by Kat | Jun 29, 2026 | General, Words
Good day, Gentle readers and Happy Monday to you all.
I apologize profusely for this extremely wordy post. But the month of June was an incredible one… at least as season’s go! (The rest of the world is a Total Shite Show… so thank goodness that Nature pulled out all the stops and distracted me from all that.) I hope that you can get yourself something to drink and settle in and allow me to share my June with you all. I will be back on Wednesday!
The foxglove bells, with lolling tongue,
Will not reveal what peals were rung
In Faery, in Faery,
A thousand ages gone.
I do not believe I can ever remember a more beautiful June than the one I had this year. Now, that is not to say that previous June’s were not as lovely… but rather my lack of attention allowed much of that beauty to go entirely unnoticed. In that regard seasons has been an excellent word for me this year. It has helped hone my focus and slowed me down. However, despite that honed focus, the month fairly flew by and honesty, I am so sad it is almost over.
All the golden clappers hang
As if but now the changes rang;
Only f rom the mottled throat
Never any echoes float.
Late spring, I found a book in a small bookshop in Erie… I did not spend much time studying the book in the shop. I simply noted that there was a poem-a-day beginning on June 1st. And so June 1, I began my reading. The editor’s introduction made me stop and think… “Reading outside is another treat of summer and, while a novel may absorb your attention so completely that you do not notice your surroundings, the comparative brevity of most poems allows you to pause in your reading, look around and take notice of the real world. The world and the poem may not match, but that is immaterial; it is the balance or contrast of the two that matters.” I love reading outside and often sit on the porch and read…but she is right, I can get lost in a novel and not notice much beyond the pages. So, it’s a very good thing that this book of poetry makes me frequently pause. Had I actually looked at a few of the poems I don’t think I would have purchased the book… all the poetry was written a long, long time ago and at first glance is… challenging.
Quite forgotten, in the wood,
Pale, crowded steeples rise;
All the time that they have stood
None has heard their melodies.
But somewhere about the middle of this month I began to see the brilliance of the poetry selected for this anthology. Each poem requires me to slow down, pause… reflect on the written words… and yes, take in my surroundings. I have found poets I knew nothing about, poets I was aware of – but had no clue of their brilliance with words, and lots of poetry that makes me stop and think.
Deep, deep in wizardry
All the foxglove belfries stand.
Should they startle over the land,
None would know what bells they be.
Take the poem I have inserted in this post… written by Mary Webb, who lived from 1881 to 1927. She was a novelist and poet from Shropshire, England. There is a Mary Webb Society, so even though I had never heard of her… the people of Shropshire have not forgotten her! Her poem, Foxgloves, which I have shared here was the perfect start to June (it is the poem for June 1st.) I spent a good bit of the beginning of June looking at my neighbors gorgeous foxgloves… white ones, and pale purpley-pink ones, and even deep magenta ones! It seemed those plants kept urging me on to keep going in this book that I was struggling to settle in with… which has been a very good thing and I have flagged several pages in June’s offerings.
Never any wind can ring them,
Nor the great black bees that swing them –
Every crimson bell, down-slanted,
Is so utterly enchanted.
There was some astounding activity in my “wild” back yard as well… a few highlights I will share with you:
- Watching the bright, almost neon, first greens of spring settle into a deeper green and then watching the “new growth highlights” that began to arrive over the month. That was truly a feast for my eyes and though I am sure I have noticed this in the past, paying attention to it this year made the process fascinating. It is if Nature is the master artist… it was quite stunning to note!
- My Pileated Woodpecker’s love the birdbath! I have had the delight of “catching” them in the bath a couple of times now. The male is the “splashiest” and he empties the bath of water. He then settles atop the telephone pole in the corner of my yard to allow the sun to dry him. It is an absolute delight! The Pilated’s are the only woodpeckers that I have ever seen visiting the bird bath.
- We have a rather large woodchuck ambling through the yard on the regular these days. It makes me laugh, because it appears he uses my yard as a place to “recon” my neighbor’s yard. If he sees no activity he heads over for a bit of a feast. My neighbor has an extensive dahlia thing going on and I think the woodchuck is enjoying it. (I know, many of you all grow dahlia’s and will be horrified at this, but honestly… I cannot feel bad. This is the neighbor of the “stinky” composter. Proof I guess that karma sometimes arrives in the form of one very large groundhog!)
- I have a pair of Baltimore Orioles who have become regular visitors to the Jelly Bar in the last week or so. When they come together, he always lets her eat first and only when she has finished does he begin eating. They are such gorgeous birds! I have looked for an oriole nest on my ambles with Frankie, but we have yet to find it. Perhaps we will this fall, once the leaves have fallen.
- The pair of red bellied woodpeckers only had one baby survive this year. It has also been a regular visitor at the Jelly Bar. It was delightful to watch the male bring the juvenile to the feeders… showing him/her (I don’t know if the baby is male or female) where the “good stuff” is. I put peanuts in the tray feeder and I hang suet year around. But the youngster discovered the Jelly Bar all on its own… it is a regular visitor there and is quite adorable in its grey and black feathers!
And now, as we will soon be turning the page to July… I am eager to see how that month unfolds. I have paged through a few of the July poetry entries and I have some Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Tennyson to look forward to! I have not read much of Shakespeare at all, but I am thinking that reading some of his sonnets will be a nice way to laze about in the heat of July!
Header photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
by Kat | May 26, 2026 | General, Words
We depend on nature for not only our physical survival, we need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. —Eckhart Tolle
Late spring has unfurled slowly in my little corner of the world, but once it did it revealed an amazingly lush, vibrantly green world. There is nothing quite like it… the greening of spring and I focused this month exactly on that, all the greens!
I kept Tolle’s quote posted several places to help me focus. A good reminder that if you look away from the chaos, there is a beautiful order to the waking world. And though Pittsburgh weather provided everything but snow this month… Spring kept her focus! It was delightful to go at a slow pace and notice the small things like the leaves unfurling over the course of several days which provide that amazing “green mist” that you can see in the far off distance that gives a watercolor quality to the landscape as leaves slowly return.
Not only was there a feast for my eyes, the accompanying spring soundtrack is not one easily missed. There is a frantic urgency to the birdsong that exists in early May… but though frantic at the beginning of the month it settles down dramatically as May wanes. Late May birdsong is still a gorgeous soundtrack, but mostly it is just the familiar “arias” of the regular birds: robins, finches, cardinals, and mourning doves… interspersed with the chatter of the talkative sparrows. By the end of the month they are all busy with the all encompassing tasks of raising babies… and I am always delighted in seeing those May young as they depart the nests yet still follow their parents demanding food!
I continued on my Spring Journey with Adrian Bell… grateful that he wrote so brilliantly and that his writings have been gathered into book form! He reminded me that for as much as things change… the more some things still stay the same. I took comfort in that… and was sad to finish his Spring Notebook. But I tucked it away and will pull it out next spring and read his thoughts again as spring unfurls.
This year I was struck by the slowness of spring… especially as I paid close attention to each day. I cannot remember a lovelier spring than this one and it makes me sad that I paid so little attention to all my prior springs!
I was delighted again that a doe graced my backyard with her tiny fawn. For two days, she stayed close as her very small fawn got steadier on its feet. But nothing prepared me for catching them both off guard one morning when I took Frankie out for a quick bathroom break. The baby stood stock still in the iris and Frankie never even noticed it! I managed to snap a few quick photos and then scurried back inside where I watched the fawn slip back into the hedges.
So stinking cute!!
It has been an amazing spring… one I will not soon forget.
What about you? What has struck you about spring (or fall) in your corner of the world?
See you all here tomorrow with some Unraveling!
Header photo by Atlantic Ambience
by Kat | Apr 16, 2026 | General, Words
Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
This month I decided to pair my focus to that of what was going on around me… growth. And this quote by my beloved Rilke was my guiding light.
Quiet growth.
Nature does quiet growth brilliantly… the dandelions do not shout as they one day appear strewn across the lawn. The trees do not sing a chorus as they begin the process of leafing out.
Quiet growth.
And so I turn inward to focus on quiet growth and I realized that sometime in mid-March I crossed the invisible barrier of insomnia. I have not had a sleepless night in some weeks… I am amazed at how simple little things can make dramatic differences! What are those things? No screen time for starters! If I read at all, it is from an actual book. It is far too tempting with the iPad to just check in on emails. Or Threads. Or Instagram. And suddenly an hour has passed and I am wide awake… so the scrolling continues. No iPad means better sleep because I am allowing my brain to do what it wants to… settle down for the day. That single thing has made the largest impact on the rest of the things… because if I am not tired all the other things seem to fall into place easier.
Now, that does not mean I am oblivious to the chaos that overwhelms daily life… nor that I am not concerned about that chaos… but it means I am attempting to control how it impacts me versus allowing it to take over. Am I perfect in not falling down the rabbit hole of “news alert” scrolling? No, but I am more aware of it now and that is a big step forward!
And I continue to amble along with Adrian Bell… I love reading his thoughts on spring. His struggles with compost success, his delight in small things, his thoughts on farming… are just brilliant (and yes, at times hilarious!) And his writing encourages me to slow down and pay attention to the small changes happening every day.
I have discovered that reading “seasonal” books read slowly over the course of the season really helps me stay in the season… and that might be the best self-growth of all. I continue making my way through Poetry is not a Luxury: Poems for All Seasons and have just finished Angela Harding’s Spring Unfurled: A printmaker’s view. It was delightful and the artwork so beautiful. And I have added James Crews latest book, Breathing Room: Poems of Rest & Retreat… I am just a few poems in and already I am loving them so much. His poem, Dandelion is one of my current favorites. I have returned to it several times this month… each time I read it I notice something new. It is nice to sit in quiet contemplation of the poem as I look out over the “lucky pennies” scattered across my back yard!
Quiet growth… is never loud, but it is impactful. I also continue to make my way through Emergence Magazine’s Seasons volume. It has so many good things in it. It introduced me to Ron C. Moss, a Tasmanian poet… he is a master of the haiku. I have been trying to “grow” my skills at writing and have started with the not so simple haiku. (I’m not sure this will be the last frost of the season, but I sure am hoping it was! ha!)
Last Frost: 3.28.26
Was this weekend it?
Last gasp of winter dying
Spring keeps on swelling.
And then Bonny introduced me to the challenging Zip Ode… quiet brain growth is a very good thing. I begin by writing my zip code down the side of a scrap of paper and then begin to play with words. It is an evolving process from the start to what I feel like might be the finish. And it occurs to me that preserving the process might be an interesting thing to look back on, so I pulled out an empty journal to house my attempts. It is a good thing to see growth… I don’t always notice it. Yesterday mornings attempt… and a reminder my zip code is 15243:
Wind
blows the rain on windows
I wake
and listen until the
patter becomes lullaby.
The final quiet growth this season… I have begun a correspondence with a friend… yes, letter writing back and forth. It is more fun than I ever imagined! I love getting her letters and I love sending a missive back to her. Quiet conversation… slow, unhurried, simple.
And with that my friends, I am going to continue my quiet growth journey this month… I will be back. I am not sure when, but I expect it will be sometime in early May!
by Kat | Mar 30, 2026 | General, Words
Spring! And Earth is like a child who has learned many poems by heart. For the trouble of that long learning she wins the prize. — Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Sonnets to Orpheus I, 21
When I turned the calendar to March I greeted the meteorological arrival of spring. And then on March 20th, I celebrated the Vernal Equinox. I mean, spring is absolutely a season that one should celebrate more than once! Right?!
And though it feels like the month has just raced past… I focused on each day entirely and in doing so I witnessed so many moments of wonder!
A tug of war… sometimes gentle, other times all out war… between winter giving way to spring. It certainly was a month that held all the weather!! Rain, winds, snow, freezing temperatures, warming temperatures… in the winter to spring confusion summer even burst on the scene for one brief day. I think the weather actually helped me stay focused on observing closely the day! There was not a lot of lots of days all the same (sort of like summer!) but instead the weather kept me on my toes!
All this weather chaos has contributed to a very chaotic closet as the month draws to a close and so, of course, I have tidy the closet on my list this week. There is detritus of all the seasons of clothing haphazardly lying about. I’d like to start April without the added chaos of a messy closet!
Each day, I have been reading a bit from Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Spring Notebook, which has been absolutely perfect. His journals likewise begin with the meteorological spring and his early March musings are timeless as they seemed very true as I read them this month. In his entry from March 12, 1977 “The Winds of March” he writes of old leaves galloping over new grass… oh yes, there were lots of galloping leaves here this month too! There is something calming in reading how similar things are decades apart… a thread running through, as it were.
I watched a literal explosion of daffodils emerge and bloom this month, as well as tender snow drops being tossed about by the wild winds. Their white flowers reminding me of petticoats as they shook in the winds! I also had the very predictable deer come through and eat to the ground any tulip leaves that dared to emerge… those same deer mowed down most of my grape hyacinths as well. It seems that daffodils are the only thing currently safe from their foraging. I am ending the month with the promise of a bounty with the April blooming daff’s all showing a plethora of buds!
The other most notable thing of all this month is the birdsong! It begins in the early morning with the Robin’s cheerily calling… in a bit of a Round Robin… as one calls, then others answer in turn. They are the first true Singers of Spring though… or maybe they are just the loudest! But the best day… after winter seemed to put an exclamation point on its leaving by depositing more than a dusting of snow… it seemed all of nature was in shock. That morning Frankie and I walked in total silence… as if the birds could not find one good thing to sing about thanks to all that snow! Thankfully, the snow was short-lived and the birds have returned to their raucous singing! I much appreciate their singing to the silence!
All that the teacher has taught her—the many thoughts pressed now into roots and long tough stems” she sings! She sings! — Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Sonnets to Orpheus I, 21
And there you have how my entry to spring went! How about you? How did spring show up for you this month?
Header photo by Sarah Craenhals
by Kat | Feb 23, 2026 | General, Words
It has been a curious month, my friends and here in the south hills of Pittsburgh, it has been a snowy one. In fact, we had more consecutive days with snow on the ground since I moved here almost 14 years ago now. And while most of my neighbors have found this phenomenon upsetting, I have loved it deeply.
I have often heard talk of the nostalgia of snow, the way that we always imagine our childhoods to have been snowier than they actually were. — Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
This statement rang profoundly true for myself as I navigated February… and the snowy month helped tremendously! I wandered down the halls of the memories of my Winter’s Past in Holland, Michigan… a place that is much snowier than Pittsburgh will ever be… and I delighted in the brief encounter with winter I could enjoy this year and we even got some snow overnight! I will take a check on the snowiest February in recent Pittsburgh history chart!
But in this deep winter month, I also began to see (and feel) changes… more noticeable daylight, the return of birdsong, I watched the snow from earlier in the month melt, and welcomed new coverings of snow more than once, I saw bulbs begin to sprout, and then over the weekend… I saw snowdrop blossoms opening in the crisp February air… all good things and this latest blanket of snow won’t hurt them at all. I felt very much these outward signs mirrored my inward feelings. Some days I felt lighter and some days did not but all around me the world was helping me move forward.
I also spent some time learning this month… stretching my brain, trying new things that feel awkward and uncomfortable in my hands. I attended a talk by Mark S. Burrows, Ph.D on “The Outward Gaze: Rilke, Rodin and the Conversation Between Poetry and Sculpture.” (this was so incredibly good…I will be jumping at the opportunity to do this again!) I took the Alabama Chanin Beading workshop that MDK offered and was dazzled (or is that bedazzled… HA!) by what I learned. (One brief side note… can I just say that if MDK announced that Natalie Chanin was going to lead a class of her reading the phone book, I’d sign up… honestly, her voice is the most soothing, calming thing ever.)
And yes… I knit almost an entire yoke of a sweater only to have to rip back to start again. But I learned that sometimes row gauge is crucial… and I have “mathed” out the solution and have slowly begun yoke knitting again.
The thing that keeps circling back to me about this month is this… I am not certain I would have done any of these things in any other time. I needed to be immersed in Deep Winter to have the space to contemplate these things… to go deeper with Rilke, to slow down and pick up the thinnest needle, thread it, and begin to… stitch by stitch… add some brilliance to a piece of fabric in a way that is entirely unfamiliar to me. And to have no other distractions to sit down and math out the solution to my “row gauge” issue.
Things that could only be accomplished with no other distractions calling made me see a new value for winter and I am tucking away ideas of things that might be interesting to contemplate next winter!
Finally, I will close with a poem by Nikki Giovanni… it is a poem of hers that was part of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Art in Transit program:
Winter Poem
by Nikki Giovanni
once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kiss
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower
And that, my friends, is the most perfect way to wrap up winter. Next month begins spring and while there might be some back and forth days as winter gives way and spring takes over… spring will eventually win! I’d also encourage you to check out how Cathy and Carolyn did this month!
I’ll see you all back here on Wednesday!
by Kat | Jan 27, 2026 | General, Words
“I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?” — Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Winter arrived early for me last year… and though I did not see it coming I recognized it clearly when it arrived. And though I did not greet it warmly, I did let it in… and, as I wrote in my journal, I had some instructions for myself:
Sink into wintering grief and stillness.
Sit and listen and observe.
The path forward is there…let the fog clear.
I spent most of this month rereading Katherine May’s book, Wintering. It is a short book that I believe one could read in an afternoon or two, which I have done previously. But with this reading I decided to Yutori it… I read it slowly not with the goal to rush through but rather to sink into the wisdom Katherine shares in the pages… and there is so much there. Despite finishing it last week, I have gone back to passages and read them again and I am leaving the book on my desk to pick up as needed. I am thinking the February pages will be revisited frequently next month.
Every January I spend some time defining my new word, and I did that again this month. Surprisingly, the definitions were varied and so interesting. Things I knew and things I had not considered like this beautiful permission:
season : noun : an indefinite period of time
This idea really got me thinking about seasons not being simply set by dates on a calendar but rather freeing them from those constraints. This is not something that ever occurred to me… and yes, I am sure I read that definition before and likely many times before! I think this was one of my best “aha” moment of the month… permission to not constrain season and to just let it be indefinite.
All this sinking in to winter feels exactly right… in this time and space. I have gained an appreciation of the pace of the days. There is a delicious slowness to them… no urgency to rush to this thing or hurry to that thing. Just savoring the season… in all its glorious stillness. I have stepped back from the digital distractions as well… Steve now asks me if I saw that “thing” he sent to me, and the answer is usually that I did not. (He is not amused but I might be!) But it feels good to have a bit of a January digital detox!
What there has been is a reinvigoration of my daily stitching and a delight in the beginning of my third 100 Day Stitch Book. Rather than feeling like I am crunched for time, I have instead leaned in to sitting quietly, listening to that quiet voice in my head and, observing… and without really having a “plan” for my squares or a concrete plan for the stitch book outside of utilizing a well worn sock… ideas began to form over the course of the days. It makes me so happy to feel my creativity having a bit of a spring renewal… here in the depths of winter… maybe I am finding that path forward!
So yes, January was a very good start on my year leaning into season.
I know there is no link up this year, but Cathy and Carolyn are my word companions this year… I’d love it if you stopped by and see how their journeys are beginning!
Header photo by Alexander Kovalev
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