Head, Heart, Hands #3

Things to make us think, feel, and do.

Welcome to Making Time. Each week, I explore the impact of time on creativity, ways to slow down, and scenes from my own life in rural Oregon. Head, Heart, Hands is a monthly feature full of links that delight me. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

On Sunday evening, we decided to take a stroll down the hill after dinner.

The day before, there had been an intense thunderstorm, with lightning strikes close to the house and whispers of small fires in the area. So when I looked out at the nearby mountain and saw a bright glow in the forest, I pointed and gasped, “Look! Fire!”

We stopped and stared as the orange glow seemed to burn brighter and brighter. Smoke appeared to billow from it as it rose quickly into the sky.

And yet, it why was the glow rising so high? Why was it so rounded? “Is that… the moon?” Kenn said.

It was, in fact, the rare combination of a full moon, blue moon, and supermoon, as it turns out. We stood and watched the moon rise over the mountains and disappear into the clouds, a burning orange orb in the twilight. “Nature is beautiful and terrifying,” Kenn said.

Indeed LIFE is both beautiful and terrifying, but I wonder sometimes if I look for the terrifying and almost miss the beauty.

• Here are 10 things that are delighting me lately:

  1. If you love fruit as much as I do and enjoy simple recipes that let your ingredients shine, I highly recommend the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook. It’s my go to for exquisite recipes that are completely unfussy. I continue to pick wild blackberries like they’re going out of style, and I can’t wait to try making the wild blackberry mousse, wild blackberry curd, and wild blackberry sauce.

  2. These salads from Nigel Slater all look like an incredible way to spend a sunny afternoon outside. I have many of his books and he never disappoints, either with his recipes or writing.

  3. These lithographs of early 19th century fashionable ladies by Henri Grévedon are stunning, and I find the colors and textures are just as inspiring today. So soft and dreamy.

  4. “Desire is a beautiful emotion and a visceral motivator. I think you should court it with a healthy respect. Life is at once more serious and more exuberant if you do so. There is a sweetness tasted not just in success, but in enjoying the searches and quests themselves, and in maintaining a wistful imagination.” Simon Sarris in quests, failure, desire

  5. At the same time, I can’t stop thinking about this old essay by Ryan Holiday that I stumbled upon recently, Passion Is the Problem, Not The Solution. As someone whose unbridled enthusiasm about things often gets her into hot water, I’ve been thinking a lot about a calmer middle path. I’m slowly becoming less all-or-nothing about desire.

  6. What would it mean to be done for the day? asks Oliver Burkeman. I often struggle with that feeling of incompleteness at the end of the day, that there is so much MORE I could have done. Lately, I’ve been reframing it as an abundance of things that I get to choose from each day.

  7. On Sunday, a new friend and I went for a long walk and were talking about this very thing: The things that go wrong make the best memories. Or at least the most entertaining and educational stories.

  8. These iced sesame noodles are easy, delicious, and a great way to use up any produce you happen to have in the fridge. I’ve been making them with soba (I’m a big buckwheat fan), adding cucumber, steamed green beans, chili garlic crunch, herbs, and cashews.

  9. Here’s how to make cold processed shrubs. So easy! I’m making a blackberry thyme one right now, and planning to add it to fizzy water. If you’re a vinegar fan, these are a wonderful way to use summer fruit and apparently last up to a year in the fridge!

  10. Recently, I started going to a morning yoga class in town on the weekends, and it’s such a joy to move with other people. But when I’m home, I use the Down Dog app and highly recommend it for home practice! You tell it what style of yoga you’d like to do, your ability level, the length of the session, and areas of the body you’d like to focus on. It then generates a practice with video for you on the fly. You can even choose the voice you prefer (I choose one that sounds a lot like Helen Mirren).

I hope you found something interesting or delightful in these links, and have a joyful week.

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