Finding the First Spring Dandelions~

~or the best things in life are free.

A walk to the mail-box with Poppy

Finding a baby bunny in the ground cover, by almost stepping on it's hiding place,

the wind in your hair,

finding, picking, sharing dandelions.

"To pick a flower is so much more satisfying than just observing it, or photographing it ...  So in later years, I have grown in my garden as many flowers as possible for children to pick."  

-  Anne Scott-James  

"It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired."   -Henry David Thoreau 

Happiness Doubled

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

~G. K. Chesterton~

"Tell them dear,
 that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being." 

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

G. K. Chesterton Essay

To change it up a little ~ instead of pictures... {of grandchildren! yet again}.

I have been enjoying a book of  collected G. K. Chesterton Essays. ( I fell madly in love with his wit, wisdom, and writing a few years ago when I listened (over and over, actually) to his book "Orthodoxy" via free audio books on my iPad.)

Now there is much in this book of essays that is profound; but some chapters are purely fun and even frivolous. A favorite example of the latter (just to give a hint of his genius). 

"What I Found in My Pocket"

from Tremendous Trifles, 1909

   "I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then ( perhaps through absentmindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief; I had a complete ignorance and profound curiosity as to what I should find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with them, so long as I can keep them out of my own pockets. If once anything slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell. I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still there; the same presumption applies to things that I have dropped into the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the same occasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there is really nothing ( excepting money) that I shall be surprised at finding among them.

  "Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence. I here only wish briefly to recall the special, extraordinary, and hitherto unprecedented circumstances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, to turn out my pockets. I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey. The time was towards evening, but it might have been anything, for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting sheet of quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers. I had not even a pencil and a scrap of paper with which to write a religious epic. There were no advertisements on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could have plunged into the study of them, for any collection of printed words is quite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. When I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can exhaust all the aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, And Summer poetry before I go on to the less congenial subject of soap. But there was no printed word or picture anywhere; there was nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank wet without...I suddenly started upright, and remembered my pockets. I was carrying about with me an unknown treasury. I had a British Museum and a South Kensington collection of unknown curios hung all over me in different places. I began to take the things out.

    "The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of Battersea tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shook down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched my patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes; also they provided me with the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them some short but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might be regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my railway journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a few months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the controversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro and con upon the data furnished to me....."

   "The next thing I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket knife, I need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral meditations all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of those practical origins upon which as upon low, thick pillows all our human civilisation reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel, led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream. I saw into the entrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among all the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man. I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all the swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial of Industrial war. For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. I opened it and looked at the brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade; and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs of man. The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing that came next out of my pocket was a box of matches. Then I saw fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old fierce female thing, the thing we all love, but dare not touch."

   "The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw in it all the art and all the frescoes of the world. The next thing was a coin of a very modest value; and I saw in it not only the image and super-
scription of our own Caesar, but all government and order since the world began. But I have not space to say what were the items in the long and splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket. I allude to my railway ticket."

  So with that kind of mind and heart, you can imagine, possibly, what he might do with subjects such as ~ The Book of Job ~ or ~ The Mystery of the Mystics ~ or even ~ The Drift From Domesticity ... along with many more essay subjects in this book.

Like Early Spring

  Nothing like a wonderful stretch of bright warm sunshine and two amazing Grand Daughters to get this blog out of it's winter doldrums. It's been forlorn and languishing here for a while. 

(It doesn't help that I took a bunch of pictures on my phone, while away in California and can't figure out, now, how to get them transferred to the computer! Oh brother.)

  Lola and Rilla got a chance to play here together today. First some pictures of these two Cousins indoors.....

..then they got to play outside for the rest of the afternoon....

...and much of their time was spent by the little "creek" that runs through the back of the property in the rainy months.