Beryl Markham
Truth
What’s in your nest?
A poignant view on why clutter doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, Dominick Browning’s “In Praise of the Comfort of Clutter.”
“There is a reason we talk about nesting. Next time you are out walking, take a close look at a nest. Nests are full of twigs, bits of fluff, string, moss and bark. Stuff birds take home, and fit to a shape that accommodates their lives. Some birds even press their warm bodies against their stuff as they are making their nests, molding them to the shape of their breasts, so that they feel like…home. A home that is uniquely theirs, and uniquely beloved.”
History.
A beautiful surprise crossed my email today, a post about our grandfather’s family homestead — a place, quite honestly, I hadn’t thought of in years. Yet today there it was, with old black-and-white images staring me in the face…offering tiny glimpses into the log cabin where Forrest C. Brooks (“Papa”) was raised in a family of seven sons. Kolb Farm was restored in the 1960s to preserve the history of The Battle of Kolb’s Farm, which took place during the American Civil War. It is on the National Register of Historic Places as part of Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.
“Kolb-Brooks Farm”
Peter Valentine Kolb built this log house in 1836 as four rooms with an open dogtrot (huge by 1836 pioneer standards!), enclosing the dogtrot into a central hall sometime before the Civil War. William Franklin Brooks (1864-1952) and Emma Latimer Brooks (1865-1949) purchased it from the Kolb family and had seven boys (William, Jr., George, Clyde, Glen, Grover, Guy, and Forrest) that lived and grew up on this farm.
Recline, don’t ‘Lean In’
Hear this one professional woman’s take on trying to be everything for everyone. And maybe…instead of working so hard to lean in and win approvals, we should learn to kick back and chill out just a little bit more.
“Perhaps the modern equivalent of Woolf’s ‘room of her own’ is the right to stop ‘leaning in’ all the time. There is, after all, much to be said for leaning out — for long lunches, afternoon naps, good books and some nice, slow hours in the La-Z-Boy […or hammock].”
Read this “manifestus for the rest of us” in She The People (Washington Post).
word of the day
.
a·nan·da
ˈänəndə/
< Sanskrit ānanda – joy, happiness, bliss
(in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism) extreme happiness, one of the highest states of being
Photo courtesy of SplitShire.com.
