Floral fragrance in abundance

I’m rich! I tell you I’m rich! I have just brought in a fistful of Lily of the Valley. It’s the biggest bundle I’ve collected in a number of years. What a treat!! (And you know I don’t just throw around the double exclamation points.)

Lily of the Valley is one of my very favorite flowers. It yearly wrestles Lilacs for first place in The Spring Flower Show and usually wins. The flowers are ever so delightful. I find the delicate, powdery scent that emanates from those little bells intoxicating and, now, with five or more buds per stem multiplied by the fistful of stems here in my hand, that equals a heady amount of fragrance perfuming the air! What a splendid, ephemeral gift!

The lily plants grow unattended as all the plants around the aparment building do. It's survival of the fittest around here. I keep my eye on a couple of patches and do some tending about once a year to make sure they’re not completely overrun by the vines (see note on unattened growth). Thankfully they seem to do okay without much attention and every few years they bloom in profusion.

Much to my surprise and delight, this year I found a new patch of them! How is it possible, having lived here for so many years, to have not found every cache by now?! Well, they’re in a spot I’d just never thought of looking: between this building and the next one.

I suppose, if you're going to get technical, they are on the neighbor’s side of the property line but between the buildings that line is a little fuzzy so I’m erring on the ‘it’s-on-this-side' side of the argument. If you see 'Horicultural Police Department' on your caller-ID it'll be me asking for bail money and then you’ll know my assumption was incorrect...

Yesterday I took the most delicious nap that I can recall in recent history. Mind you, my memory isn't what it used to be but, oh, it was a treat! One of the many gifts of a three day weekend is time for rest. The breeze was cool enough that I was able to tuck in under the covers; there was music from a cardinal nearby who was very busy advertising his territory. The backdrop for my slumber was so idyllic that when my head jumped in with the list of things to do I was able to let it go and drift off without a care.

A Nap. A Rest.

These words often have a negative connotations in our culture. Naps are for children and the elderly. Rest is for the ill. Healthy working people don't do either except for the one week (or two if you’re lucky) of vacation allotted each year. Anything more than that and a person’s work ethic is called into question. I think that’s unfortunate. Rest is something that I need and naps are something I wholeheartedly support in all their various shapes and sizes. Ooh, think what an amazing world it would be if we all had regular naptime again!

‘Make hay while the sun shines’ was certainly a good motto for a life lived on the farm but it's been carried into our modern lives with much less success. What's been lost in translation is that while an agrarian life did mean a great deal of work in the warm months it also allowed for a quieter time in the winter when the land was asleep. Winter was a time to mend and repair, a time for planning and preparing for the coming spring.

That is what is missing in our electrically charged, Energizer-bunny lives: we just keep going and going and going. There is no time when our modern city landscape sleeps because people work around the clock, stores are open all the time, and the television and computer run 24/7. We’re busy keeping up and staying up. We're doing. We've forgotten the being part of being a human being.

As you know, I am creating space for quiet in my life. It’s sometimes easier said than done but when I do make that space I find I am calmer and more content. By paying attention to my breathing and listening to my heart (in both of its definitions) I literally feel the difference it makes. Equally, I’m able to feel when I haven’t quieted down and it’s a less comfortable feeling than it used to be.

It’s easy to get pulled into ‘making the most of time’. I’m doing my best to remind myself that I cannot be at my best until I have taken care of myself through connecting with nature and taking time to rest. Watch a little ' Hercule Poirot' as I've been doing lately and you'll see that he's got his priorities set: he does his work without fail but also without fail takes time for tea. The Chief Inspector would prefer him to work through the night on pressingly important cases but Poirot retires to bed confident that with a good night's sleep he'll crack the case in the morning.

So in these long days of Summer, that wonderful drink of warmth and sunshine that visits us ever so briefly here, I'm setting aside time for rest. I'm taking time for tea with a good friend: myself (the best part of which is knowing I'll get the last cucumber sandwich)! And I'm making space for unstructured time including naps. I hope you, too, find yourself dozing off to the sound of birds singing and wind swirling through the trees...

Sweet dreams-
Karen