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Kate Spring

~ growing a deep-rooted life

Kate Spring

Category Archives: Morning Inspiration

Beauty Explains Nothing

15 Sunday May 2016

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

beauty, breath, happiness, inspiration, Mary Oliver, meditation, peace, poetry, spirituality, Thich Nhat Hanh

image

sunset, friday night

“Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still / it explains nothing.”

—Mary Oliver, “Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way” from Felicity

These lines caught me immediately.  I’ve been rolling them around on my tongue for days, though part of me wants to erase the second half and still, it explains nothing.  Until this morning, I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, I wanted these words gone, except I didn’t understand what she meant; I wanted to say back, yes, beauty can explain everything.

And then this morning, I read this from Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Sit : 

“If you ask a child, ‘Why are you eating chocolate?’ The child would likely answer, ‘Because I like it.’  There’s no purpose in eating the chocolate.  Suppose you climb a hill and stand on top to look around.  You might feel quite happy standing on the hill.  There’s not a reason for doing it.  Sit in order to sit.  Stand in order to stand.  There is no goal or aim in sitting.  Do it because it makes you happy.”

There is no purpose.  There is no goal or aim.  Do it because it makes you happy.  And yet, beneath this is the understanding that the meaning is in the mindfulness.  That beauty or action alone explains nothing.  That they are not, in fact, trying to explain anything anyway.

Amidst the industry and utility of this world, I easily forget the simplicity of being.

I forget that we aren’t meant to explain so much as to experience.

Beauty has its way of catching us and bringing us into presence.  Beauty has its way of bringing us beyond the explanation and into the heart of experience.  And so beauty has no duty to explain.  And neither do I, except to tell you what I’ve learned:

Beneath beauty is breath.

You don’t have to explain anything.  Just breathe.  Do it because it makes you happy.

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No Mud, No Lotus

03 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration, Seasons

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

change, inspiration, life, nature, spirituality, Thich Nhat Hanh, yoga

No Mud,No Lotus

Years ago, sitting cross-legged in a yoga class, my teacher spoke about the muck on the bottom of the pond.  How the muck is home to the roots.  How it gives birth to the lotus.  I sat there, grounding my sacrum to the floor, strengthening my spine, feeling the opening at the crown of my head, and breathed in the lesson.  In that moment, the relationship between the mud and the lotus was so clear.  You’d think as a farmer I’d never forget it.

But I do forget it.  Despite the compost we shovel on our field each year, despite the fact that my livelihood depends on manure, I forget the balance.  I have to re-learn it each spring.

The month of March churned up the internal muck, and I caught myself there, in the opaque sludge of worry, in the heavy suction of resistance.  It took weeks to remember that pushing down to find grounding is futile in the muck.  It took weeks to remember how to trust in letting go.  How to trust in the mud.

Eventually, movement returned.  I don’t know if it was external validation or the wind bringing in warm air and clear skies, or the exhaustion of trying so hard that finally brought me to letting go, but I’m shifting into spring and feel the shoots starting to rise from the murky base.

Somewhere in all of it, I remembered sitting in that yoga class, remembered the space that filled my body as I breathed from the flower down to the roots, remembered that this cycle has spun through me before.  And I’ve woken up into trust, into space, into abundance.

I’ve woken up.

No mud, no lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh said, and I remember that the pond, too, sleeps and must wake each spring.  That the lotus, too, must bloom anew each year.

 

 

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To be alive and full and whole

18 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration, Wildness

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

life, nature, photography, Seasons of Beauty, spirituality, summer

Rudbeckia evening

To be seen.  To be free.  To be alive and full and whole–the yearnings of soul.

Evening comes and the sun lights upon the horizon, it’s rays like open petals before dusk: an invitation, an opening, an ease of light to quell the ache of longing.

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Creatures of Habit

27 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

farming, happiness, inspiration, life, Redefined Life, spirituality, writing

Morning clouds Monday whispered thoughts of rain all morning and afternoon, with undulating gray clouds stretching across the sky.  I was beneath them broad forking the lower field and feeling anxious about money, as so happens from time to time.  As I worked, I listened to an episode of Redefined Life, a podcast my friend Aaron Mead recently began.

The conversation between Aaron and Jeff Shapiro, a wing-suit BASE jumper, played in my ears as I pushed the tines of the broad fork down into soil and pulled back, loosening the bed.  The rhythm of the work slowly eased its fingers into the jumbled knot in my stomach, and as it loosened, the conversation turned to happiness when Shapiro said that happiness is a choice, and that nothing outside of us can give or take away happiness.

The warm air and cloudy sky afforded the perfect temperature to be working outside; the trees in full green framed the field and rose across the hillside into the mountains; my body was moving, and I felt that choice to be happy.

The antidote to anxiousness is presence.  Out in the field, working with soil and plants, I fall into rhythm and it leads me to presence, which in turn opens my body to choices beyond anxiety.  Like happiness, presence and awareness of the now is a choice, and like anything else, the more you practice making that choice, the more you say “yes” to it, the more natural it becomes.

We are creatures of habit.  I’d like my habit to be happiness.

Aaron also interviewed me for Redefined Life.  We spoke about writing, farming, and creating a business.  I was nervous to hear the episode,not quite remembering all that I said, but it served as a reminder to me why I do all that I do.  To hear it, visit Redefined Life online.

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Mud Season Transition

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration, Seasons

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

change, growth, inspiration, life, spring, winter

“Part of being our best selves is having the guts to not avert our eyes, to look closely at what scares us, what disappoints us, what threatens us. By looking closely we have a chance to make change happen.” 

~Seth Godin

Baby Maple

It’s a messy transition between winter and spring.  The white canvas of snow that welcomed reflection melts into mud, ruts up the road, and floods the river.

When we are finally ready for long days and warm air and the time to put our dreams into motion, we get pulled into potholes and have to inch along when we are ready for speed.

It’s the moment just before the leap, the transition between planning and acting, that we must look at the things we hold and decide what to let go of, decide what will serve us and what needs to melt away with the last of winter’s snow.

It’s the transition that asks us to slow down and look into the mud.  It’s not always easy, but if we don’t slow down, the ruts and potholes will break us before we get anywhere.  Now is the time to look closely, to sink in, to plant a seed in the thawing earth.

Sometimes–often times–slowing down and letting go are the first steps in creating change.

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Grasp Your One Necessity

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Annie Dillard, Hunger Mountain, life, morning inspiration, nature, photography, toddler

“I think it would be well, and proper, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

~Annie Dillard

Hunger Mountain Summit, October 2014

Hunger Mountain Summit, October 2014

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Beauty as well as Bread

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

inspiration, John Muir, life, nature, photography

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” 

-John Muir, The Yosemite

mountain in rock

mountain in rock

May you find beauty today, and everyday

May your stomach and your soul be filled

 

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The Courage to Try

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

change, courage, learning, life, thoughts, Vermont

 

I’d like to learn how to make whiskey

and play the fiddle

and how to sew quilts.

At a certain point in life it seems we give up on some desires, the big, far-away lofty ones, and a few small, close, dear ones.  We accept the idea that we needed to learn how to do it when we were young, and a small measure of defeat sets in and reincarnates itself as hopes for our children.

But I still want to learn how to speak Spanish, and French, too.

I’d like to learn how to ride a horse, and then have one of my own someday to ride along the logging roads in the forest that stretches out and rises up from this hillside pasture.

Learning doesn’t have to stop.  Childhood wonder doesn’t have to fade away.

We wake up everyday and we can open our eyes to possibilities, because that’s what each new day is: a possibility.

I don’t know what I’ll approach first, the whiskey or the quilting, the horse-back riding or the fiddle.  I just know that it’s not impossible.  All it takes is two hands, an open mind, and the courage to try.

DSC_1373

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This Moment

05 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

home, life, photography, Vermont, winter, yurt, yurt living

{this moment} ~ A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. {a tradition from SouleMama}

coming home

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The Wisdom of Quietness

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by Kate Spring in Morning Inspiration, Nature/Environment

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

inspiration, nature, photography, quote, Rick Bass, winter

white birch

“We need the strength of lilies, ferns, mosses and mayflies.  We need the masculinity of ponds and rivers, the femininity of stone, the wisdom of quietness, if not silence.”

~Rick Bass, The Book of Yaak

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Welcome!

Kate Spring

Kate Spring

Welcome to The Good Heart Life: an organic gardening and lifestyle blog where we grow beauty, joy, and nourishment for the body, soul, and earth. I'm Kate Spring: organic farmer, mother, and chief inspiration officer at Good Heart Farmstead and The Good Heart Life. Grow along with us, and together we'll cultivate a more lively, joyful world one {organic} seed at a time.

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