Posts Tagged ‘pause’
Precious Pause
The fine art of knowing how to pause to enjoy the beauty of a moment is not lost on me. Tall grass is already swallowing the bottom wire of our fence line and making it difficult to discern some of our trails through the woods, but the weeping crabapple tree beside the freshly mowed labyrinth is flowering.
Asher and I decided to take a break from landscaping chores and bask in the shade beneath the falling flower petals while being serenaded by our new resident Baltimore orioles.
It was blissful to the extreme, right up to the point where the fabric of the rocking chair ripped, sending a surge of adrenaline coursing through my reaction system.
That chair is the second of a pair. The first one is up in the shop garage, currently beating me in a challenge to remove the remains of its ripped old fabric in my overambitious intentions to renovate it. Well, now there are two. It’s a shame, because the rocking frame still looks like it has life in it.
At this point, we will be better off buying replacements and leaving the remains of the old ones to be turned into some funky art conversation piece. I always wanted to learn to weld. Hmm.
The pause was cut short, and we got on with the next cutting project that caught my attention. I had already done a fair amount of work with the string trimmer the previous day, so I pushed the riding mower to its limits, knocking down the tall grass on each side of the North Loop trail.
For the record, I was able to trigger the error code for the blade motor overtemp toward the end of the effort. At least now I know what I’m dealing with and have a solution in the works. I can still get the machine to work if I avoid cutting where the growth is too thick or tall.
As a bonus, allowing the mower time to cool down will give me more opportunities to pause and bask in the beauty of our surrounding scenery and its wildlife serenades.
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Just Breathe
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Some mornings, you just need to pause, tilt your head back, and breathe.
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Soothing Interlude
For your viewing pleasure, here is a thirty second distraction from your usual daily grind, courtesy our freshly tended landscape pond waterfall.
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Enjoy!
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Today, Pausing
Today, we have all the ingredients for taking a pause from the multitude of news and projects facing us with relentless regularity: A Sunday; gray skies; soggy grounds; workshop aftermath; no plans.
I caught a moment of television news coverage reporting the latest synopsis of Hurricane Harvey this morning and was struck by the different perspective it presented from the minute-by-minute reality of what it must be like “on the ground,” so to speak.
They wrapped it up in such a neat little package of a few minutes, and then moved on with their regular scheduled broadcast.
It felt like, “Yeah, it is bad, but… whatever.”
Meanwhile, I’m wondering, if the municipalities are inundated with emergency response requests, the power is out, the water continues to rise, tornadoes repeatedly threaten, boil water orders are in place, toilets are becoming useless, and catastrophic amounts of rainfall will continue for days… how are people going to cope?
It doesn’t wrap up nicely in a breaking news update.
Reading a portion of 911 calls with one after another requests for rescue from families with infants and elders trapped by rising water gives just a tiny sense of the immediate emotions involved as the drama continues to play out.
This can’t be conveyed in the short news briefing that so quickly ends to be followed by the next inconsequential distraction.
I don’t mean to imply that I fault the updates. On the contrary, the updates are valuable for what they can provide. I am just boggling over the canyon of differing perspective I notice from them.
Just as I am boggling over the Sunday calm settling over us today, with no pressing demands forcing our decisions, in juxtaposition to what is simultaneously going on in the Houston area.
If I end up puttering with the silt fence by our swamped soil runoff spot today, I will be certainly be thinking about how our predicament here compares with what is going on in Texas.
It definitely gives pause.
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Relative Something 