I get a new half pan for my watercolor set, quinacridone magenta.  The older I get, the more I like pink.  When younger, I thought it conventional to like pink, stereotypical, liking a color society assumes I like because I am female.  So I showed them (them in quotation marks), cultivated instead a love for yellow which remains strong.  But I grow tired of resisting and fighting certain things, realize as I get older that resistance isn’t always the answer, certainly not in the case of the color pink.  So I surrender, I like pink.  I lay down washes of magenta that are bright, bold, beautiful.  Eventually, I will play with the softness I know is possible but, for now, I stay with the spirited saturation straight from the pan, allowing the magenta to make a statement, a statement that things (and people) change and isn’t that glorious?

I dust the family room furniture, the kitchen table, the dining room table which is really a puzzle table.  All the while, my son and daughter stay with me.  It is the smallest of matters that they stay, that they talk as I move from chair to chair to table to bookshelf.  On another day, I might ask for help but I let them lounge while I dust, happy for their company.  It is moments like this that remind me they will not always be in this house to lounge while I do the dusting, am reminded that things (and people) (that my children who are no longer children) are changing.  I want to feel that this changing, this growing from little babies in my arms to young adults curled in armchairs, is glorious in the way that my changed feelings for pink are glorious, and in most moments I feel the gloriousness of my children who are no longer children, feel the gloriousness of the past twenty-one years of motherhood, but it isn’t always glorious, is bittersweet.

The other day, I notice something new in my garden, a volunteer tomato plant.  In the riot of cosmos and zinnias and four o’clocks and poppies, all self-seeding gifts, I miss the initial sprouting of this cherry tomato plant.  But I see it now and, not for the first time, in fact for the fifth time, I whisper a prayer of gratitude for flowers, for cherry tomatoes, for seeds, for life. Little green globes dangle from the stems of the tomato plant, strings of possibility.  I vow not to get mad if the deer eat the tomatoes, vow to stay with the delight, vow to stay with the joy I feel upon this garden discovery.  The plants in my garden are companions and guides, reminding me that sometimes a path of least resistance is a path to abundance, that gardens and life (and pink) are glorious.  

Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.
~ Wayne Dyer ~

P.S. It's the first Friday of August which means Barbara and I have a new quote + mobile photos to share with you.