Tomorrow is the spring equinox. You can find ways to celebrate here.
I’ll be traveling next week, so I won’t be blogging. But I have a little giveaway planned while I’m away, so check back on Monday for the details!
Happy first day of spring!
Just One Small Change
When I was writing my New Year’s Resolutions series, I went on the lookout for simple and inexpensive ways we might live better in 2010. And it struck me how much we might be able to improve our lives by making just one small change.
For instance what if someone committed to a daily walk? That alone could bring better health, relaxation, improved sleep, connection with neighbors, and more quality time with family. And if the walk replaced a car trip, it could even save some money. Every small change I thought of had a similar snowball effect.
Recently I heard an interview with William Wittman, a life coach in Seattle. He talked about an easy daily exercise that he recommends to his clients and insists he’s seen it bring huge changes to people’s lives. He calls it “Owl Ears and Owl Eyes”. The idea is to go outside first thing in the morning, stand still, and look up, down, and side to side without moving your head while listening closely to the sounds around you, first the loud ones, then the quieter ones.
Wittman says that by connecting with nature like this first thing in the morning, we connect with what’s meaningful in the world. And by focusing on looking and listening, we can’t help but quiet our mental chatter and relax. He says he’s seen this one small change motivate people to get healthy, find fulfilling work, reach out to friends, and on and on.
I think Wittman might be on to something. Awhile ago my neighbor put down black plastic over the garden in his backyard, which attracted ducks – sometimes sixty of them at a time. And now each night the ducks circle over our neighborhood in groups of four or five, flying lower and lower until they’re just overhead. (I wrote about it before here; my neighbor has since built a pond for the ducks.)
I’ve been shocked at how much this random, natural (and free) event has improved my family’s quality of life. Most nights we go outside to watch the ducks, and we chat with our neighbors, connect with nature, and enjoy each other’s company. Just one small change really has added up to so much more.
(This post is for Steady Mom’s Thirty Minute Blog Challenge.)
What do you think? Has one small change ever made a big difference in your life?
Adults on Bikes
Shareable.net published my article about three different bike cooperatives today. It starts:
Over a hundred years ago, H.G. Wells famously quipped, “When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.”
When Wells wrote his novel Cycles of Change in 1896, the world was in the throes of a bicycling craze. James Kemp Starley’s 1885 invention of the modern bicycle enabled the working classes to travel quickly and cheaply for the first time. Women who had been constricted in corsets, hoops, and petticoats were donning bloomers and discovering a newfound freedom of movement.
Today in the United States it can be harder to muster Wells’ optimism about the bicycle. Only one percent of urban trips in this country are made by bike, and only 0.55 percent of people commute to work on a bicycle.
And although Susan B. Anthony once credited the bicycle with doing “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” today the vast majority of American cyclists are white males. According to research by John Pucher, American men make three times more trips by bicycle than women. Plus, a 2008 NSGA Sports Performance Study found that while African Americans and Hispanics make up 12 and 15 percent of the U.S. population respectively, each group represents only about six percent of bicyclists.
Obviously there are some huge barriers to bicycling in the United States, especially for women and minorities.
Nevertheless I discovered ample reason for optimism about the future of American bicycling. In cities across the country, people are coming together to form bicycle cooperatives with the mission to make buying, building, and repairing bikes an affordable, accessible, and shareable experience. And many of them are reaching out to women and minorities.
You can read the rest of the article here.
Plan a Bicycle Trip
Google Maps added a “bicycle” option! Now they’ll help you find the best route by car, public transit, on foot, or by bicycle. The bike function is still being tested, and Google is asking for users’ feedback to guarantee their routes are actually bicycle-safe.
I just tested it by asking for a map of the best bicycle route from my house to my friend’s house across town. I wouldn’t say it chose the absolute best route, as it sent me up a busy street when I know of a couple of safer, more enjoyable routes. But it was a much better route for biking than the way they recommend for cars. So it’s definitely an improvement.
Check it out!
And speaking of bikes, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that my son is crazy about them. He runs and find his bike first thing in the morning, and he squeals “Vroom vroom” every time someone rides past on a bike. He’s also a big fan of wearing his helmet and riding in his bike trailer.
In this nice, peaceful stretch of time before he starts making everything into guns, I must also say, it’s thrilling to see how much he loves reading books, or “nanomes” as he calls them, and smelling flowers, or “floofs”.
And yes, he’s also big on making up his own words.
Celebrate the First Day of Spring
The first day of spring is nearly here. What better time to start some new traditions? Here are some ideas:
- Place a bouquet of crocuses, daffodils, tulips, or dandelions in your kids’ bedrooms while they sleep, so they wake up to fresh spring flowers.
- Go on a hike and identify wildflowers if some are sprouting in your area.
- Visit a local farm and see if you can get a glimpse of calves, lambs, or chicks in the barnyard.
- Make dandelion or clover chains if those flowers are coming up where you live. Wear them as spring crowns.
- Watch the sun rise. (You can find out what time it will rise here.)
- Sow seeds. Have each family member pick a favorite flower to plant. Designate a special garden, and make a ceremony of it.
- Establish a table-top, shelf, or mantel to display spring flowers, cherry buds, egg shells, a bird’s nest, or whatever symbolizes springtime in your family.
- Read books about the season! Some of my family’s favorite spring picture-books are: Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic by Steven Schur, Spring by Ron Hirschi, and Home for a Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.
- Read aloud from The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson.
- Make a spring feast with the first crops of the season. Dandelion leaves, steamed nettles, and asparagus are delicious spring greens. Other traditional spring foods include eggs, ham, and sweets.
- Eat dinner by candlelight.
- Eat outside if weather permits, or have a picnic on a blanket in the living room.
- Decorate hard-boiled eggs with natural dyes. Try beets, cranberries, blackberries, or raspberries for red; yellow-onion skins or turmeric for yellow; parsley, spinach, or red-onion skins for green; blueberries for blue; and coffee, pecan hulls, or black-walnut hulls for brown. Or experiment – try whatever’s coming up in your backyard. You can read more about making natural egg dyes in the book Together: Creating Family Traditions.
Or create your own traditions to welcome spring.
Resources for seasonal celebrations:
The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays by Anthony F. Aveni
Ceremonies of the Seasons by Jennifer Cole
The Spring Equinox: Celebrate the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson
Together: Creating Family Traditions by Rondi Hillstrom Davis and Janell Sewall Oakes
The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule
If you liked this post, you may enjoy these related posts:
*Are you planning a celebration for the first day of spring?*
Learning to prune
We moved into our house two years ago in mid-February. A few weeks later, our neighbor knocked on the door holding clippers, a miniature saw, and a book on caring for roses. “It’s pruning time,” she said, gesturing toward my backyard, which is teeming with rose bushes.
I’d never pruned anything before. I watched as she demonstrated the technique on a few bushes.
“Cut off anything that’s dead or diseased, anything that’s skinnier than a pencil, and anything that’s growing inward,” she said, as she snipped, clipped, and sawed a bush down to a few woody stubs.
I spent over a month pruning the roses that spring, examining each plant before making any cuts. Each one felt like a jigsaw puzzle.
Several weeks after her demonstration, my neighbor walked by and saw me hovering over the bush in the front yard. “Don’t worry. You’ll get more confident when you see them grow back this summer.”
I wasn’t so sure. “Where would you cut this one?” I asked tentatively.
But then the next January, I walked through the city rose garden. Those plants, which were gigantic walls of roses in the summer, were all pruned down to just a few woody stems.
So the next February when I returned to the garden with my clipping shears, I had no fear.
It took me less than a week to trim all of the bushes, and they were significantly more, well, pruned this time. And sure enough, by mid-June, my backyard was full of gigantic blooming bushes just like the city rose garden was.
At first pruning felt counter-intuitive to me. I was sure that I would hurt or kill the plants by cutting them back so far.
But as I return to the garden for my third year, the process feels more intuitive and even like an apt metaphor for life.
Sometimes you have to be fearless about cutting out what you don’t need so that you can make space for more things to grow.
This post is for Steady Mom’s Thirty Minute Blog Challenge.