You are one year old today.

I think it is time for me to serve you a miniature devil’s food cake and let you smash your face right into it.  I won’t forget to take pictures, either, to try and embarrass you later on when you are all grown up and dignified.

Yes, I am so very proud of you, and I think you are beautiful, even when you have icing on your chin and in your hair.  You have taught me more than I could ever have imagined.

Thank you.

It’s my blogaversary, y’all!

This time last year, I was nearly having a panic attack over the idea of pressing the “publish” button for the first time.  I had no idea then how everything was going to work out so beautifully.  All I could feel, as I read and re-read and re-re-read my initial post, was that old fear that has kept me from showing my writing to anyone for years and years.  Decades, actually.

Let’s just say I had some unpleasant early experiences with publishing and even showing my work to people who were not careful with my developing artistic soul and who stood to gain some things by stealing or trashing or misinterpreting my work.  Also, I was young, and I didn’t know how to defend myself from such attacks.  Pretty soon, I was prepared to burn my work rather than let another human being read it — and indeed, much of my writing over the years has been burned or shredded or even tossed into the trash compactor.  In one rather memorable instance, I even buried a bit of it under a full moon.

Sometimes you have to go for the grand, symbolic gesture.

Around my birthday last year, F. started suggesting that I start a blog, as a creative outlet.  He saw how much I wrote, starting with three pages of longhand stream-of-consciousness writing every morning, and became frustrated with my unwillingness to ever show him anything.  At least when we were dating he’d had the benefit of my words and stories in e-mails.   Now he was getting bupkiss, and because he is an incredibly wise man, he tried to nudge me out of my stubborn and defiant stance.  As he saw it, I was silencing myself and had to be stopped posthaste.

My first reaction was, “And what exactly is this thing called ‘blog’?”

Seems funny now.

Once I found out — although I still had no idea, really — I backed away from the idea as far as I could go.  I believe I actually may have said things along the lines of how I never could do that, how it would be painful in the extreme, how I’d never have the courage.  A few weeks later, when F. brought it up again, I told him I flat-out refused to even consider it, that he couldn’t possibly understand, and that he was an insensitive jerk to suggest I expose myself and my words ever again.

It was a terrible moment.  I was being asked to open the door just a little bit again, and I reacted with panic and blind fury.  You know those doors you have in your heart, that sometimes you slam shut, and then they get stuck that way, and then it starts to feel comfortable and safe for them to be shut forever?

Well, maybe you are lucky and you’ve never done anything so silly.  But if you have, you’ll know how brave you have to be to even nudge that door open a quarter of an inch.  Such a small sliver of light comes in, not even wide enough to fit a toe in the gap.  But you can put your eye up to it and see farther than you have in years….

I did do that, one year ago.  Only because during a much calmer conversation in late July, F. assured me that no one would ever read my blog.

Not exactly true, it turns out.

Out of curiosity, I checked this morning, and my words have been read (or at least scanned or glanced at) tens of thousands of times now.

Wow.

And I didn’t once die from the exposure.

On the contrary.  This whole experience has been an incredible, radiant joy.  I have learned so much, about myself, about writing, about creativity and resilience, patience and persistence, about gardens and magic and storytellers all around the world.  I have made friends, laughed and cried with y’all, and been told my words lifted someone’s spirit, brought some small measure of beauty and peace into the world, made things a little brighter, for at least a little while.

And now I have tears in my eyes.  I can’t help it.  The creative journey is an amazing one.

I’ll probably write more about this journey past my huge creative block as I come to understand it more.  But for now, let’s stop all this serious stuff and get back to the happy happy joy joy part.

Aren’t blogaversaries supposed to be about celebration? And presents? Yes!  Never fear, I do have presents for you, who have been such an integral and lovely part of my journey.

First and foremost, you have my thanks.

You also have a chance to win free Beauty in your mailbox.

I haven’t said much about it here, but I now sell prints and canvases, postcards and cards of my work over at RedBubble.  (See the box in the sidebar.)  Yes, it enables me to earn a little money in return for the hours of artmaking I’ve put into this site, and yes, I am so appreciative of those of you who have purchased items from the shop, because our financial situation has not been the easiest row to hoe lately.

But originally, I did it all for the love of paper.  I once ran the Paperie at a famous art supply store, and I believe I might have landed the job when the manager asked why I wanted it exactly, and I clasped my hands together like Anne of Green Gables and waxed poetic about how much I adore good paper, and old-fashioned letter writing, and thank-you notes, and fine stationery.

I might also have mentioned how I have a collection of hundreds of postcards and how good-quality, cold-press watercolor paper makes me swoon.

How amazing is it, to be a stationery addict all your life and then to hold your very own designs in your hands?  It was a moment of awe for me.  I’ll be sending two lucky winners a packet of cards and postcards, hoping you feel at least a touch of that pleasure when you open your mailbox.   To enter your name into the random drawing for these gifts, just leave a comment on this post before midnight Eastern Standard Time (that’s the same as NYC, for those of you overseas) on Sunday, August 15th.

If you tweet or otherwise advertise this giveaway, you have my profound gratitude and the joy and satisfaction of serving as a connection point for potential like-minded spirits.  But I really want every reader to have an equal chance to win, so those actions will only be to your benefit karmically.

Now, even though I wish I could send you all a lovely gift in the mail, unfortunately that cannot happen, especially since I am relearning the joys of extreme thrift lately.

Blooming in spring, the kind of thrift I actually prefer.

But still, I have managed to come up with a little something for everyone.  See that square button in the top of the sidebar labeled Soul Food?

Yes, that’s the one, with the pretty yellow flowers.

If you click it, you’ll find a selection of the best of the best of The Enchanted Earth & Victory Garden Redux (the first incarnation).  For each month, I have selected a post where I thought my words were inspired and shining, deep and rich with meaning.  I give them all to you again, with a full heart.

Namasté, y’all.

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Back when I wrote “taller than a tree,” the post which introduced the lovely and ancient Magnolia grandiflora and chronicled my personal relationship to one very special Magnolia tree, I was a little disappointed not to find any pictures of fully developed blossoms and seed pod formation in my photo archives.  Instead, I made a promise to myself that I’d attempt to locate and photograph and then share these beautiful flowers and the resulting seedpods at all stages of their development this summer.

One of my favorite details of the massive, heavenly-scented blooms of the Southern Magnolia is the “matchsticks” that form and fall off into the still-cupped tepals* just as the seeds are forming.

These matchsticks are actually the stamens, which have done their job at this point.  Since I engage in a lot of stamen love around here, y’all might notice that these are pretty tough, as stamens go.  But then, this was a necessary adaptation for a tree which evolved in a time before bees.  Each of these thick stamens was designed to withstand the attentions of the only pollinators yet in the game back then:  beetles.

Aren’t they charming, spilling out into the tepals*?

Matchsticks are the perfect image for today’s post, I thought, because a year ago yesterday I lit and smoked my last cigarette.

Yes, this is my one-year anniversary of being a non-addict.  It feels pretty great to even type that sentence — and even better to breathe deeply through my much cleaner lungs now.

Quitting smoking is really tough, and my heart goes out to all those struggling to overcome any addiction right now.  People who have never been addicted to anything really can’t “get” what it’s like, I’ve discovered.  My still-smoking friends were hardly a safe source of support in those first few weeks and months,** and my friends who’d never been addicted at all had limited capacity for understanding and empathy.

Part of the reason I ended up starting a blog (okay, two blogs) in mid-August was the feeling that I was going to lose my mind in the first few weeks without nicotine.  The gum made my throat so sore I was in danger of losing my voice, and the patches hurt my skin, so it ended up being a cold-turkey event for me.

If you’re interested in vintage Meredith posts about my journey getting the tobacco monkey off my back, you may click this link which will take you to a list of posts in the Overcoming Addiction category on my first blog.  There are only seven posts in total.  Mostly, I didn’t feel like talking about it much as it was happening.

And now that it’s finished, do I feel like talking about it?

Magnolia grandiflora immature seedpod.

Hmmm… not much.

Do I think it was worth it, a year down the road?  Definitely.  If I had to start the process all over again today, I’d do it, without hesitation.

Being free is precious.

Namasté, y’all.

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*What are tepals, you ask?  This post answers that question.

** Yes, I fell off the wagon during a girls’ weekend in the mountains in November, four months into the journey.  The temptation is still palpable even months later, even if your friends are super careful and don’t mean any harm by it and you’re sure you’re tough enough to withstand anything by then.  And it has definitely been a challenge to me that F., after 7 weeks of our quitting journey, began to smoke again.  But turn about is fair play:  when we first met, he’d been tobacco-free for eight months, and unfortunately his new smoker girlfriend dragged him off the wagon quicker than you can say “kiss an ashtray.”

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Or not so young grasshopper, as the case may be.  Today is my birthday, and I think, officially, I no longer qualify for the term.

But I’m still sometimes as impatient as a youngster, and if the DSL woes have demonstrated anything, it’s that patience is a virtue I do need to cultivate.  We had more connection issues over the weekend, if you can believe it.  I finally started to get seriously annoyed.

This morning, I switched my purse over for the summer.  I typically do a seasonal bag change, and I’m pretty lazy about completely emptying the old season’s purse, so there’s always a little surprise when I come back around to it again.  I pulled out a purse from last spring, a dark blue, embroidered silk bag large enough to fit notebook and camera and a water bottle, perfect for long walks at the park or the lake or the Botanical Gardens.  As I was emptying it, I discovered a cache of Chinese fortune-cookie fortunes, which I collect.

Of the five I discovered, four were wonderful — especially if I take them (lightly) as personal messages from the Universe on my birthday.  There was one, though, that was a not-too-subtle reminder about my progress, and it had me rolling my eyes and muttering under my breath about just how much more patient I’m supposed to get.

Geez.

In spite of my mounting annoyance with the phone company, however, I had a lovely time this weekend.  I actually watched the sun set over a nearby lake, now full to the brim with clear, sparkling water — the same lake that was so dry during the record drought that when F. and I first met we sometimes walked in the dry bottom and collected some of the copious litter we found there.

This time around, we were with a visitor from Europe who looked politely skeptical of some of our descriptions of the area as it was then.  That drought made such crazy alterations to the landscape that I could never even have imagined the reality — and yet, listening to F. explain about the boat dock where we stood, gently rocking on the current, how it settled so far down on the dry lake bottom and caused the ramp to angle so steeply that we could not even risk climbing down that way, I realized that, to those who did not witness the dramatic changes, we both must sound like very accomplished yarn-spinners.

Remembering it aloud made me even more profoundly grateful for the return of the rains.  I never want to go through such a thing again, and my heart goes out to all of those around the world suffering a drought now.

Once upon a time... this was all dry land.

We also saw a beaver swim to a swampy shore, only about 12 feet away, and begin to attack a fallen limb with those amazing teeth.  When first we saw the disturbance in the glassy water, coming toward us in the dim and failing light beneath the canopy, I assumed it was a juvenile alligator — which, it turns out, is an alarming and unwelcome assumption to Europeans.  (Oops!)

And I introduced him (the visitor, not F.) to the pleasures of mimosas (Albizzia julibrissin) in bloom.  Although to be fair, the feathery “flowers” (they are actually all stamen and no petal) were not his primary interest.  He seemed more fascinated by the fact that the leaves had buttoned themselves up tightly with the advent of the twilight and would not reopen until the sun returned with the dawn.

It is pretty cool, when you stop and think about it.  It’s good to see ordinary, everyday things, trees so common they fade into the background for me, through the eyes of a stranger.

Somehow, I managed all that without my camera (I know, shock!), but I went back at lunch today as a special birthday treat.  Ignoring the day job and household chores in favor of some close encounters with the Earth — what could be a nicer way to celebrate a new year?

However, you’ll need to be patient a little while longer for me to go through those photos and put together a post on the mimosa, maybe later this week.  Meanwhile, here’s a taste:

Now you can probably see why I considered titling this post “Mother Nature does fiber optics, too!”

Namasté, y’all.

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My Earth Day essay was over 2500 words, complete with footnotes and quotes, before I scrapped it yesterday.  I think I may have rendered myself incoherent because I so wanted to make an impact, wanted to “say something important” for this anniversary.  My relationship with the Earth is rather vital to me, as you might have guessed from even a cursory acquaintance with this blog.

It did not take me quite a thousand words in the second draft today, writing about my grandfather’s Parkinson’s Disease as a result of exposure to agricultural pesticides, before I realized that that was not what I wanted to say, either.

What I want to say is this:

Love the Earth.

I know I sound naive and simple, which is why I’ve danced around saying it now in two different essays.  But I really do think the more we connect with this beautiful planet, and truly allow ourselves to feel the wonder and joy of being alive now, here, the more likely it will be that each of us will choose to live thoughtfully and deliberately and lightly, will desire to heal and no longer to harm, will get involved wherever we can to spread that love and to make appropriate changes where we have the power to do so.

I think that we’re all pretty intelligent, after all, and if something matters to us, matters deeply, we will figure out a way to learn what we need to learn and do what we need to do to keep ourselves in alignment with that core value.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that we will suddenly do it perfectly, that we will transition seamlessly to a new mode of living to match our new way of seeing the world, never once making a mistake.  Like everything else in life, it will be a process, fluid and unknowable in advance, with challenges and opportunities along the way.  And probably failures, too.

i heart u

In my reading today, on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, I have been coming across a lot of panic, and blaming, guilt, fear, anger, and shaming.  I understand that we are collectively mourning the perhaps easier worldview we used to have.  Or at least many of us are in my area of the world; I can observe no other area accurately.  Many people are in denial, or are bitterly angry, or are bargaining with the Divine or the Powers That Be to try and hold on to their old way of thinking and acting in the world.  Some of us are downright depressed, or panicked, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems, or burnt out from trying to win the fight day-in and day-out.

In other words, we are going through all the classic stages of grief, all at once, but at our own speeds.

I don’t want to add to that fear or guilt or anger or denial or shame.  I don’t think it helps the Earth, I don’t think it helps the humans, and I don’t think it’s a good place, psychologically speaking, from which to make rational decisions.  I find the guilt part especially disturbing — and very common.

Why should you feel the weight of Industrial Civilization’s choices squarely on your shoulders?  That burden can be paralyzing.  (I speak from experience.)

That’s why I’m urging love, really.  No matter what you think of the science, or the politics, or the history, or the future, you can decide to get to know the bit of earth that you come into contact with daily.  You can learn its contours, its habits, its glories, its goals.

Wait.  Does the Earth have goals?  I think so.  Maybe you will disagree once you know your patch of ground well.

And from knowing it better, learning its ways, respecting them, the love arises naturally.  It really does.  And it is never a paralyzing force.  Love doesn’t say, Quick, change everything you do now!  Or you’re no good!  Love might whisper a sweet nothing, a hint that really, it might be nicer, more worthy of your love, to do it this way.  It might even make the beloved feel good, make her life that little bit better, make him smile that adorable, genuine little-boy smile.

All of these portraits are of the fallen seed leaves of Mustard ‘Ruby Streaks.’  As plants grow, at some point they no longer need their seed leaves and let them go.  These are not “true” leaves, but hold much of the power of the seed, allowing the plant access to just enough energy to get established, at which point it can support itself on a diet of sunlight and raindrops, rich earth and fresh breezes.  An honest-to-goodness miracle — that happens every day and without which, I wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be reading these words.

These tiny leaves resisted being positioned on my kitchen table.  They wanted to flutter off on their own paths or stick to my skin instead.

I named the one above “seed leaves and earth,” because a little earth came with them when I picked them up from the dewy garden this morning… and of course it ended up in the portrait.  As I looked at the series, searching for a “clean” one, I realized that there is always earth, in any picture, whether of a child, a cubicle or a concert hall, a book, a bank or a bald eagle, a party, a pair of socks or a Painted Dessert.  Whether the scene is indoors or out, primitive or modern, urban or rural, candid or posed, it is there.

We are of the Earth; it is the ground of our being, after all.

What’s not to love?

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

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“I think carnations are making a comeback.”

– Carrie Bradshaw (a character on Sex and the City)

Carnations are winners in my book.  Not only are they pretty and ruffly, but they last forever in the vase, and their scent is lovely, with a hint of spice at the heart that makes me lean in to sniff several times a day.

I’m afraid I did not properly follow up on my half-anniversary giveaway, and I do apologize to you for that.  With the move over to the other site ongoing, I guess I just forgot.  It’s getting a little difficult to keep up with both sites and all of the details, so if you haven’t visited The Enchanted Earth, please come on over and don’t forget to change your bookmarks, subscriptions, and links.  Soon the transition will be complete, and Victory Garden Redux will be a happy memory.

Thank you to everyone for your kind congratulations on my half-year anniversary of blogging.  Some of those comments were so nice they made me blush.  I hope to continue to meet your expectations for another half year and beyond.

Without further ado, the winners of the selection of seeds are:  Annie’s Granny, Jackie, and Carol.   I know Granny prefers lettuce (not just for herself, but I think for her adorable rabbit Cookie, too), and Jackie wants a selection of radishes to amuse her husband’s taste buds.

Carol, you’ll have to let me know your seed preference:  is it to be radishes, lettuce, or cucumbers?

I’ll be in touch with all three of you soon about addresses and details.

As for the rest of you who commented and who read this blog, you know you’re all winners to me!

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Spring is in the air.  Quite literally in the air.  I spent an entire hour at the South Carolina Botanical Gardens yesterday, enraptured by the buds and new shoots and flowers at my feet, so much so that I never noticed this Japanese apricot bursting into glorious bloom overhead.  Only as I was leaving did I perceive a rosy mist among a thousand bare limbs, a hint of a blush hovering in the air above the distant pond.

I rushed over to stand beneath it, the first flowering tree I’ve seen this season, and managed to snap this one shot before my camera battery died on me.  I’m so glad I was able to capture that one; it’s nice to immortalize the moment when spring became utterly real for me, even though winter still holds us fast in its grip.

After all, the ground had a frozen crust that crunched beneath my feet when I went to check on the peas’ progress this morning.  Yet as I stood beneath these flowering branches, my heart swelled with the joy and the certainty of spring.  If I’d been the demonstrative type, I might have started singing.  (Visitors to the gardens are no doubt relieved that my relatively timid public persona forbade it — or would be if they knew what a narrow escape they’d had.)

I’m reminded of the opposite moment, immortalized in another post written at the other pole of the year, when autumn made itself felt to me, even in the midst of a blazing August when it seemed as if summer could never end.

When I wrote about the major seasonal shift from summer to autumn, my blog was just a few days old.  I feel a bit like a four-year-old announcing this (only very small children count in fractions), but…

It’s my half blog-birthday!

Six months ago at around 9:00 at night, I pressed the publish button on this blog for the first time.  And not a single person read that post for 14 days.  But I wasn’t really anticipating an audience, or even aware of how one would go about getting one, and it was better for me not to have one at first.

I was treating the blog as a semi-public diary of my kitchen garden, mostly for my use and to get me past my irrational and near lifelong fear of having others read what I write.  Those first entries were basically a transfer of a couple of paragraphs that normally would have been preserved in one of my gazillions of notebooks, never to be seen by other eyes.

Now, this whole approach to blogging may sound strange to other bloggers, but you have to remember I knew almost nothing about the world of blogs.  And unlike F. and other academically-minded people, I didn’t bother to research before I launched mine.  My style is more jump-in-with-both-feet.

So I did.

My personal goal, enumerated on my other blog (which has its half-birthday in two days), was to publish some bit of writing and a photograph here every single day.  And I have done so, by and large, only missing seven days’ postings in six months, by my count, and some of those were due to our DSL going on the fritz.

I also used a “cheat,” posting a quote from someone else and a photograph of my own on occasion, especially useful during those times when I was sick, on deadline for work, or away on my honeymoon.  Although I learned over time to prepare posts in advance for emergencies, it was particularly difficult to write them too far in advance due to the seasonal nature of this blog.

Since that first post, I have pressed “publish” a total of 299 times (if you count both blogs), and my words have been read — or scanned, or at the very least glanced at — over 12,000 times.  And I didn’t die, after all.  Pressing the publish button is no longer nerve-wracking, and it seems that by practicing a little writing every day, I’ve somehow cured my writer’s block and am writing more freely than I’d managed in a decade.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You must do the thing you cannot do.”  It seems that in my case, it’s true.

It turns out that letting people read my words is not something to inspire terror; it’s more like a thrill.  In fact, my audience turned out to be not scary at all, but rather intelligent and passionate, friendly and knowledgeable, lively and humorous and fun, as can be seen in the more than 1800 comments we’ve exchanged here and at my art blog, and in all of those lovely e-mails, too.

There is no way to adequately express my thanks for all of that interaction, whether it be just reading along or subscribing or commenting or sending me a note.  Y’all have been such an integral part of my journey in blogging.

As this anniversary was approaching, I thought a lot about what it has meant to me to have that audience there, and I determined to have some sort of show of my thankfulness.  And in keeping with the theme of Victory Garden Redux (how funny is it that I didn’t realize I had a theme when I began?), I’d like to give away some of that most potent symbol of Nature’s mystery and the wonder we all experience when we allow ourselves to truly interact with that mystery; that is, I’ll be giving away some seeds.  And because it’s the Victory Garden, they’ll be seeds for food plants.

On February 18th, I will select , by random number generator, three readers to receive a gift of a selection of five varieties of either lettuce, radish, or cucumber seed.  These will not be full packets, but a small quantity of seeds of each kind that I have in my seed collection, all suitable for a home kitchen garden.

To enter, just leave a note in the comments and tell me whether you’d prefer lettuce, radishes, or cucumbers in your garden.  For those who garden in containers, don’t forget that lettuce and radishes are both suitable, and lettuce in particular is forgiving of relatively cramped conditions.  Some cukes are fine in containers, but I have found them a pain because of their need for pretty consistent moisture levels to produce well.

I’m sure that it will not be legal for me to send seed to certain countries, so if a comment from an international reader is selected, I’ll research the rules pertaining to that particular locale, and if exchanging vegetable seeds with you would be illegal or questionable, I’ll find something else garden-related to send instead.

The tradition in F.’s country is that the person whose birthday it is should treat all his or her friends to a wonderful dinner, and sometimes gifts, as well.  Of course, in the United States it’s the opposite, with the birthday girl or boy receiving the presents from friends and family.  But I like it his culture’s way, really.  It’s almost like saying, “Look at me, I’ve survived another year with your love and company and support, and I’m thriving, in large part thanks to all of you.  So let’s celebrate together!”

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by planting some seeds (for me, today, ‘Saxa’ radish and ‘Tatsoi’ mustard), and I’m so happy to share this half-blogaversary with all of you.

(Post originally published on Victory Garden Redux, my original blog.)

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