Everyday Miracles

One of my favorite flowers in my garden are the Peonies. These are so beautiful when they bloom and they smell wonderful but my favorite part is their growing process. They start out as these little purple shoots that grow so fast you can almost watch them growing. In about two weeks time they send up these balls awaiting blooms like in the picture above. They are beautiful as well but the most amazing thing is that these plants are unable to actually open up and bloom without help. They would die if they didn't have the help of one of God's smallest creatures. Ants are the heroes here. They climb up to the top of these flowers and eat a waxy film covering the buds. They feast on it for a couple days and once it's all gone the flower is finally capable of releasing all of it's beauty to the rest of the world.

There are a million lessons we can learn from the simplicity of this fact of nature, but the one I am taking to heart today is the fact that we are not independent planets that are completely self-sufficient. We are only able to release all of the beauty inside of us with the help of others (and no I'm not talking about beauticians and cosmetic beauty). If we didn't have people to teach us what it means to be good and help others we could be very ugly creatures indeed. Most importantly if we didn't have anyone to love or love us back there would be no beauty in the world at all (at least that's what I think).

Slor Fest 2007

So what have I been up to lately? Well other than being completely weird because of medications from my wisdom teeth removal surgery (yea I guess I did act a little weird, but I just thought it was my everyday normal kind of weird, apparently it was a bit more than that from the accounts I hear from my friends), and sleeping a lot because they made me sleepy, I've been working with my friends on a sled! Not just any sled though. You see this sled is a giant whale sled with a mini boat to go with it. We are making this sled to enter in the Cedar Ridge Wild and Wacky Card Board Sled Derby.

Here are a few photos of our work in progress.

All of the helpers include: Karla, Matt, Dustin, Joel, Amy, Katie, and then there's me.

You have to be careful with this whale because it has teeth and likes to eat people that say "glorious day" all the time. Joel was it's first victim. His memorial service will be held this Sunday at 2pm at Whitetail ski resort where we will also be holding the sled race at the same time. Once we've finished racing we're going to be cutting the whale open to retrieve his remains. I know it will be a sad day but it should also be a day to celebrate the going home of our dear friend.

Hope to see you there (whoever you are)!

So little time....

I'm a college student going to school for Art. I really want to teach. It's something that I've wanted to do since I was in kindergarten. However I'm into my fifth year of college with still another year and a half of school to go in order to get my Art Teaching Certification. There's so many things in my life that I want to be able to do but school takes a lot of time and energy. An art degree in particular takes an inordinate amount of out of class time to work on projects.

I've been considering getting just the Art degree and forgoing the Teacher Certification part simply to save time so I can be done. I can still teach at a private school with just a bachelor's degree and really that's what I want to do but would I be limiting myself too much by doing that and is another year really that much longer to have to wait (YES! and no).

Time has been something that I've always struggled with because I am something of a procrastinator (probably only the worlds biggest). It's a part of me that I've never really liked and always wanted to change but haven't yet. When I procrastinate I'm stealing time from other things that I could be doing that would be more productive and enjoyable if only I let myself do them. Instead I feel guilty because I don't have the highest priority things done yet so I put everything off until they are done and spend a lifetime trying to accomplish them.

I just feel sometimes (more like all the time) that there are so many other things that I'd rather be doing. I want to be more involved in ministry and with my church. I want to share a house with 4-5 of my friends and see what that kind of a community can be like. I also want to be working with children in some sort of school setting. Whether it be at a private school or working with homeschoolers in my own home. Whatever, I want to share my life with those kids and my love for Christ, as well as teach them about art and creative living. I want to study the Bible intensively and have God's words written on my heart. I want to travel all over the place seeing places I've never seen before and experiencing God's creation in all of them. I want to spend more time in nature and less time in front of a computer. I also want to build stronger relationships with the people that I know and love and be someone to support them in their endeavors.

I've tried to do many of these things but I'm always stealing away time from one or the other and never really fully devoting myself. Trying to find some sort of happy medium or achieve some "harmony" is just out of my reach, or so it seems.

Lord help me to do your will in everything I do.


To cheer this post up a bit I want to share this picture with you that I took on a recent bike ride to a friends house. The colors in this picture are a favorite combination of mine and I really want to work in this palette on a quilt sometime (if I ever make the time to do it). That won't probably be for a while though. I've never been one to choose a favorite color but I do have favorite color combinations and this would be one of them. My roommate probably gets sick of me telling her how giddy I get over certain color combos. I had a professor once ask everyone in the class to share one thing that makes them insanely happy and the only thing I could think of at the time was COLOR.

Well I'm going to stop procrastinating now and go finish some homework!

hippie wannabe

The main reason that I am posting this picture is because I want to post it on my profile and this was the only way I could figure how to do it, so here's a picture of me kayaking and looking very much like an American Indian wannabe at the same time. Not because of the blue kayak or anything but because of the simple braid in the back.

My older sister would say that this picture represented the hippie inside of me. Although I am not a hippie I'm also not insulted but such a remark. As a lover of nature and the environment as well as all things created I don't think that being called a hippie is all that bad of a thing. After all the definition of a hippie is:

unconventional young person of the 1960s: a young person, especially in the 1960s, who rejected accepted social and political values and proclaimed a belief in universal peace and love. Hippies often dressed unconventionally, lived communally, and used psychedelic drugs. ( informal )

Granted I wasn't a young person of the 1960's nor am I into psychedelic drugs. However the ideas of rejecting "accepted social and political values and proclaiming a belief in universal peace and love." Are things that I could be categorized as. Part of being a Christian has to do with being "set apart" from the world around you and following a Christ who wants peace and love to abound in His world. Not only that but He wants His followers to share in community with each other, and those around them. Humans were not meant to be alone and to isolate ourselves from others is only going to hurt us.

Anyways I really love this picture. It was taken by a good friend with a great eye for composition in a picture, and a thoughtfulness that astounds me. He often surprises me with the way that he can see something that I didn't notice before. I'm the type of person that takes tons and tons of pictures hoping that a few will turn out to be great, where as he will take in everything in his surroundings and sort of frame the picture out in his mind before taking the picture. It's a good lesson to learn in photography and one that I am still working on but taking time in anything you do to consider the outcome can be rewarding.