In her excellent podcast (one of my favourites!) Brooke McAlary talks often about tilting to meet life's demands of the moment. (If you haven't listened to it before, this episode and this one are two older ones that you could start with.) She also wrote a great post about tilting, here. The past few weeks have found me tilting in to work mode as I have had the opportunity to travel a bit, and made my way clear across the country to attend the Candian Vision Teachers Conference in Vancouver. The thing I love so much about the idea of tilting is that it eliminates much of the feeling that I should be doing something else. It's an alternative to "balance", which I've always found problematic. I'm making conscious choices to be doing precisely what I am doing, meaning that I'm choosing not to be focusing on the other things, which allows me to appreciate the time I have for exactly what it is. It ties in with the notion of rhythms or seasons of life, something I came to appreciate when the boys were very little, and which changed my entire perspective on life. Everything is temporary - every phase of tantrums, toilet training, sweet mispronounced words, throwing pureed food everywhere, diapers, chubby tiny arm hugs, first days of school - all of it. I find that so reassuring when it comes to the difficult things, and it really, really makes me appreciate the good and beautiful.
Whew! Didn't know that paragraph was going there, but I'm glad it did.
It was so, so great to meet old and new friends at the conference, and I left feeling inspired with ideas for work. As I had anticipated, the city is incredibly beautiful. The people were lovely and helpful and kind, our travel went smoothly, and I was so inspired by beautiful shops like this one, this one, and this one which I visited. And I want to open one like this someday. (I found some Papier d'Armenie there, which I have been keeping my eyes peeled for since I first saw it over here!) Thankfully, I only had a carry-on - things could have gone awry and the budget would have been blown if I had a full suitcase. So many locally made beautiful, useful things! And the city has certainly got the tree-planting thing down - every median and square inch of available growing space was planted with something lovely.
I also spent some time in Halifax with colleagues on my roundabout way back home, and one of the highlights was lunch with Kimberley Eddy. Kimberley and I met on Instagram a little while ago, and when I saw her Ocean Flow series, I was smitten. But it wasn't until I saw one in person at Made in the Maritimes that I could appreciate how luminous and beautiful they are, and I knew that I would buy one for Adam our anniversary. I'm not a painter, so I don't really know much about it, but she uses pouring medium to create these abstract aerial-view ocean/beach scenes, and they are so captivating - you can't help but be drawn in. Over lunch at Il Mercato in Bedford (order the grilled vegetable salad!) we chatted about everything under the sun and there still wasn't enough time. Kimberley is just lovely. You can see more of her work here.
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Our replacement window for the front door just arrived, and the forecast is beautiful for the week! I'm laying around with a very sore throat and general ick, daydreaming about the end of the summer when the exterior will be repaired and painted (white with white trim), my lovely slate house number will be installed, the door will be this colour and my perfect symetrical bobo hydrangeas will be blooming. Swoon!
The top photo was from a short family visit in Wolfville this weekend; I highly recommend an orchard-visit at dusk when the trees are in bloom and the bees are flying. It's heaven. During that visit, we met with our bee guy, who assured us that we will be able to get replacement bees from him this year! So if all goes according to plan, we should have four hives to replace the two we lost over the winter. That's my kind of math!
And after all of that rambling and all of those links (no one pays me for any of them!) I'm off to make another cup of tea.