Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Parenting

Welcome Spring

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“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

The spring equinox is this Wednesday. What a perfect time to celebrate longer days, warmer weather, and blossoming trees and flowers. Here are some ideas for simple ways to observe the day:

Observe and Explore

Watch the sun rise and set. Visit a farm to catch a glimpse of the adorable lambs, calves, and chicks. Go for a hike and identify wildflowers. Learn about the plants and trees on your block or in your yard.

Celebrate

Arrange a bouquet of crocuses, daffodils, tulips, or dandelions for your kids or partner to wake up to. Go on a picnic. Eat dinner by candlelight.

Play

Fly a kite. Blow bubbles. Draw birds. Collect bugs. Run around barefoot.

Plant

If it’s time to sow seeds where you live, designate a place for each member of the family to plant a favorite vegetable or flower in honor of spring. Or, plant a hanging flower basket or window planter.

Make

Make a spring crown out of dandelion or clover chains. Get creative with some spring arts and crafts. 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 with whatever is coming up in your backyard.)

Read

Read aloud from The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson. Check out these ten spring reads for kids aged 0 to 9. Browse Publisher’s Weekly’s list of The Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2013.

Eat

Prepare 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.

Reflect

Spring is a time for rebirth and new beginnings. What’s ready to grow in your life?

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The Most Powerful Thing in the World

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It’s March, and as I write this, it couldn’t be lovelier here. (March does have a way of surprising us, doesn’t it?) In these parts it came in with sunshine, daffodils, and birdsong.

Last week I received my copy of the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine, which includes my review of Janisse Ray’s The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. Ray’s book is about seed saving, and it’s part memoir, part poetic manifesto, and part how-to.

Ray presents a bleak scenario about seeds. Ninety-four percent of vintage, open-pollinated seed varieties have been lost forever since the turn of the 20th Century. “Goodbye, cool seeds,” she writes. “Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.”

Nonetheless, The Seed Underground is an upbeat read. Ray calls seeds “the most hopeful thing in the world,” and she profiles a handful of “quiet, under-the-radar revolutionaries” who are collecting and exchanging seeds in a quest to preserve our food heritage against enormous odds.

The Seed Underground inspired me to learn more about seed saving and got me excited about experimenting more in my garden this spring. I hope you’ll check out my review if you see a copy of YES! Magazine. I’ll be sure to post it here once it’s available online.

In other news, we survived our long stretch of sniffly, sneezy, fevered February days inside, helped greatly by … a pack of construction paper. Valentines. Glider planes. Homemade kites. Crowns. Cards. Envelopes. Shapes. Handcrafted books. Oh yes, we are making the most of this $5 pack of colored paper. What a fantastic reminder that kids don’t really need expensive toys to have a great time. And often the most basic supplies inspire the most creativity.

I hope you’re also enjoying some good weather, or some creative afternoons inside, or some combination of those, as we are.

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The Wisdom of Winter

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Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do — or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so. – Stanley Crawford

Oh February. I always find this month a little challenging. Short days. Rain. Fog.

Moreover, this February, a host of coughs, sniffles, sneezes, and most recently fevers have descended on us.

Around now it’s tempting to long for May, for the first strawberries and garden-fresh greens. For throwing the windows open in the afternoons and planting the garden and walking barefoot in the grass.

But the other day, when I emerged from our fevered nest, I was greeted by a handful of yellow crocuses dotting our neighbor’s yard. And I felt a wistfulness, not for spring or summer, but for the quiet, reflective days of this season, which is so quickly departing.

These days, we seem to think we can outsmart winter. We can arm ourselves with our electric lights and flu shots and vitamin drinks and continue to go, go, go.

I’m no different. I had all sorts of plans for February. A big project. Outings. Busy, packed days.

But so often winter demands a certain amount of stillness from us.

This month has brought me lots of quiet afternoons tending to sick family members, watching movies, knitting, and reading.

As crummy as it feels to be sick or to see those you love sick, I see wisdom in all of this. Slow down, winter tells us. Be still.

In the Mountain Rose Herbs blog this week, acupuncturist Dylan Stein advises, “Let’s take these last few weeks of winter as an opportunity to rest, to meditate quietly and to prepare our bodies for the bursting energy of spring.”

He recommends ingesting nourishing foods like beans, root vegetables, seaweeds, dark leafy greens, and walnuts, and gentle warming spices like cinnamon and ginger.

Likely, that’s where you’ll find me this week: resting, sipping on spice tea, and reflecting on the wisdom of these seasonal cycles of stillness and vigor.

My favorite spice tea:

1.5 quarts of water

2 teaspoons turmeric

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon grated ginger

1/4 teaspoon pepper

Combine and boil for 10 to 20 minutes. Strain.

Add honey to taste, if you wish.

Enjoy!

What’s your favorite winter food or drink? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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The Healing Power of Trees

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Cough, cough, cough. Cough, cough, cough.

That’s how our household sounds this week. So it was with interest that I read that infused Douglas-fir needles are a traditional cough remedy. Douglas-fir needles? They’re everywhere here; they dust the sky and litter the ground. And yet I’d never thought to ingest them.

According to botanist and medical biochemist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, humans and trees are interrelated down to the most basic level. The hemoglobin, which transports oxygen into our blood, is strikingly similar on a molecular level to chlorophyll, which produces oxygen in the presence of sun and water.

“We cannot survive without the tree,” states Beresford-Kroeger.

It makes a perfect kind of sense that tree needles would be medicinal, especially for our lungs, whose alvioli spread out like branches.

So, this weekend, Ezra and I wandered up to a place we call the high forest in search of Douglas-fir needles. It’s actually a city park, but it feels more like a forest, because it is strangely and magically abandoned. I’ve visited regularly for years, and I’ve only seen two other people there ever.

It’s hard to find Douglas-fir needles at arm’s reach. Most of them sway in the breeze 30 to 60 feet overhead. The trails are covered with fallen branches, but Ezra and I were in search of the fresh, fragrant tips that are supposedly best for tea. We padded along quietly searching, until we spotted a small, spindly tree with branches at just the perfect height to snip off a few.

At home, we boiled the needles for 20 minutes, let it cool, and then took the first tentative sips of our homemade, hand-harvested cough remedy.

What a delicacy! It has a lemony, light, and complex flavor.

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The Healing Power of Trees #plantmedicine

Perhaps you don’t live in proximity to the giant Douglas-firs? Well, you can buy wild harvested Douglas Fir Spring Tea on the Internet. However, you probably don’t have to look far to find a tree with healing qualities right in your own backyard.

According to Beresford-Kroeger, kids can gain protection from childhood leukemia for a year by playing with the green fruit of a black walnut in August. And black walnut leaves, rubbed on the inside of the arm, protect a woman from breast cancer. In her book The Global Forest, Beresford-Kroeger also writes that fatty acids in hickory nuts promote brain development and a compound in the water ash helps prevent cancer.

And, of course, most of us are familiar with the healing properties of willow bark, which contains a chemical similar to aspirin.

I’m not sure if the Douglas-fir needles will cure our coughs, but I can tell you that harvesting them was healing. That’s the thing about forests: just visiting them is medicinal. People have known it forever.

Photographer Jillian Doughty shares a story on her blog about visiting a Mayan massage practitioner, who told her that she needed to be outside with the trees more often. “She said all of us do, we need to go to the trees and let them take the thoughts we no longer need, the feelings we can no longer take, and the memories we should no longer carry ourselves.  She said trees are here to collect what we don’t need.  They breathe what we discard, that is why they are here.”

Modern scientific studies concur that visiting forests is healing for us. “Forests — and other natural, green settings — can reduce stress, improve moods, reduce anger and aggressiveness and increase overall happiness,” says a Science News Daily article. “Forest visits may also strengthen our immune system by increasing the activity and number of natural killer cells that destroy cancer cells.”

Or, as Ezra said, as we wove through the Douglas-firs, “I like naturing, Mom.”[clickToTweet tweet=”Forests are healing, and trees have incredible medicinal properties. #health #plantmedicine” quote=”Forests are healing, and trees have incredible medicinal properties.” theme=”style1″]

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular posts about the healing power of nature:

"If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees." - Hal Borland

Striking a Balance With Technology

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When my sister spent a year studying abroad in Iceland in 1993, we had little contact with her. We spent a lot of money to call each other occasionally on a land line that hummed and cracked, and we wrote letters, which took weeks to make it from the Colorado mountains to her new home on the Arctic Circle.

That experience would be radically different today. We could email, text, or Facebook each other. My sister could blog. We could video chat with her.

That’s an astonishing transition when you think about it.

The technological progress we’ve seen in the last two decades – the Internet, digital cameras, mobile phones, streamed videos – is dizzying. I’m in unabashed love with so much of it. Even amidst the marketing and spam, some days Twitter feels like a giant free-form university with intelligent people from all sectors of life zipping information back and forth and bantering about ideas. I get giddy when I discover an interesting academic, thinker, or activist and find dozens of their interviews and lectures online. And the revolution that e-readers and tablets are bringing to publishing and academia is exhilarating.

This is an exciting time to be alive.

And yet, the amount of time we (and our children) spend interfacing with gadgets and screens makes me uneasy, and I know many people share my angst. Recently a blogger lamented that she’s contemplating ditching her iPhone, because it’s eating too much of her time, and dozens of her readers divulged that they’re feeling the same way.  The same week a Lifehacker post and a Harvard Business Review article warned that our smart phones might be dumbing us down. Then a large study came out, finding that one in three people feel envious, lonely, frustrated or angry when visiting Facebook.

Despite its connecting powers, our technology often seems to disconnect us. It can encourage us to ignore our family and friends to engage with a group of folks we hardly know. And it can swindle hours that we may have once spent in nature, or moving, reading, writing, or making art.

I imagine most people, like me, are constantly trying to find a balance with family, work, creativity, and the distracting allure of our gadgets and screens.

I try to ask myself questions from time to time. How much and what types of technology help me be present with my friends and family? Stay intellectually stimulated? Focus on the things that matter? Conversely, which activities and gadgets make me feel distracted and unhappy, steal my focus with my kids and my work, and distract me from the creative projects that make me feel more alive.

I’ve yet to find a perfect balance. But I’ve come up with a handful of ways to be more intentional about the way I spend my time, and that’s helped me  make peace with my angst about technology.  Here are a few of the tricks I’m using right now to try to let in the gifts of the information age, while keeping out the less than happy side effects that so often sneak in with them.

  • A digital sunset and a weekly digital sabbatical

We usually turn the computers and gadgets off around six, so we can eat together and wind down for bed. And we devote Sunday to family day. It’s usually a lazy day, with leisurely hikes, library trips, afternoon naps – and no computers. In other words, it’s everyone’s favorite day of the week, and it’s incredibly restorative.

  • Not-so-smart phones

The truth is, I don’t really need Google on the go, because most of the time I’m home near my trusty desktop. (Yes, desktop. It’s like those archaic days of the early 2000s around here.) So far, I’ve survived without apps and GPS. And while we’re out and about, I’m able to focus on these quickly disappearing days when my kids are little and say and do curious and hilarious things. I have a feeling I will have to renegotiate this one in the future, but for now my not-so-smart phone offers more than enough distraction.

  • A television-lite life

We have an old-fashioned TV that we hardly turn on, except for mid-afternoon episodes of Dora and Diego for four-year-old Ezra, who is a huge fan. (We’ve found a trick to allowing  a little bit of TV and avoiding the cajoling, begging, and tantrums that can come with it: we allow a certain amount at a certain time of the day, and we stick with PBS shows on DVD or Roku to skip advertisements.) As for the adults in the house, we enjoy a few shows, but we have little time to actually watch them in this season of our lives.

  • Pen and paper

This groundbreaking technology allows you to write or jot down notes, without allowing you to click over and watch cute kitten videos on Youtube. One trick I’ve learned: when you get the urge to Google something or message or email someone, write it down. During a designated computer time, scan your list and decide what you really need to attend to. This  practice can improve your focus and be a huge boon to your productivity.

  • Quiet

As my kids get older, I’ve found that background noise – radio, podcasts, or music – makes it difficult for me to be an engaged parent. I listen to a podcast for an hour a day, and we sometimes listen to music in the afternoons. Other than that, I shut off all the background noise when I’m at home with the kids, and I’m astounded by how much happier and focused that makes all of us.

  • Slow blogging and a social networking diet

Like its cousin Facebook, this blog can devour hours of my already spare work time. That’s why I’ve transitioned to a less frequent posting schedule (generally once  a week on Mondays). And although I read and reflect on and appreciate every single comment you leave in this space, I don’t always have the time to respond to each of them. Likewise, I only go on Facebook for a few minutes a few times a week. And I tweet four days a week for a half hour or less. I’m mostly okay with less blogging and social networking, because it means I get to spend more time in the here and now. And that feels like a good balance right now.

I’m curious, how do you feel about technology? Have you devised ways to be intentional with it? Have you found a good balance? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Finding Beauty

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enervated

My photo archives are like a journal of my life. I can spot the periods of busyness, stress, or deadlines by the gaps there. I can also spot the winter months that way. Around November my picture-taking mojo tends to curl up for a nap. I love snapping photos in the spring or fall when the light splashes and dapples across flower petals, leaves, and faces in surprising ways. But the months of gray skies and bare branches don’t seem quite worth recording.

Last week as we were leaving for an ordinary walk around the neighborhood, on a whim, I raced back inside to grab the camera. As I strolled along with my camera, I discovered all kinds of beauty hiding in the muted landscape.

It was a good reminder. As much as I love taking photos, I’ve feared that sometimes the camera yanks my family right out of the moment, that it can transform a hike or a vacation into a pressure-packed challenge to record our lives. Sometimes we’re so busy capturing the waves or the fun that we don’t quite experience them, you know? I’ve also taken some interest in the national conversation about whether our collective obsession with photo-taking might be unhealthy for our kids.

I’m reminded that while the digital camera, like most technology, will probably have some ill effects, it’s an incredible gift. Not only can we forever revisit the impossible cuteness of our kids’ toothless grins. Our cameras help us pay attention to the beauty in ordinary things. Mine will be a more frequent winter walk companion.