Marrow deep

This post started Monday morning with a simple weekend summary. It was a joyous weekend and I wanted to write about that. Then I got a bit bogged down trying to say the real and true thing.

I’m just gonna publish and be done.

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Saturday was a gorgeous sunny day and started with a get-to-know you visit with a local acquaintance who I met through Instagram. She came for a visit with her husband to pick up tomato seedlings that I had offered on IG Stories.

She brought freshly baked pumpkin muffins and we had a lovely time sitting outdoors on the front deck in the morning spring sunshine. The first around-the-picnic-table chat of the season.

I spent the afternoon in the garden fertilizing the garlic and the greens bed with blood meal, preparing the carrot bed, planting the carrot bed, and doing a second seeding of arugula and radish seeds.

I’ve already planted a couple rows of both of those rapid growing brassicas in mid April, and this next batch is for a staggered harvest.

Sunday was rainy, perfect for the newly planted carrot seeds. (Carrots need consistently moist soil to germinate.)

I was grateful for all that rain because there was no temptation to work outdoors. I was sore from Saturday’s gardening exertions and I appreciated the bodily rest.

Gardening is also an indoor game this time of year with starting seeds and up potting seedlings. I did a lot of up potting on Sunday, mostly Zinnias and sunflowers. I did more of the same before and after Monday’s workday.

I have to get my last round of indoor seeds started this week. My spreadsheet says I’m seeding Cosmos, Gomphrena, basil, cucumbers and squash.

I don’t have any hard deadlines on the horizon this month. My next big life deadline is mid June when we leave for our Montreal vacation. A lot of things have to be in place, garden-wise, for that trip but I have seven weeks to get there and I feel confident everything that needs to be done will be done by that time.

The weekend was bookended on Friday and Sunday by playoff hockey. Sunday night started with a family dinner before nail-biting our way through to the Habs miraculous game 7 win against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The weekend’s activities, its multiple moments of meaningful connection and its steady rhythms brought to my awareness, yet again, of how much I enjoy my life. And how the enjoyment of my life, the enjoyment of living, is one of my priorities in this midlife season.

“Enjoy my life. Do the things we love”, is literally written in black marker on an 8.5x11 piece of cardstock stuck to my office wall by washi-taped corners.

Throughout my adulthood I’ve written down my dreams, goals, plans and priorities for myself.

I can’t say I’ve always prioritized enjoying life, in those exact terms, but enjoyment, as a principle, has driven other goals. And in that way it’s a driving life force. I mean, why wouldn’t it be?

(I will answer that rhetorical question by saying for some people prioritizing enjoyment is perceived as selfish, and especially in certain religious contexts self-sacrifice and preparation for the afterlife is more important than enjoying this world.)

Although the two aren’t mutually exclusive my own unbelief and uncertainty about next things definitely influences my desire to enjoy my life and the people in it, here and now.

I would be lying if I said my enjoyment of life wasn’t enhanced by the big things, our recent trip to Montreal for example.

But the day-to-day enjoyment of my life is mostly found in ordinary-ness.

Daily routines of personal, marital, and residential care and maintenance. Fiercely loving the people on this property. (And my children in Montreal.) Tending, sustaining, nurturing, and stewarding land and growing things.

Hearing the calls of the hermit thrushes, barred owls, and broad-winged hawks.

Working for values-aligned clients to help them achieve their goals.

But maybe these aren’t so ordinary after all. And so I can’t pitch catchy phrases about my contentment in the quotidian.

So much of my life these days feels magical, spacious, and gifted. I don’t have to mindset my way to feeling gratitude for any of this. I’m not squinting real hard to see the beauty.

I don’t have to scrape for glimmers when I’m standing in a vein of gold.

And I certainly can’t do any prescriptive writing from this place, though that is not my style anyway. “SMART goal your way into enjoyment”, “how to find meaning in the brokenness”, etc.

If I don’t have to wrestle to get there, do my words matter?

The goodness of my life has been an underlying theme in my experience and my writing since moving to Nova Scotia. It’s probably tiresome to read.

It’s not just the country life. It’s country life across the driveway from my parents. It’s newfound midlife financial security. It’s the realizing of many of my life dreams and goals that required some land, trees, and willing and eager participants.

Sometimes I feel like contentedness disqualifies me from publishing my thoughts, that high life satisfaction makes my writing unrelatable.

I’ll take actual life enjoyment and contentedness over audience resonance any day. But as a writer I do like having readers.

If the story of how much I love my life is sounding like an annoying broken record to some people, I am sorry for that. I don’t want to be that annoying happy person.

But what do you do with marrow-deep life satisfaction and gratitude, if not express it?