Meg Evans

Somehow I let myself get into a gloomy, brooding sort of mood over the past few days; and when today rolled around I still didn’t have anything in mind for a Nurturing Thursday post. While I was standing in the laundry room, taking towels from the washer and putting them into the dryer, I was wondering if I’d had any self-nurturing going on this week that was even worth mentioning.
 

Then I started thinking about how everyday things like a washer and dryer, along with all the other common household items we take for granted, make our lives more comfortable all the time. My current front-loading set is much nicer than the set it replaced, which in turn was better than the first washer and dryer my family had, and even that cheap set made life much easier than using a laundromat or an apartment laundry room.

And of course, before the modern era, women who did their laundry by hand in a washtub or at the river would’ve dearly loved going to a laundromat! So, as with everything, it all depends on one’s perspective. When gloomy thoughts show up for no particular reason, the best thing is to take a different view of the situation and just let them wash away!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Yesterday I decided that it was time to post a summer photo of my backyard willow hedge, completing the series of autumn, winter, and spring photos featured in past Nurturing Thursday entries.
 

So I stepped out into the backyard and took this photo, standing at the end of the hedge as I did in the other seasons. I felt warm and comfortable in the sunlight of a cloudless day, surrounded by the late-summer sounds of crickets, locusts, and one small bird chirping. It was so peaceful that it almost seemed as if the moment might last forever.

As it turned out, though, it was a very good thing I took the photo yesterday because this morning was cool and rainy, feeling much more like autumn. Looking out the window at today’s damp gray sky, I’m reminded that everything changes, and often much more quickly than we expect!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Around this same time last summer, I wrote a Nurturing Thursday post that included a view from my kitchen window of an orange trumpet vine along the backyard fence. It wasn’t blooming much because of the harsh winter; but even so, I thought it made that corner of the yard look like a fairy-tale sanctuary. This year it’s blooming a lot more, so I took another photo.
 

This morning my husband looked out the window and saw a hawk perched on the fence, but it flew away before he could grab his phone and take a snapshot. I’ve often seen rabbits in the backyard, probably because the fence protects them from neighborhood pets. I expect that’s what the hawk was after.

On those busy days when my thoughts start wandering off in many different directions, it’s always good to know that I can just look out the window or step out into the backyard and connect with nature!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

I have three large hostas in my front garden. A neighbor gave them to me long ago, when she discovered that she had bought a few more than she needed. Three years ago, I posted a blog entry called Room to Grow, about moving the hostas when they grew larger than I had anticipated. Life is full of assumptions that need revising, I wrote, and such tasks are best done promptly.
 

The plants have been thriving in their new location. All they needed was a little more space! Often that’s true in our own lives, too. When we feel stuck and frustrated, maybe we shouldn’t just try to get used to the annoying situation. Instead, we might do better to move things around and give ourselves more space to keep on growing!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

We all have days when we feel stuck, like there’s nothing to be done with a problem. It feels like we got hold of a box that is shut tight, and no matter how hard we yank on the lid, it’s never going to lift up. But maybe that just means the box needs to be opened a different way.
 

Sometimes we simply need to take a little time and consider the situation from other perspectives, asking “What else is here?” That’s when we discover much more is unfolding than we first imagined, and lots of unexpected treasures were right there all along!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Last month I posted a Nurturing Thursday entry with a photo of yellow daylilies in bloom next to my house. I mentioned in the comments that I also like orange lilies, but had not planted any. Much to my surprise, this week I found lovely orange lilies blooming in a gap in my neighbors’ hedge (shown in this post) where the deer trampled down the bushes long ago.
 

Just gorgeous! I don’t know whether the neighbors planted the lilies recently, or maybe they were there all along and never grew enough to bloom because the deer always stepped on them. I haven’t seen any deer walking through the hedge this year, probably because construction of new homes changed their usual paths. So it looks like the hedge is finally going to grow together, with orange lilies as a bonus, yay! Sometimes when we wish for things, they really do show up.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Somewhere deep inside our minds there’s a door to a place we don’t want to see, overflowing with heaps of scary old emotional baggage that we haven’t managed to clear away. We wish we could forget all about it, and most of the time we do; but when a present-day experience triggers those bad memories, the door swings wide open, no matter how many bars and screens we might believe we’ve put across it.
 

What’s to be done about that door? More bars won’t solve the problem. Plant some nice pretty mental landscaping in front of it and make it less noticeable? Well, that might help a little; but really, it needs the same treatment as a real-life cluttered room full of ugly, rusty junk. Rather than trying to leave the door closed forever, we just need to roll up our sleeves and march confidently in there with a box of garbage bags, a bucket of hot soapy water, and a mop.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

I posted a photo of daylily plants under my gas meter for a Nurturing Thursday entry in April and mentioned in the comments that I would take another picture when they were in bloom. They’re looking good today, and it’s bright and sunny after almost an entire day of rain yesterday, which has made the grass look nice and green too! Here’s the new photo:
 

Because the plants are thick and healthy, they haven’t needed much weeding this year. That’s also what happens with our own lives when we root out all those prickly mental weeds of negativity, fear, and bad habits—we’re healthier and have more energy for blooming, and there is no space for weeds to grow back!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

My husband has a very good sense of how mechanical things fit together. That is not one of my strong points, though; and he often tells me “Don’t force it.” We have a spigot on the east side of the house that got stripped because I turned the knob too far a few years ago, and now it has to be turned off very carefully. We haven’t replaced it because the pipe is in a place that is hard to access from inside the house. So, when I hook up a lawn sprinkler to it, I generally leave putting away the hose and sprinkler to my husband.
 

Not forcing things is useful advice in many other contexts, too. I’ve always had what I would consider a good amount of persistence. When I commit to a task, chances are I’ll get it done. When it comes to patience, though, I have to admit there’s room for improvement. I recently had a conversation on another blog about how we try to cram everything we want into the now, rather than letting things take their natural course, which leads to constant feelings of pressure that actually make it harder to get what we want. We’d all do much better not to force it!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.