I am saturated in thankfulness and awe for the earth’s beauty. The glory of the Methow Valley is May.

May is when the the hills are brilliant green, each tree just budding, the widened river rushes fierce, and the far mountains still cut a hard white line against brilliant, fresh blue horizons.

Fruit blossoms and bees are more abundant than any spring in recent memory in our old-growth trees.  Our garden beds are dug deep and wide holding seeds of promised sustenance.

The predominating feeling now is preciousness.  Now, when we’ve all been home caring for each other, our land, our home, our plants, over fifty days with more isolation time to come, May around us is singing “for the beauty of the earth.”

This unprecedented and precious time strikes most as a distillation of being.  I know personally within myself, the effect has been to get closer to what I want to be, closer to creating myself in accordance with my beliefs.  When else do we have such an opportunity?

So much of our lifetimes are made up of the business of surviving, pushing on, maintaining a material success.  Very little of modern life is still, reflective or inward turned on the spiritual level.  Distillation of being is thus a Great Gift to embrace in this time, and we’re blessed with the particular time it has come–rebirth of the earth in springtime.  Quiet, peaceful, distilling purpose and thought comes to the predisposed contemplator.

There’s more quiet reading time without school and money making work out of the home.  My favorite children’s books tend to be from the 1940s and 1970s, both times when a back to the earth, back to basics mentality, by necessity or choice, pervaded more enlightened thinking.

Ox-Cart Man

Ox-Cart man is a children’s book from the seventies that formed my childhood narrative and accompanies my children’s quiet reading time with a pointed spiritual message. The good life, abundantly peace filled and loving is conveyed.  The rhythms of daily work together harmonize with the rhythms of the earth, seasons and food grown with sustainable methods.

“…and in May they planted potatoes, turnips and cabbages,

while apple blossoms bloomed and fell,

while bees woke up starting to make new honey.”

The simple life, there is in fact nothing better.  We need each other for giving and receiving love; we need a healthy piece of land to cultivate and grow; we need peace, which come from love and thanksgiving in praise of our Creator. Knowing we need little else, we are sustained, internally renewed, in harmony.

I share these thoughts now because despite knowing that this isolation time will end, I will to take these reflections with us.

~Peace from our home front to yours!  Gina @ Soul & Stomach.