This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.
A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.
I’m here as a kind of halfway house—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.
All of the things are blooming. Have you noticed? June is here. The Cecil Brunner rosebush is magnificent this year--an explosion of flowers so heavy that its top has fallen away from the white wall of the little city cottage where Lucia is made, and is spilling toward the alleyway. There is a lesson here for me, in expectation and fruition...
Sunday, April 9, 2017 - Daily Notes, From the Editor (550 words). Whoa, April is intense. Burgeoning. This thing we call Spring is aptly named. To the untrained eye, new growth appears suddenly, but if you have been paying attention you know: this all started long ago.
Happy New Year! Oh, the plans I had for ending 2016 with a neat bow, a perfect email, and an announcement of a new offering I've been working on for early 2017. Out the window they flew sometime in the last week while I struggled to balance heart work with paid work, dreams with reality. Instead, I woke this morning unfinished. Like I always do...
Walking alone can be a meditative practice. Walking with children leads to interiority by a different path. My love for walking hearkens back to my days as a pilgrim, when I traversed Spain and, later, France on the Camino de Santiago. On pilgrimage, you follow the path, absorbing the folds of the land in your bones as the body wears out, and mind-chatter stills to a plain - flat, expansive, rounding at the edges.
Photos by Laura Lowery
“Perhaps the rain is how our grandmothers whisper, “Slow down, dear ones. Enjoy this life.””
{240 words}
"My mother always said it slows things down and cleans things up," she murmured, as she packed my groceries into the brown bag last night. I had mentioned the rain, making small talk at the checkout stand. It has been falling all week. "She passed when she was fifty-nine, but I still talk to her."
Last weekend I kept a promise to spend time with my dad. We went through boxes of family photographs I had not seen before, like the one of my grandparents on the day they married in 1931.
I never met my grandmother Inez; she passed when she was sixty, just before I was born. But her wedding picture reveals curly brown hair (like mine) and I wish I could talk to her.
The misty rain this week has made straightening these curls an exercise in futility. Today I left them alone and put on a dress. With one hand on my hip, I tried to smile into my camera the way I imagine Inez smiled into hers: that look she has of hope, curiosity, uncertainty, courage.
Life is quickening now. We are heading into spring, and the whole Northern Hemisphere is roaring back to life. New projects and plans take on a life of their own. It does seem harder to slow down in March, have you noticed?
Perhaps the rain is here to remind us. Perhaps the rain is how our grandmothers whisper, "Slow down, dear ones. Enjoy this life."
xo
laura
Laura Lowery is the founder, editor and publisher of Lucia. She does her best to lead a creative life. Whether triumphant or stumbling, Laura shares daily notes (that are often weekly) here on luciajournal, including stories, behind-the-scenes happenings, little doses of inspiration, and large quantities of curiosity and heart. She is pleased to meet you.
