On a typical day, I have a to do list. During the week, that list can grow to be quite long but on the weekends, I tend to lay it aside and live outdoors. With 6+ acres, there’s a lot of living and exploring that can be done but I can confidently confess that I have never, not even once, in my life put the task of “ pulling weeds” on my to do list. I was taking a walk the other day around our little plot of land on one of my favorite trails and had just made the turn by the creek in the back when I came to one of the funniest shaped trees on our land. I was floored by the beauty and size of the weeds growing around one of my favorites. They were so green and alive. At different heights, they seem to add a unique beauty to the oddly shaped tree. I knew we had just had several days of hard rain from all the hurricanes that hit the coast, but it was something about their color, their vibrancy, that took my breath as I stepped around the band. See, when I pull weeds, I’m looking for the eye sores. The ones that don’t belong in my well manicured flowerbeds. There’s not much pausing and contemplating how they got there; there’s simply the desire to remove them and toss them away. Which got me to thinking, I do this too many times in life. I get so focused on my to do list and completing it that I don’t pause enough to see the beauty that I live in every day. The load of laundry that shows me my family had an abundance of clothing to wear. The full dishwasher that is evident of the several meals we had together as a family. I forget that the weeds in life have come from a storm. Maybe it was my storm, maybe it came from a different direction all together. But nonetheless, the weeds will come. And how we view them can add to the quality of life or it can steal our joy completely. If I had not paused long enough to see the perfect blue sky and the beauty in what grew after the storm, I would have missed a moment of pure wonder. A child like awe in the beauty of something I had been disregarding. May the child in you take a moment to explore, listen, smell and may you be pleasantly surprised at the beauty in life‘s weeds.
Bake on!!
Shannon