts, carve eraser stamps to adorn some pages, stamp the page numbers, hand-letter titles and so on. I must have been really motivated by it all, and I know that a great deal of that motivation was knowing that there were other women out there, like me, who would cherish all of that work. I didn’t receive a lot of feedback, and that was ok, because we didn’t expect much back then. The subscriptions continued, and I received handwritten notes along with the checks.

It was really wonderful while it lasted, tho’ during all of this I was recovering from an accident. The slow recovery of my nervous system and the trauma-induced chronic mono that I struggled with eventually brought it to an end, after five issues. My longing to share and connect around all that I cared about had to simmer back down until my improved health and the arrival of home computers and printers eventually brought Small Meadow Press into being. Then Wisteria & Sunshine.

When I reflect upon the journey I have gone through (that we all have really, if you have partaken of the webby world over the years,) there were seasons where it felt almost entirely positive, hopeful, dare I say-simple? When I created my first website in 2003 for Small Meadow Press, I did so via a small company that supported moms with businesses. We learned how to do it in a friendly forum. There was no social media, just occasional notes on the front page of my site. I didn’t begin blogging until 2006. And I didn’t need to work hard to be found in a big pond because the pond was pretty small back then, or so it felt. Early blogging felt the same.

Today, I definitely feel called to discern for myself how to make my online life and business feel more like sitting next to a small pond and sending out my thoughtful ripples, whilst also enjoying the gentle sensation of other’s ripples when I decide to go for a dip. No more rushing rivers or tumultuous oceans (polluted with plastic : (    It’s too much. Life is too short. We hear this all of the time, but I can tell you, when you turn 60, it becomes very real.

“Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our heads, growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will better-more successful, adored, satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, “This is how I am,” in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside. It requires conscious effort not to waste your life swimming furiously against the tide, toward some imaginary future that will never make you happy anyway.”

P.S. The refresh here will go rather slower than I would like because there is a whole year’s worth of Daybooklets to design this month, Wisteria & Sunshine to tend, and home & garden and Wimbledon to savor! : )

I first noticed the banners on the lamposts and the artificial greenery being hung in town in early November and by the middle of November, there were Christmas ads and movies everywhere, the artificial red ribbons had joined the greenery and the familiar feeling of my spirit wanting to push back against it all had begun. When I grumble about these things (lament, mourn, sigh) Doug put’s on a grumpy old man’s voice and says “Get out of my yard, kids!” But I don’t think its a crotchety attitude, so much as wanting to let each season be its own particular self.

Thanks to Lissa, I found this, which illustrates it so well. As does the artist’s comment…sh-sh-sh. That is just what I want to do, gently put my finger on the mouth of the consumer machine of Christmas and hush it for awhile.

“With only a fortnight to go before Christmas Day Lulling people were beginning to bestir themselves about their shopping. London might start preparing for the festival at the end of October; Lulling refused to be hustled. October and November had jobs of their own in plenty. December, and that latter part at that, was the proper time to think of Christmas, and the idea of buying cards and presents before then was just plain silly.

‘Who wants to think of Christmas when there’s the autumn digging to do?’ said one practically.

‘Takes all the gilt off the gingerbread to have Christmas thrown down your throat before December, ’agreed another.”

-Winter in Thrush Green

Miss Read

On the way home from our Thanksgiving-in-the-city, I thought to look up the Splendid Table’s Thanksgiving broadcast that we had missed earlier in the day. In the second portion of the show (at around 32 minutes in, to be precise!) the host told a story about an elderwoman chef in New Orleans known for the dish she makes every year on Holy Thursday. In the way of things nowadays (Doug would be getting out his old man voice right about now : ) people began to clamor for it, to want it at other times, and her response was “Leave things be special.” Isn’t that lovely? As is the whole little conversation around this story in the show. Do give it a listen if you feel the way I do about this rush to Christmas.

Tho’ I have been pondering all of the people I know, especially women, who love to break out the Christmas music, movies and decorating as soon as possible and who are also wonderful at enjoying other seasons thoroughly and well. I would love to understand. Of course there are the warm, nostalgic feelings that come with Christmas that I can understand wanting to wrap up in. I guess I can’t sustain that for weeks and weeks and weeks. And I am also not good at overlooking the noise and shininess and the pressure that come with the quieter bits. Honestly, even I could handle it all more gracefully, I just don’t want to. Anticipation is something I value and enjoy and I simply don’t need or want weeks and weeks of Christmas. It seems incompatible with the beauty and meaning of the Winter holidays to me. And I guess I can’t separate the waste and harm that ripples out from the way mainstream Christmas unfolds.

So I’ll keep trying to walk next to this smaller stream of honoring and festiveness, still noticing the leaves on limbs and underneath my feet, and the beautiful spareness that is growing all around and wait for my Christmas season to begin.

How about you?

P.S. And tho’ this wouldn’t at all work for the Lulling folk, I will be closing my shop earlyish in December, so that I can sink into Christmas when it does come near for me. So please order in the next week or so if you are planning to. And if you aren’t, but you appreciate what I make and do, I would so appreciate the sharing of my work in whatever way you like to share…Pinterest, blog mentions, Instagram. I am coming right out and asking because it is the loveliest sort of advertising and I need the word to spread farther than it has so far. I’ve been making Pinterest-worthy pictures in my shop listings and have also been trying to pin what I make a little more often so it is out there in the world. So grateful!