How often do you get a “personal” message—meaning a handwritten note from someone you actually know—versus a “personalized” brand communication using your first name? With my real-time and virtual mailboxes constantly bombarded, I didn’t think about it much until a letter with carefully packaged dried marjoram showed up from Des Moines, Iowa.
Category: Nature
Coneflower Sequence: Finding Harmony in a Fractured World
Last spring, I wanted something trouble-free and found it in coneflower seed packets, buying into the midsummer promise of self-sowing sun lovers—now overrunning the garden with nature’s lavender turns. Seed heads bristle symmetry, measure upon measure, Fibonacci’s weathered tune luring goldfinches to August feasts.
Creative Flow Takes You off the Clock—into the Infinite
I wrote this letter to a colleague who dedicated years to writing a novel. It was not easy. When you chase something meaningful while navigating daily existence, you feel time’s tick. Yet there are moments when we slip wholly into creative flow that frees us to step out of time and connect with something greater.
You Can’t Take the Country Boy out of the Man
Was I lucky to have a dad obsessed with transplanting north Georgia mountain tradition to Alabama soil? I didn’t think so, especially on Saturday afternoons. While the neighbors’ kids played kickball on the cul-de-sac, our family tended the crops on the utility easement. There was nothing sentimental about growing squash, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, corn, and beans, beans, beans—until now.
Nature’s Humor—If We’re Free to See in the Moment
For all its beauty, nature can play a joke, as in the time I once passed beneath a stately magnolia and spotted a nest with a tag likely torn from a pillow. It was a laugh-out-loud moment: a bird recycling human trash.