One Hundred Summer Days

The day was nearly perfect. Clear, blue skies. Cool, dry air. I wish I could say I spent the day outdoors, but I spent most of it inside working. I did get to walk from the house to the car and from the car to the church, and then later from the church to the car and from the car to the house. Lunch, a couple of meetings and work at the computer. A quick step outside to breathe some fresh air. The sun set on the one hundredth day of Summer at 7:19. The one hundredth of 100 summer days.

And just like that . . .

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (sometimes) daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

 

From Time to Time

From time to time, I miss my old place. 

Like when I look out my front door and up into the darkening blue skies with pink-tinged clouds that move quickly across the skyscape. A sky that seems to go on and on, forever. I step outside onto the patio and watch forever. At the old place, the wall of windows in my kitchen opened forever to me as I sat at the kitchen table, writing. It's just different. But I do miss the light.

From time to time, I think wistful thoughts about the past.

A past that dresses itself up in its Sunday best and smiles prettily. She's not always so demure, so mindful. And the memory is as wrong as that usage. Still, the past plays her games and sometimes we fall right into it. 

From time to time, I wish I had lived my days differently.

I get to the evening and look back on the long stretch of hours that flew by nearly unnoticed and wish I could grab a handful and use them differently. That I had allowed them to be more useful. Still, I live today as I choose. Did some laundry. Ran errands. Luxuriated at Whole Foods, picking up things like good black tea and root vegetables. Talked to my cousin for two hours as we planned our upcoming trip. Made soup. Ate soup. Spent a few minutes placing the bromeliad I bought today in my bedroom.  

It rained, and the temperature dropped by at least ten degrees. The sun has set on the 99th of 100 summer days and I don't want to blink. We know what happens when we do. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (sometimes) daily writing practice that opens a landscape into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Tomorrow Quickly Becomes Yesterday

The pool is closed. I lift my head from about ten days of a belly virus. My brother tells me he's heard that something like it has been going around. The air cools, and it feels like summer is quickly slipping away. 

Labor Day brought an end to the season in our East Coast mindset. Today is the 98th of 100 days of summer. The equinox is just a few weeks away. Tomorrow quickly becomes yesterday.

My garden needs a good pruning. Spent flower heads, exhausted herbs, weeds that have grown up between the stones of my patio ~ they all need my attention. When things are tidied, the garden will look fresh again.

A healthy harvest of sage waits to be picked. I'll let it dry and use it in my fall cooking, give some of it away. While I don't care for pumpkin spice anything, I love pumpkin ravioli with a nice sage brown butter sauce. 

But not until October.   

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (sometimes) daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Until It's Undeniable

I'm getting ready to take a few days off for rest, reflection, and relaxation. It's been a heavy pull with the new work over the last two months, and some time for being still feels welcome. 

The last time I was in the pool, I watched leaves gently fall to the water as I moved rhythmically, back and forth, length by length. An easy wind moved across the water. The other day I was driving through a forested area, and red and golden tinged leaves on small trees gave me pause again to reflect on this theme. How quickly the days of summer pass, how the light builds, levels off, and then begins to diminish once again. How fleeting are the flowers in the blossoming, and how quickly green stems become brown. How quickly weeds spread in the garden after a few days of rain.

The funny thing is we don't always notice while it's happening, but only once this movement has advanced, until it's undeniable.   

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (near) daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Got Weeds?

Writing escapes me like summer days careening toward the season's end. 

It's been another whole week since I've written. In the meantime, I've filed my submission for the new anthology. A tiny grief memoir of poems, prose poems, and reflections from the first 40 days after my mother's death, part of a larger work I'm creating. 

The pool is out of commission due to an electrical issue. A perfect summer day yesterday, and I walked up to the gate and saw the sign. No telling when it will be repaired. The responsibility is PECO's, not the HOA's, and it's the last week the pool is open for the season. It's such a disappointment. 

There are other little things ~ the friend I meet for dinner most weeks is traveling, the garden still is overgrown, my new place remains a chaos of boxes as I await furniture. I could order my bookshelves. Ikea, finally, has restocked. I'd be able to set up my library and writing room. I hesitate only because I know I will have to cull books. My new space has less space for bookshelves. It's a strange hesitation I feel to complete my moving in.

What's that about?

I'm in the weeds. I wish it was as easy as calling Blake. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (nearly) daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

  

Momentum

I've careened through these last weeks, since the 66th day of summer and my last writing. It's now the 80th. You can close your eyes and breathe for a second, it seems, and whole weeks have passed. I've been living my days, enjoying the pool and the sky and the breeze, the clouds that move across the skyscape, and time with people I love. 

My garden is completely overgrown. Growth from a weedy bush on the other side of my fence has burrowed underground and come up in my lawn. Weeds grow through the cracks in the spaces between the stones of my patio. Flowers bloom on my lettuce plants.

It never occurred to me that there is such a thing as lettuce flowers.

Twenty summer days are ahead of us. But it seems the seasons are already turning. Leaves fall from trees. Cool overnight temperatures make for cold morning swims. The air smells like fall is on the wind, a trace, a premonition. Color begins to tinge the leaves of small trees and shrubs.

I'm careening and the lettuce has bolted. Time to slow down.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (nearly) daily writing practice that opens a landscape into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

Actually, it's not. Change abounds. This morning while swimming, I noticed the quiet. The catbirds no longer are calling, no longer perched on their familiar seats, and the chatter from deep within the tall shrubs is gone. It seems they've flown the nest; the nestlings have fledged. 

After awhile I noticed a convention of sparrows gathered around the tall shrub. Almost as one, and suddenly, they penetrated the deep green foliage and disappeared. Will the sparrows take over the space? Is there something left to forage? What interest do sparrows have in the former territory of catbirds?

There's always someone to come in after someone else is gone.

Dragonflies gilded in deep, shiny gold fly over the swimming pool today. Hovering, diving, aerial acrobatics on display. Are they a sign that the seasons are changing? In a few weeks, golden school busses will move through the neighborhood and I'll likely see them for a few weeks during my morning swim. And then, the pool will close and I'll migrate back to LA Fitness. The summer seems to fly as fast as dragonflies do.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (nearly) daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

Swimming Beneath a Rainbow

Between a quick trip to Washington and storms moving through the area, it's been tricky to get in my swim. But, an early morning swim on Friday and evening swims on Saturday and Sunday, before and after the storms did the trick. Saturday's was short, as thunder rumbled 15 minutes after I began and 15 minutes later the skies opened up. This evening skies were mostly blue with some cloud and just a little light rain. 

About halfway through I turned my head and looked up. A rainbow was set against the clouds in the east. A full arc, camouflaged in the center, as the sun sank in the west and the cloudlets blushed.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a (nearly) daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

An Accounting

I've written 21 of 31 July days for my daily writing practice. It's interesting to me to notice my own reactions to this news. When I began these summer daily writing projects, I was strict with myself about showing up every day to write and ship. One night, I even got out of bed because in the busy-ness of the day I'd forgotten to write. 

I knew this summer would be challenging in different ways than other summers have been. A new house, a new job, anticipating the sale of my mother's house, a deadline for a new anthology, some more focused attention to my health and well-being in the middle of a lot of stress, and a hundred other little things. A friend suggested I might like to give myself permission to skip it this summer, but that did not feel like something I wanted to do. 

Instead, I've been practicing some kindness toward myself. I don't get out of bed to write. I don't turn around when I'm headed upstairs for bed to write. I continue my practice of swimming in the morning as a priority. I'm fitting all the things in where they fit and I'm not worrying about it. Actually, I'm a little surprised with how relaxed I've been about most things. 

That may be coming from the same well of kindness.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions about the small things in life.   

Sixty of One Hundred Summer Days

The momentum of the season seems to be gathering speed. It's all perception, of course. The first thirty days of summer moved gently like the slow ripple of a meandering brook. 

The brook opens into a rushing river. 

Days flow one into another with such force that I sometimes wonder where the weeks have gone as we come to the end of July. 

August is on the doorstep.

My days stream in a now familiar pattern. A morning swim, and if I'm lucky time in the sun. Afternoons at work at the church or at home. Evenings gather up moments and make space for things I was not able to do during the day. Last night was a trip across the river to Jersey for gas and a stop for provisions at Trader Joe's. Come home, put away the groceries, have something to eat, watch the Olympic equestrian events in the gardens of Versailles. Cross country.

In my quest for gymnastics, I've instead come across surfing, fencing, skateboarding, white water kayak, dressage. It's been a delight to watch. 

The poem that inspired this writing series begins ~

Be glad dear soul for what you have / You now have a hundred summer days / And today is the first.

It ends ~

Pay close attention to where you stand / Before you know it, tomorrow has become yesterday, / Wandering (through life) goes so fast. / Pay close attention to what you receive / Which is a hundred summer days a year, / And tomorrow is the second.

Be glad, dear soul, for what you have. You now have these summer days. Pay close attention to where you stand. 

Before you know it . . . 

The days flow, a rushing river . . . 

You can never enter the same river . . . 

The flow changes everything . . . 

Still, we have . . . 

So much.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Pivots and Turning Points

The handy man is here. I understand there may be an updated way to refer to this kind of service provider, but I like the term handy man. Reminds me of my childhood and the simplicity of those times. Today he's working on a project I've waited about three months for, a kitchen project that will enable me to (finally) unpack the rest of my kitchen boxes.

He's removing the utility room door and a wire shelf from the wall, moving an ugly-but-usable pantry cabinet into the utility room, and building the pretty-and-useful kitchen island I ordered from Wayfair in March. He's looked at bi-fold doors and will find one that will work in that space. At some point, a contractor will replace my counters and put in a tile backsplash. Then the kitchen will be done.

This feel significant to me. A turning point. Once the boxes are unpacked and moved from where they sit in my dining room, the living room boxes can go into that space. Cleared of boxes, the living room will feel less chaotic, even though there's no furniture yet. I'll be able to work my way through the rest of the boxes and have those done in time for the delivery of my furniture.  

I am looking forward to a little less chaos in my home atmosphere. I've not been sleeping well, and wonder if a little bit of chaos is the culprit. 

Ikea (finally) replenished its stock of bookshelves, so progress can be make in my library. I have a new writing desk picked out. I'm looking forward to using that space for more than storing boxes of books and supplies. I pivot, as the original line of bookshelves has changed so much I'm looking at another line. More expensive, of course. 

I stand, poised for the next phase of this move, or maybe I've stepped over the threshold. Not sure which it is beyond experiencing the many stops and starts of this. I've moved so many times I figure I'm an expert at it, but I've forgotten things like changing the address on my driver's license and following up with the now-more-difficult process of changing my voter registration. Maybe I'll pop online and get a moving checklist, just to make sure I've thought of everything I need to think of. I like checklists. They help me feel grounded when there's a lot to be done.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Fifty Shades of Days

We've lived fifty of the hundred days of summer. Here, there's a break in the heat, humidity, and scorching sun. We're in the dog days, as bright star Sirius rises in the early morning sky and nears its conjunction with the sun. Twenty days before and twenty days after are the hottest days in the Northern Hemisphere.  Another wilderness time. Sirius conjuncts the sun on July 23, so the dog days this year are July 3 through August 11. 

The full moon is July 21. There's lots of beauty in the sky these days. There usually is most days and nights.

Fifty days of summer remain. This feels abundant. Even as the light begins slowly to diminish, stone fruit and root vegetables swell and ripen. The roses are blooming again. The birds and rabbits are nesting again. A new bunny came to call today. The garden is overgrown and invites some tending. The spent iris flower stalks need to be cut down. Weeds need to be pulled. The cone flower and borage plants still need to be dug into the ground.

Of course, none of this needs to be done. Still, I want to do it and bring the garden back to the beauty that meandered through most of the June days.    

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Twenty-One Minutes

The summer days begin to shorten. The sun rises about 15 minutes later and sets six minutes earlier. Twenty-one minutes. The days will continue to shorten as July slips away, and by early August the diminishing light will be remarkable.

I think about the poem that inspired this series and my thoughts during these summer days. Soon they will be half gone, the 100 days of summer. I ask myself if I've been living each day to its fullest and wonder and, at the same time, if it's possible to live all our days to their fullest.

For now, the days are long and the morning light comes early. Evening light still tarries past eight. The air hangs heavy with moisture and the sun's heat is fierce. The garden is overgrown with weeds, and the herbs spill over the edges of their pots. Rainfall relieves me of watering. Heat and humidity keep me from the weeds. Mosquitos keep me from enjoying the patio in the evening. Morning swims continue to delight. 

Work feels meaningful and time with friends is valuable and uplifting. I continue to work my way through moving boxes and work the puzzle of what home is here. 

Another storm moves through this evening. Lightning flashes and thunder sounds. Rain comes hard and loud. It's expected to clear by morning and pass through again tomorrow evening, cooling the days.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Thunderstorm In My Bones

There's a storm outside and a storm within. 

A strange pattering on some surface outside echoes in my bones.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

A New Day

A new day, and I was greeted with a vase of flowers early this morning as I stepped onto my front porch to go to the pool. This happened last month as well. No card. No note. Just a vase filled with beautiful flowers.  

Sunday, when I was on the way to church, my thoughts filled with many things, I drove up over a rise in the road and was greeted by a field of sunflowers blooming. I drive by this field often, but had never noticed the flowers before. 

There is so much beauty. Sometimes it nudges us out of our worry for the world for a moment. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

The Day after Yesterday

I don't have the stomach for thinking and writing this evening. Preaching and holding space in the congregation today drew energy that took me to my reserves. It was my first preaching in this new congregation. An hour-long swim in the early evening restored. Sitting in the breeze and listening to birdsong as the sun went down refreshed. I long for bed but feel restless, and catch myself chewing on my fingernails.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Elegy

The shock of violence rocks a nation

Fruit of violent rhetoric

Silent witnesses wait and wonder

What may come next

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Welcome Home, Mrs. Lipa

She lived in my mother's basement for years, and in my grandparents' before that. Now she is home with my brother and his family. I am so glad she survived the cull.

Mom's house is finally empty, everything from that life and from those of generations before has been cleared, distributed, redistributed, and otherwise scattered to the four winds. Mom sent some items to museums; my brother held on to correspondence and other historical items for possible donation to museums or universities or other archives. I have some things. My grandparents lived in bold times and my grandfather was in the thick of it, from the founding of Czechoslovakia in Tomas Masaryk's administration, through the war years, to the Partition of Czechoslovakia and Benes's government-in-exile while Hitler occupied the country, to those awful years following the war when the country was overtaken by the Soviet sphere of influence. Mom helped Czech and Slovak historians with their research by providing correspondence, photographs, and her remembrances. 

Mrs. Lipa was an opera singer, and a sculptor made a bust of her. That's about all we know. The bust had pride of place among artifacts in the basement. I have no idea how the bust came to be there, but Mom wanted us to remember her name, and so she wrote (over her heart) "Mrs. Lipa."

I remember as we were going through the house in the aftermath of Mom's death, my brother and I looked at the sculpture and asked, "What are we going to do with Mrs. Lipa?" We let the question hang for two years, but she remains with the family.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Waiting til the Midnight Hour

Getting in under the wire as I begin this writing at 11:56 p.m. It's still today. 

And what a day! I seem to be running from one end of it to the other, at least after my morning swim. It appears that I can't keep time today. 

Midnight has struck and today has become yesterday, tomorrow is today. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Forty Days and Forty Nights

It's my big landmark. The forty days and, this year, forty nights since I've been writing mainly at night. It's not my usual pattern, but I've been swimming in the early morning, and spending time outside in the sun listening to the birds, enjoying the blue skies, and watching the clouds move and swirl and create their fantastical patterns. Night time offers a different perspective and different energy. 

This summer's writing has been wilderness-y. Sometimes a slog. Showing up has not been as easy as in years past and the writing has felt more halting. There've been so many changes in my life this year, and it's not always easy to keep up with them and to fund whatever it is I draw on to show up, write, and publish daily. I feel more vulnerable. 

My theme, Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday, feels challenging. Embedded deeply within it is the commitment to live these summer days to their fullest, to notice and appreciate their bounty.

I think part of the vulnerability may be the home crafting that is part of this summer's winding path. It's slow and intentional, even confrontational, as I open boxes I brought home from Mom's the summer after she died two years ago, and decide what will become part of my new space. There are other boxes that wait. Boxes of things I packed after the divorce and stacked in a storage unit until I felt ready to open them and figure things out. Like my wedding album, family pictures, other items that figured prominently in a home that was part of another life. 

I remember when I was moving out of that home, how difficult it was to decide what to keep and what to let go. I made some decisions and deferred others. I rented for a long time, because it was hard to make a commitment to another home. Alone. 

And here I am. In a mostly empty new home, surrounded by boxes, so not really empty at all, but definitely under construction. The longs delays with furniture delivery have given me time, months of it, to face long unopened boxes and plumb their depths. 

And my own.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Heat Wave

Temperatures have been in the high 90s, feel like more than a hundred. The air is so thick I sometimes think I can see it. I got up early today and went to the pool just after eight. Didn't even flinch when I got in the water. The other night I went swimming in the evening and the water was positively warm, almost like a bath. Friends in desert communities report temps nearing 115. I don't know how they're surviving. It's almost too much for me, walking from the house to the car and then to the office door, and from the office door to the car and then to the house. A Facebook friend went on a three hour mountain bike ride through the desert the other day. I'm waiting for a break in the temps to work in the garden. That reminds me, she needs a drink.   

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Twilight

Soft glowing light lingers in a late evening sky

A scattering of the sun's rays before she sleeps

And gathers her light again at the dawn

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

 

Coming Into Form

The bee balm finally looks like herself. She's had an unusual journey from bud to flower. At least to my perception, and expectation. She has been fully herself, of course, and she's not done yet.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

Time to Weed Again

Even as dry as the soil is, a green carpet of weeds covers the ground. It's the only lush thing in the garden on these hot, dry days. Even as the plantings droop and wilt, weeds spring up with fresh energy. 

It's a mystery.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

Doomscrolling

There is so much anxiety in the nation right now, at least the mainstream media would have us believe this. I don't know what to believe. 

I feel heartened that the Labour Party swept the elections in the United Kingdom. It's a glimmer of hope in a world that seems to be careening right, into the folly that held the world a century ago. Do we forget? Do we take our relative freedoms and prosperity for granted? Do we, as one press observer noted, think the post World War II society can't possibly fall?

Time to take a breath and post some nature photos. The screaming Interweb is deafening.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

 

Holiday

The night is dark, and I've been watching fireworks through the trees. 

Beyond, another layer surfaces. 

Of a dark night, signs of celebration obscured.

A nation waits, wonders, hopes. Holds its breath.

 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Gifts of Summer

A friend sent me a text the other day about her visit to a lavender farm. I had no idea that there was a lavender farm in the area. 

Suddenly I have an uncontrollable desire to visit the lavender farm. To walk through fields of fragrant flowers and breathe in all that wonder.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonder. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

More Beautiful Days

The days have been achingly beautiful. Cool, breezy mornings. Clear, blue skies. Cloud shapes move across a wide-open canvas. Everything is deep green and lush from recent rains. Birds are nesting again. Cicadas have begun their songs. Butterflies move liltingly among the flowers.

The weeds are growing again in the garden. It's about time to claw them away. The coneflower still waits to be dug into the garden. I wait for morning glory vines to cover the fence and reveal big blue blooms to wish me a good morning. I never did plant the moonflowers. They'll wait for next summer.

I swim in the morning and enjoy the beauty. I pass in and out of my house and enjoy the beauty. I sit on the terrace in the cool of the evening and enjoy the beauty.

With so much ugliness in the world these days, the beauty and peace of nature softens the shocks that seem to come daily in the headlines. We must have places to retreat from the agony of living and enjoy the beauty of life. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.   

Beautiful Transformations

I've been watching the bee balm move through her stages of blooming. Today she began to take on the more recognizable look of a burgeoning  bee balm flower. Tiny pink tendrils begin to emerge from the center bud that resembles a delicate, sculpted ball. I noticed it when I walked outside into the cool evening air as the light fades from the sky. 

July begins, another beautiful transformation. The page turns on the calendar and the days stretch out before me, a new and pristine leaf ready to receive the writing of these days. The next 31 of 100 summer days. 

There's excitement as something new begins. Possibility is intoxicating.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Thirty of One Hundred Summer Days

And just like that, the sweetest days of summer end. May and June, the soft, flowering months of the year flew by on the wings of songbirds. Here, there are clouds and rain today. It's muggy and buggy. Everything drips with moisture, big, fat water droplets on the foliage. The air and greenery hang heavy with wetness. Only a few days ago, the ground in my garden cracked from dryness after days and days of clear, beautiful, sunny weather. Most of it punctuated with soft, cool breezes. 

Things change so quickly. When I bought this place, the ground was covered with snow. I had no idea what the yard and garden looked like, except for a few places where what lay beneath peeked through. We walk through life with small glimpses of a future we cannot truly know until we are living its days and nights in the now.

I am given this day. What will I do with this gift? 

Drive into Philly and view the Mary Cassatt exhibition at the Art Museum? Clear up some debris in my garden and neaten everything up? Unpack more boxes in my new place and advance my moving in? Lose myself in the Zen of cooking and make and enjoy a fabulous meal? Watch for a break in the rain and go swimming? Call a friend and get together or talk on the phone? Write the checks for my monthly bills? Start a new book and enjoy a cup of tea while I read? Watch a movie? Pull out my paints and start a new work of art? Finish the short story I'm writing for the new anthology project? Go to Reading Terminal Market and walk among the stalls and maybe come home with something fun? Take the train to New York and surprise myself with the unexpected? All of it? Some of it? None of it? Something else?   

Pay close attention to where you stand/Before you know it, tomorrow has become yesterday,/Wandering (through life) goes so fast. Pay close attention to what you receive/Which is a hundred summer days a year,/And tomorrow is the second. (Cai Lundgren, translated by Imelda Almqvist)

I think back to the poem that inspired this writing theme and revisit some of its lines. Awareness remains the path to cultivating joy in living, to cultivating presence, to experiencing each day in all its fullness and beauty. Even if the beauty of the day is achingly painful. It may be that I spend this day in reflection, cultivating awareness. It's easy to let it slip away as the days fly by and we lose ourselves in the busy-ness of our lives. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Stormy

After more than a week of beautiful summer days, clouds rolled in today. Clear blue skies and sunshine peeked through every now and then, and it was muggy. From the sound of things, the predicted storms are moving through. 

I hear rain falling and sighs of relief from my garden. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life..

Bee Balm

A gift from a friend's garden. I enjoy watching her come to life. From four twiggy pieces in a plastic pot to a slender leafy stem with a stunning bud. I've never seen its like. And even this has changed as she continues to find her form. 

Deep green and dark pink, she opens to reveal tiny spikes in the center. What she will be tomorrow, I have no idea but I'm looking forward to her continuing growth and blossoming.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

  

Can We Change a Couple of Things, Please?

There's a lot of hype tonight about the presidential debate and the campaign. Many things weigh us down spiritually. These endless political campaigns are one of those things. I wish they'd pass a law that limits political campaigns. Like to six weeks duration. Otherwise, no campaign events, no campaign speak, no premature so-called debates, no posturing ~ until mid-September before a November election. 

Nothing about this year's elections feels inspiring to me. I'd like to feel inspired by the people we look to for leadership. I also wish we'd pass some laws that limit spending on campaigns. Like each candidate gets the same budget and no donations are allowed. Take the money once spent on campaigns and use it for the public good ~ feeding and housing people, improving infrastructure, educating citizens in citizenship. 

I think these two changes would vastly improve life, general contentment, and likely the functioning of government. I have some opinions about tonight's debate. Thinks like ~ it wasn't really a debate. It felt more like ninety minutes of mudslinging, and we all got dirty. As for the rest of my opinions, I'll keep them to myself. 

It's just that I've been sitting here reflecting on it, and the evening sits uneasily on my mind.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.. 

 . 

Wiggy Wiggy Wag Wag Woo

It's been that kind of week. Wiggy. Unexpected challenges. Changes. Small and smaller changes that confound when I'm trying just to put together a schedule I can depend on and things to look forward to. I'd really love it if I could just relax and breathe, if life could flow smoothly so that relaxing and breathing could flow smoothly.

I'm rolling my eyes at myself.

I'd like to be able to roll with the small stressors, but there've been so many big stressors this year that I don't have much elasticity for the small ones.

But . . . I got a great haircut last week and the weather's been beautiful, so I've been enjoying the pool. I get great joy from my morning swim and the songs of birds, movement of tree branches in the breeze, and clear blue skies with or without gorgeous summer clouds. I'm getting my vitamin D these days the natural way.

I get great joy from spending time with my son. We've both been moving and have helped each other with that, have enjoyed making some meals together. This evening we baptized my new grill with a marinated flank steak. 

I get great joy from spending time with friends. I have a standing date for dinner with one every week. I have a standing date with a group of friends one evening every month. Other friends and I try to find time to get together for tea and conversation or tea and poetry. I check in with two writing groups every day and am working on a new anthology contribution with another. 

The writing groups bring joy on two fronts ~ friends and writing.

What doesn't bring me joy is the tedium of moving boxes, but I'm working on changing my mindset around that. To cultivating the joy of discovery. Opening a box, only to find something I've been wondering about or have missed. The ease I'm feeling around getting rid of things. Tedium sometimes has its benefits.

I'm not quite finding joy in putting together a new home. Stress and decision fatigue seems to be in control for now, but I'm working on changing my mindset around that too. But there's time. I'll get there.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

  .

 

 

Angel Numbers

When I signed in to write today, I noticed something. A number. 555. An angel number. The triple 5 sequence pops up for me frequently, usually when I least expect it. It always invites me to pause, notice, reflect, smile. I like the idea of angels all around us and that sometimes they remind us they are there.

This time it really grabbed my attention. It indicates the number of reflections that I've written since I started this blog in 2012. My life had just been through some big changes, changes that would continue for a couple of years, changes that would come around again every now and then. 

New Age writer Doreen Virtue popularized Angel Numbers in the early 2000s. She later began to study theology and withdrew her work, saying it was demonic. I don't think that casually noticing number repeats and delighting in them as uplifting messages is demonic. Perhaps if one idolizes them, a claim can be made. Of course, idolizing anything ~ money, success, power, to name a few, is a spiritual stumbling block. Numbers figure in many ancient esoteric systems, including the three Abrahamic faiths ~ Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are overt expressions as well as mystical expressions. Numbers can be symbolic. This quotation is attributed to St. Augustine (I was not able to find the citation. Google is not always a helpful search engine) ~ 

Numbers are the universal language given to us by the deity as confirmation of the truth.

Whatever the facts are, we find truth in many things and they don't always make sense. I'll take my Angel Numbers, especially my frequent 555 that invites me to relax and trust in the midst of big changes.  

 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

A Little Bird Told Me

I'm in some kind of weird lull. The only time I feel happy is when I am swimming, or lying in the sun, listening to the birds sing or watching them fly around.  Even things like reading, writing, cooking, and gardening fail to hold my attention. In other news, my mother's house is now cleared out and ready to be listed. It should happen one day soon. 

The other day a gold finch came and landed on my window. Nodded his head at me as if he was trying to tell me something.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Two For the Price of One

This morning as I opened the vertical blind in the living room, I remembered that I did not write and publish yesterday. My commitment is a daily writing practice, and I do not know how the whole day and evening went by without my writing. Well, I know how it happened. I've been swimming in the mornings since the days have been so hot and the pool so crowded later in the day. I changed my pattern and the new pattern is not solid yet. I stayed at the pool longer than usual yesterday because the day was so beautiful. I pushed my time and became overheated. Over-sunned. Threw me off, and I never quite caught up with myself.

The beautiful thing is that I noticed it without judgment and committed to writing two reflections today. My inner critic gave me a break and rolled with it. Wow. Is that different.  

I've spent the last few months being mindful around being kinder to myself. There's been a lot of change and a lot of stress. Outer circumstances have not always been kind, so my inner circumstances need to be. It's the loving thing to do. There's unexpected treasure in this, for ourselves and for others. When we are kinder and more loving to ourselves, we can be kinder and more loving toward others. It's something the world can use a little more of these days.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Catbird on a Hot Tin Roof

I tend to fall into a reverie when I swim on these beautiful summer days. The sky, the clouds, the breezes moving the branches of trees. Birdsong and birds flying through the air, landing on the fence, in trees, on the ground. Today a catbird landed on the peak of the roof, stood proudly there at the pinnacle and sang her beautiful song.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Fresca Deliciosa

The fridge is pretty empty. I could use a trip to the store. Coming home from the pool, I noticed the containers all needed water. It's hot and dry. As I moved through the garden with the watering can, it occurred to me that the kale and lettuce I'd been nurturing in containers are edible. Well ready to harvest. So I made a salad of my own lettuce for lunch today. Some of my own kale, dill and basil. There was half an avocado in the fridge and a little feta, some pickled red onion. With a little olive oil and champagne vinegar, it was a good salad. Refreshing. 

And there was something about most of it coming from my own garden that felt good.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.