to look at all of the beauty around you

"a few years back, as i was driving home from work, i had a silly thought that suddenly turned straight genius on me. i realized that all i really wanted was for my life to be beautiful. i wanted my home to be beautiful, i wanted my thoughts to be beautiful, i wanted my feelings to be beautiful. i wanted to create beauty in my life. if it was worth doing, i wanted it to be done beautifully. life didn't seem beautiful at the time, but i wanted it to. it was silly and shallow, until suddenly it wasn't. god created for us an insanely beautiful world. beauty around every corner. music, art, science. all beautiful. and loving families, a passion for learning, and a sense that we can have an impact on what surrounds us-- to me, that is beauty. and holy, for sure. so i stopped considering that desire shallow. i started to think of it as a way of honoring god, who is the one who created beauty to begin with, after all."

from Natalie// found  here

i have a dream that looks a lot like green gables, and i look a lot like anne shirley, but without the red hair, of course, because nobody likes being called carrots. she's a pretty littlewhite house settled in between green, green, green; and it's not the green in these utah mountains, it's the green of the place i call home. it's the kind of green that you can't imagine until you've seen it. 

there are 70-year trees and 80-year trees, even 100-year trees with wrinkles like laugh lines in their bark. a wrap-around porch is complete with swings, chairs, and ferns in between each column, and a door the loveliest shade of red you have ever seen. 

there's a garden out back full of squash and tomatoes and peas-even strawberries! i'm wearing a loose sundress and my hunter green rainboots carefully examining each fruit to see if it's ripe and ready to pick, and if she passes my inspection, she's placed into my basket for dinner later that night. 

the sun is gloriously warm! it shines on my fair skin begging each freckle to reveal itself, the wet air curling my crown of baby hairs around my head. it's summer and it's hot, but it is beautiful. 

as i am busy in my garden, the inside of my house is singing through the open windows, big armfuls of knock-out roses fill every vase and pitcher i own, filling the house with an aroma of summer. i have two little kittens named howard and francesca (howie and frannie for short, naturally), ham and beans in the dutch oven on the stove, and fresh bread rising on the counter. 

but the quietest part of the house hold the best secrets. walls and walls of books, old books, new books, borrowed books, lost books. where future littles can hear stories, their giggles are carried in the wind. 

isn't it perfect? 

dreaming of summer