Fading Lilacs...

Today the temperatures climbed into the high 80s, and the air in the garden was thick with the scents of sea salt and lilacs. The purple flowers are all open now, and some are browning around the edges. We're heading into the mountains for the weekend, hiking in two days what we could hike in one, just to slow ourselves down and enjoy the silence of the woods (although perhaps the black flies will speed us up a bit, and then we'll just luxuriate in our tent and read). I'm hoping the lilacs last a little while longer and won't all be gone when we return after the long weekend.

I finished the semester in a flurry of writing, late nights and early mornings spent whacking away at papers and paperwork. Now, I have three long months until I'm back in the classroom again, this time gainfully employed-hurrah! In the midst of all I've been thinking a lot about writing and journals. I struggled with papers this semester, mostly because I was just tired of writing papers for other people on topics that weren't my own, and because I seriously overloaded my schedule in order to finish my certification work. I made it, but I haven't had time to do much writing of my own in the last few months. I've been playing around with different journal types, such as my layered journal , and with the idea of writing a "brain dump" first thing in the morning, what artist Julia Cameron calls "morning pages." The idea of these pages is to clear the mind and get ideas flowing without the requirement of a finished product, and early enough in the day that you aren't distracted by the usual chaos of life. I find that they do bring clarity to my work, and am hoping to do them more regularly now that I don't have to be at work at 7am, or wake up early to get a few pages of paper written. I'll write some more about these journals and the process, because I think it is a really interesting way to explore your own mind a bit. I'm working on some ideas about combining my morning yoga practice with my journaling, since the two have so many parallels in purpose...

And many thanks to folks who have been leaving lovely comments on my garden photos-I'm looking forward to visiting all your sites and catching up on what's been happening in the last few months.