Monday Musings... The Romantics

This morning I was up and out early, by 8:00, to do some mowing before the blistering 90+ degree North Carolina heat and humidity set in. Sometimes when I mow or garden or stack wood, I don't focus on anything except the job at hand. But sometimes I reflect on my life or the state of things in the world. Today I thought about The Romantics, a 19th century group of writers. The Romantics are my favorite group of writers for a variety of reasons, not the least being their connection with the natural world and the common folk. When I did my student teaching at a high school back in the early 1990s, this was the group of writers with whom I chose to begin, and my students loved that we went outside for class, under the trees, to read and discuss these writers and poets from 200 years ago. I guarantee they remember those classes still. It is the group of writers I always come back to when I need to get my bearings straight.

I suppose I thought of them because of a discussion on Friday night while we were visiting with our son. My son is a photographer and he often photographs furniture for companies and for the International Furniture Market held in nearby High Point every spring and fall. On Friday night he showed us the latest furniture brochure, the photos of which were his work. I was proud! Then he showed us a chair, a simple design with a woven wicker seat, comfortable too. The price tag? $15,000. I was aghast... "What? This isn't even curly maple, or rosewood, or walnut or anything special!" I cried. "It's pine!", I said, which was verified by my husband who knows his wood quite well, being a knifemaker who uses wood in the handles. My son said simply, "It's the designer." Good Lord... who can command that kind of money for such a simple thing that you plop your butt on for a short period of time? It's insane, in my mind. Just think what $15,000 could do if spent in other ways... say, for instance, to feed the homeless at a local shelter? Or to get a free medical clinic up and running?

When I came inside from mowing, out came my Brit Lit book and I opened to this poem, a favorite of mine... one that I was first introduced to as a teenager in British Literature class in my senior year of high school.

The World is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth, 1807

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Those lines... "we have given our hearts away" and "we are out of tune" get me every time. They are so blaringly honest and true. They were true in the 1800s and they are true in 2010. What owns our hearts, really? For some, this may not be a pleasant question to answer. And in what ways are we out of tune and what are the consequences? Being out of tune in diet and exercise because we need fast and quick and cheap to enable our sedentary lifestyles affects our health, requiring larger medical costs and drugs; being out of tune with one another affects our relationships locally and internationally, resulting in so many poor people in our country and in other countries and in young women toiling in sweatshops across the globe so that others can have cheaper products; being out of tune with nature and the natural course of things affects our water, our forests, our oceans, our air, and wildlife.

I've never understood people who need to buy big and buy often. Why must we have big houses and expensive toys? Why do people go into debt, huge amounts of debt, just to have stuff? Why do we put more importance on money than on the people around us, on the forest regions, on health and well-being and peace, for ourselves as individuals and for the world? Why do people work so hard at money-making only to forget their surroundings, to lose contact with the natural world on a daily basis, to forget about their fellow man? I saw this attitude quite often in the college students I taught a few years ago. And of course, that attitude is definitely present in the business world too... shall we say we see it in big oil, down there in the Gulf? And we see it in ourselves... in the desire for cheaper gas at any cost so we can drive hither and yon, unfettered and free, on the smallest whim... not giving thought to the ultimate consequences of our gas consumption.

If you aren't familiar with these 19th century writers, give them a whirl... go check out a book from your library. Fix yourself a little drink, sit under a shade tree or among some flowers, breathe in the summer air, clear your mind, and meditate on the words of these wonderful poets who figured out what life was all about.

Tulip Gatherer by arlenefaye on Etsy

Treasury Challenge

Yesterday I got an email from RoughMagicCreations who informed me that my High Hope Hollow painting was part of her newest treasury... and it went on to talk about this new challenge. PipingHotPapers has issued a treasury challenge on Etsy... and I gave it a try this afternoon as a way to relax after spending some time in the painting studio (two canvases now have fresh paint).

Here's the way it works:
You pick a word, any word, and do a search on Etsy using that word. You choose your first item from the list of works that come up; then you choose one of the tags on that first item and do a search with it, picking your second item from that list... and so on until you have all 16 spaces filled. When you post your treasury, you tell what your first word was and what your last word was.

I started with the search word EAGLE.. and other tags included waterfall, elegant, CASTteam, circle, sunset, crane... and lots more I can't remember now, but the last search word was ROMANCE.

Here's my treasury and the link to it...



While I miss the old way of doing treasuries and am not terribly fond of Treasury East, I did enjoy this fun challenge, and I hope you'll enjoy the items I've included!

Happy weekend, everyone!

In the Good Ol' Summertime

It's rare these days that I spend much time on the computer; I've listed a few new wire-wrapped stones in my Etsy shop , but there is just too much life beyond this machine and I can't be contained here for long! There's gardening, weeding, planting, harvesting, baking, photography, tubing, and gathering with friends for great summertime meals and music-making.

Last Saturday, we enjoyed the annual First Fruits Festival just a few miles from here at the home of two very good friends. They've got a place on the river, and so on that very hot morning, a tubing trip down the river was in order. I hadn't done this in about three or four years, and I always forget just how wonderful an experience this is... so peaceful, so refreshing, so so enjoyable to float down the river, letting the current take you along, chatting and laughing with friends while enjoying the sky, the trees, the birds, and the rocky outcroppings leaning over the water. It was about a two hour trip, and I hated for it to end.


Perhaps later this summer, we'll take a longer, four-hour trip... and strap a cooler in an adjoining tube for drinks and snacks. Following the tubing trip, we enjoyed a potluck lunch including a giant stir fry of fresh garden veggies, with a few store-bought organic goodies too, cooked outside over an open flame, rice, salads, squash fritters, watermelon and so much more. Delicious!

On Monday morning before the sun got too high, I weeded an area that we are trying to contain in order to do some more manageable landscaping. I also planted some flowers that John brought home... in an effort to disguise our very large handmade composting container. While I did the weeding and planting, John picked a basket full of apples from our June apple tree so that I could start putting them to use.



On Monday night around 8:30, I was home alone, John having gone out for a meeting at church. I was at the table working on a song, with the dogs at my feet, when I heard my favorite bird, the Wood Thrush. It was loud and it was close, so I got the binoculars out and spotted it easily in the very top branches our our pear tree in the front yard. I was thrilled because we don't normally get to see the thrush since it prefers the depths of the woods to open fields. I watched for a minute or so as it sang its heart out, and then I decided I'd try to get a photo or two. Sure enough, by the time I'd rounded up my camera and got the settings adjusted for photos at dusk, the thrush was still there. So I managed three photos before it flew back into the woods where it usually stays. Because I'd adjusted the camera's settings, I didn't get a clear photo of the bird with its beautiful markings; instead I got a silhouette, but I'm happy with it anyways, and it will probably become the focus of my next painting... but I can't say when I'll get started on it.

This morning at 7:30, I began dicing apples and by the time 11:30 had rolled around, I'd made an Apple Harvest cake and two batches of fried apple pies and cleaned up the kitchen. Everything was made from scratch, and while these recipes have eggs in them, they could easily be made vegan. If you have never had a fried pie, that means you don't live in the South and haven't ever visited. It's high time you headed this way because these pies are to die for.




And tomorrow night we'll enjoy a small dinner party with friends, feasting on homemade potato salad, fresh steamed green beans with mushrooms, strawberries with sharp cheese, and for the meat-eaters (everyone but me), ham biscuits, courtesy of one of our dinner guests... and guess what we'll have for dessert? All that followed by some wonderful music-making on the deck as the sun goes down!

Don't you just love summer? Come join me... there's enough garden goodness and apples to go around!