tear up your lawn, tear up your life

i feel very inspired lately. inspired to eat well and take more pictures of my children, for they grow so fast and furious it's hard to keep up, to read more important books and simultaneously stop thumbing and keep thumbing my nose at The Man, to be grateful so so grateful for my in laws and parents and brothers and sister in laws and nieces and soon-to-find-out other miracle baby inside my sister in law karen, to rejoice and cry and pray with friends over the big and the small - for there is SO much going on with all of my friends. inspired to tear up my lawn (that i rent) and plant a garden (which i am not allowed to do), to contemplate politics and what they mean to me, how do i walk out what i believe? what do i even believe? how does what i believe translate into the current political system? should i even vote any longer? a once passionate voter i now feel called into something... Else? time will tell but nonetheless, i feel inspired and challenged. baking loaves of bread every few days, drying sage and it filling the tiny tiny kitchen with it's aroma, took my first crack at canning and it went smashingly well. (see below photos). inspired by friends who are out there furthering the kingdom, people who are thinking about our upside down religion, and people speaking my heart about politics. inspired and grateful for friends (mamafry) for saving my sanity and watching olive so that i could get caught up in my medical reports. i love her to death! & to my brother josh and sister in law brienne for sleep overs with auggie, i thank you!

so i asked my landlord if and where i could plant a garden. if you've been to my apartment you've seen that my back yard if you can even call it that is about 5 X 10 ft and they are not okay with my tearing up the grass, which is what i expected. what they did say was that i am free to plant something where the ground is already kicked up and free of grass, which takes my former anger about the awful patchy lawn and channels it into a feeling of endless possibility. There is an area behind the communal garages to the right of the clothes lines that is mostly sunny, no one bothers it, and it is free of grass. oh did i mention it is full of broken beer bottles and cigarette butts? awesome! but with a little elbow grease, TLC, and gloves i can whip that place into a functional space. Maybe i've been reading too much Food Not Lawns lately (is that possible?) but i've been very very inspired to get guerrilla on my neighborhood if need be. last night we were at a party and there was a pear tree full of lush gorgeous fruit and no one even harvested anything off of it. i felt very frustrated seeing all of the fruit sitting there rotting. we even asked, half joking, but mostly serious if they would consider netting the portion that was in their yard (it was in an adjacent yard but a main branch fell over onto their property) and catching the pears. i think they thought we were kind of weird for asking. *cricket cricket*


2 locally grown raspberry, strawberry, blackberry jams. 2 cherry preserves. 4 yummies


& this was on yo gabba gabba. i love mark kozelek (of red house painters)