Thanksgiving cactus checking in

The thanksgiving cactus is budding up nicely, just in time. 

And I'm up for a quiet day, cannellini and chard soup, roast cheesy potatoes, jigsaw puzzle, all planned.

And reading is appropriate for the day

I'm thankful I'm able to do what I do, and for the generous presence of all you blogistas! If it's just Thursday where you are, happy day anyway. Or if it's Friday, same, same.

People need plants and water

Monday was about weaving while I thought about stitching, finishing the Sacks book and walking.

I recommend all three! If you can. 

Catching up online while weaving. Bruce and Melissa on the screen.

Lovely bright weather for walking 

As I got to this point I started hearing the plomp sounds of frogs leaping into the water, and saw a couple as they flew from the bank, see the widening circles in the pond.

I got closer 

There were dragonflies in action, we have a lot of them, several species, and water boatmen on the water surface. I think some of them may have been taken by frogs, when they suddenly submerged.  

Here's a wild strawberry or something adjacent, and there are many around here. There's also spraying, so I don't check them out.

Home again I sat outside reading and watching birds, and noticing the honesty has started its seedpods 

Once they're silver, I'll let the seeds fall then add the branches of  silver disks to my collection in the downstairs bathroom.

The purple flowers are the sage. They're similar in shape to antirrhinum. 

And 

the yellow potatoes are starting up.

The Sacks book of essays, some written near the end of his life, is full of wisdom, really worth reading. 

He understood the value of plants and being involved with them, and would seek out botanical gardens when he traveled. He comments that his psychiatric hospital work kept him in New York city, and only the gardens made it tolerable. How I agree.

And I'm now rereading an old favorite, full of comic scenes 

I know it so well I'm laughing in anticipation of the antics of Nicky.

Happy day, everyone, flowers all round!

Friday knitting group, sage, and Sacks

 The Friday knitting group was an actual group, plural people, who'd been sick, or in Taiwan, or working, or on vacation, returned. with various projects. K,  the embroiderer, had left before pictures, but here are a couple 

S, wearing a sweater while setting up a shawl 

R with an experiment in changing direction to create blocks of design 

Talk ranged widely, over rehoming musical equipment, Puerto Rico, cats, rumspringa, other Amish doings, Squirrelwood Animal Sanctuary, names, heating in China, my ficus, brioche knitting, pig keeping, bird reproduction, box turtle food, and more. 

And the sage, loving the cold wet weather, is going for world domination, chair for size comparison.

Latest reading is dear Oliver Sacks, a collection I hadn't heard of till yesterday. Mary will like this title 

 I haven't started it yet, but expect to enjoy, if it's anything like his other work.

Meanwhile I came across yet another lovely northerner on YouTube,

a lovely man, who has prompted me to make sausage rolls tomorrow, first time in years, since I have spicy plant based sausage meat in the freezer.  I'm planning on the snack cake anyway, and finally remembered to put the apricots to soak. So tomorrow is about baking, among other things.

Happy day everyone, keeping warm and dry is what's up here, so do whatever's called for there, too. Try not to dissolve any curtains while you're at it.

Return to the Labyrinth

Finally, after months of delay from storms, kneedeep snow and ice on the labyrinth,it's all cleared up, and today I was able to keep a number of labyrinth promises, for two departed people and their families, and for various other intentions.  

This included the life of Oliver Sacks, who wrote recently that he was nearing the end of his life.  I had the joy of being part of a book he wrote a while back, after we had an email correspondence, and felt that this world famous thinker and neurologist and totally gentle man, was himself still so open to learning that it was a joy to cross paths with him even briefly.  So, wherever he is on his journey, I walked for him, too.

Always at some point on the slow pilgrimage around the labyrinth, there's some tiny object waiting for me to pick it up and see its significance and add it to the center of the circle.  

Today it was a little ring of blue plastic stuff, very narrow, which fitted on my finger, and was so emblematic of the various points in life of the people in my intentions, and the unbroken whole of us all, that it was the center of thinking today.

This is it, lying on that rock in the foreground.  Never fails. Always find an inspirational object, always get answers to my own puzzles, while the birds sing unconcernedly and there's street noise, all part of the day.

Over the winter the storms and the squirrels have made inroads into the Tibetan prayer flags, but they're still there, more or less.As are we all, in one way or another.