When my husband is away, I tend to feel a little down and want to stay in bed all day, reading magazines and eating bad-for-me food. He’s gone all weekend to backpack through the Ozarks with four other guys. While I’m really happy for him to have some nature time, I feel like half of me is missing. I have to make an extra effort to stay cheerful and motivated. This past month has been one of the most stressful I’ve ever experienced since we started our business. It’s given me an idiopathic case of hives and a bit of insomnia.
Getting Back to Basics…
Meditation really helps when me when I need to get back on track and have a number of conflicting voices shouting in my ears. I’ve been thinking on this one for the past few weeks:
But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God; I trust in the mercy of God forever and ever. – Psalm 52:8 NKJV
Wikipedia says that the olive leaf was used as “a symbol of abundance, glory and peace …used to crown the victors of friendly games and bloody wars.” I like that, but this is what I found to be the most inspiring:
The olive tree is very hardy: drought-, disease- and fire-resistant, it can live to a great age. Its root system is robust and capable of regenerating the tree even if the above-ground structure is destroyed. The older an olive tree is, the broader and more gnarled its trunk appears. Many olive trees in the groves around the Mediterranean are said to be hundreds of years old, while an age of 2,000 years is claimed for a number of individual trees, and in some cases this has been verified scientifically.
I want to be like that. Also, it seems that the olive rarely thrives at a distance from the sea. Maybe I need a little holiday on the ocean? 😉 Since that’s not an option right now, I’ve been doing everything to try to de-stress this weekend.
Lately I’ve been addicted to watching the Longyearbyen 360 Livecam throughout the day. It’s stunningly beautiful. Longyearbyen is the administrative center of the Norwegian island of Svalbard.
I find stark landscapes to be calming and invigorating and I end up reading everything I can of the history of these kinds of places. Every morning this week I’ve turned on that livecam just to see what’s happening over there.
I also spent the weekend catching up on my Youtube subscriptions, cleaning, marinating ribs for Sunday, and getting lost in Kakuzo Okakura’s Book of Tea, which is full of little thought-provoking gems, like this one:
“Slavish conformity to traditions and formulas fetters the expression of individuality in architecture. We can but weep over the senseless imitations of European buildings which one beholds in modern Japan. We marvel why, among the most progressive Western nations, architecture should be so devoid of originality, so replete with repetitions of obsolete styles. Perhaps we are passing through an age of democratisation in art, while awaiting the rise of some princely master who shall establish a new dynasty. Would that we loved the ancients more and copied them less! It has been said that the Greeks were great because they never drew from the antique.”
There’s an artistic challenge in there that I think we’d all do well to consider, although I’m not sure I’m entirely in agreement. I’ll come back to it when I review the Book of Tea on this blog in a few weeks. That’s it for this stream of consciousness ramble. I’m going to take an antihistamine and pass out.