Changing, growing

If you've spent any time reading this blog, you'll know I like to garden. I waited ten years to have a garden of my own (container gardening, while nice, only gets you so far). So one of the first things I did when we moved into our house last fall was to tear out the grass along our fence line and put in native grasses and perennials.

Okay, it wasn't just me. Beloved Husband and both kids helped. It was a ton of work, but well worth it, because we now have this:

The neighbors, who thought we were crazy when we started, have all commented on how much they love it. And I love that it will change as the season progresses. By mid-summer, it will have lots of yellow and orange flowers blooming, and by fall, the grasses will be tall and all shades of yellow, gold, and red, some with feathery pink seed heads.

Yesterday, I was pulling weeds (yes, I pull them by hand, more on that in a moment) to the susurrus of baby cardinals begging for food in our lilac. As long as I kept my head down, the parents were content to come and go. I also discovered a bumblebee nest behind that pinkish plant in the foreground (Penstemon, for anyone who's curious).

Weed-pulling: a back-breaking, mindless waste of time, right? Lots of people think so, but I enjoy it. (Now you know why our neighbors think we're nuts.) I like it for many reasons.

• It's hard work, but at the end of the day, I can look at the planting bed and see the results. There's very little instant gratification in writing.
• It's back-breaking, but in a different way from writing. it stretches muscles that sit for too long when I write, so in a way it's soothing. Besides, there's something satisfying about going to bed a bit sore from a hard day's work. And I sleep better.
• It's mindless, which gives my brain a break from constant focus and thought. The inability to sustain focus on something for a prolonged period of time (or the increasing difficulty in doing so as time progresses) is called directional attention fatigue, and studies show that exposure to nature is the best way to allow the brain to recoup and revitalize (source).
• It's inspirational. A good many of my magazine article and picture book ideas (the non-fiction ones) are based on things I have seen while gardening or spending time outside. Gardening is also the perfect opportunity to figure out what, exactly, that random thing that just happened in my novel really means, and how it will play out later in the story (or if I should get rid of it).

And then there are encounters like these. How can you not love seeing something like this?

eastern swallowtail butterfly

Do you garden? What do you like about it? And if not, why not?

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M is for Making the Most of the Moment

We have a limited amount of time left in Berlin. We will be moving this summer, a big, inter-continental move. It's a stressful thing, moving. Uprooting the family, removing ourselves from our home, our friends, and the lives we have made here.

It's exciting to look forward and bittersweet to look back. But what I'm trying hardest to do right now is live in the moment.

Of all the places I have lived and the many seasons I've been through (including autumn in New England), spring in Berlin tops them all. Everything is in bloom, a procession of color that started a couple of weeks ago. First the purple of the early-spring crocuses, followed quickly by the yellow of the forsythia and holly grape. And then come the pink cherry blossoms, purple lilacs and the pink and purple azaleas. The air is, quite literally, perfumed with the scent of flowers for six to eight weeks.

I am soaking up every moment of it, reveling in every breath of sweet air (when the wind doesn't blow the scent of manure from the neighboring farms), because where we're going, it won't be like this.


How do you live in the moment?

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Woodsville

Serena at I see you see is hosting the Location, Location, Location blogfest today...

Looking for cool shade in summer, brilliant folliage in fall, pines blanketed with snow in winter, and bubbling brooks in spring? Woodsville provides all of these and more. Lose yourself among the fir trees, gather hazelnuts and chestnuts, and discover clearings blooming with wildflowers of every color. Each season Woodsville bursts with life in its various forms. Come reconnect with nature!



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Autumn weather started really early here this year, back at the start of August. We've had cool temperatures, lots of rain, and very little sunshine (but today is an exception--the glare of sunlight on my computer monitor makes it doubly hard to force myself to stay inside and work).

But there's an upside.

The color of the fall foliage this year is the most intense I have ever seen (or can remember seeing, at any rate). I've been carrying a camera with me everywhere for the past week, wanting to capture the bold reds, oranges, yellows, even pinks (yes, pink leaves!). And since they make me happy, I thought I'd share them with you.

What's your favorite season? Why?

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Getting a new perspective

"I like your orange blog, Mama."

"Thanks, honey. I see it as green."

"OK." Boss Man shrugs and walks away. He's used to us telling him that we see things differently.

Boss Man is color blind, so he sees the world in a completely different way from most of the rest of us. It's a permanent condition, there is no "cure" (at least not yet). But really, why would we want to fix it? It's not a disease, it's just how he sees things.

Animals see the world differently from humans. Many birds and insects can perceive ultraviolet radiation that is invisible to the human eye. With so much variation, no individual (human or otherwise) sees the world how it "really" looks. Who is to say that we normal-vision people see things the same way?

I used to wonder about this when I was a kid. What if my blue sky looked green to you? Meaning, what I see as blue, you see as my green, even though you call it blue. This would actually explain wild variation in color combination preferences. For example, I really dislike orange and blue (or green) together, but other people really like it (or so I assume from the orange/blue and orange/green clothing that has been so popular of late). Maybe someone else's orange is my yellow, which completely changes the picture.

Perception is a highly  individual thing. It's easy to get caught up in our own perceptions, but it is probably worthwhile to occasionally take a step back, take off our perceptual goggles and try on someone else's. If we all did this (in all parts of our lives), it would help us to better understand each other and be more compassionate.

Trying on someone else's perceptual goggles also helps spark the creative process. To give you an example, this is how Boss Man sees the rainbow (what you and I see is on the left, what he sees is on the right).

His world looks completely different from mine. The green leaves that I adore look brown to him, except for a few weeks in the fall, when they turn yellow. Dark reds look black (he often thinks that black ink on his hand means he is bleeding). Pink looks gray and purple looks blue. He loves pink and purple, and I have to remind my husband that those colors look gray and blue to him (very manly, think Dallas Cowboys).

There are other forms of color blindness and varying stages of loss of vision, too. If you are looking for a bit of inspiration, whether for a story, a painting, a drawing, or something else, do a little experiment. Put yourself in someone else's perceptual position for a bit. You might just find the inspiration you were looking for. Here's a web site to get you started.

Synesthesia

My world is color coded. This is something I never really realized until I read an article on synesthesia and discovered that I am a "synesthete." Synesthesia, which occurs in approximately one out of every 2,000 people, occurs when the brain connects two seemingly disparate things. The most common form involves color: days of the week, letters, numbers, or months may stimulate a particular color in someone's mind. Other forms link taste or smell with other things, such as the sense of touch or with musical notes. Quite often members of an immediate family will share a particular form of synesthesia, although the associations may not match up (e.g., the letter A is blue to one person but yellow to another).

For me, numbers are most vividly connected to color, with months less strongly so. Doing a Sudoku puzzle is easy when I can look at the puzzle and "see" which color is missing. A friend of mine sees the color-number association so strongly that she remembers phone numbers by remembering the way they "look" in her mind.

Each morning I write morning pages—three pages of free-association writing (I am working my way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I highly recommend)—and I write the date at the start of each session. I am continually amazed by the impact this small act has on my mood. A date associated with colors that I like makes me happy, one with dreary colors brings me down. And the colors stimulate other ideas in my mind, small nuggets that often develop into story ideas.

The impact of color has become even stronger of late, as we live in a snowy, monochromatic world of white and gray. I find myself craving color. Not just waiting for spring but thirsting for the bright yellows, purples and greens of early spring flowers and plants. In fact, I crave color so much it has determined the location of my next picture book adventure story: Scotland, a verdant world richly cloaked in every shade of green.

And for the times when I cannot escape into my colorful stories, I can gaze at the the multi-colored snowflakes the children and I made a few weeks back. Anything to keep me afloat until spring comes. I keep telling myself that each day brings us one day closer.