Down the Long Lane Helping Women Write
My body, mind and spirit are healed by the earth.
I’ve been on a healing journey from my unstable youth moving every year, to my horse injuries, to my grief from losing all my family.
I will share what I’ve learned, how I’ve learned it, and why it works for me. I hope you will be able to garner some comfort for yourself from my roller coaster ride.
Even into my elder years, I continue to experience new trauma and search for comfort and relief, mostly through nature and my animals.
I’ll talk about planting trees, walking in the woods, and sitting on my porch listening to the crickets and birds.
I hope you will contact me with your stories, whether through this website or on social media. We learn from each other and I still have much to learn. I’m listening.
Moving fifty times in my first forty-five years made having a garden impossible, but I spent most of my time wandering around the shores of lakes and along paths through the woods.
As I grew into an artist, I looked at iris flowers up-close even as it dried and curled, studied the images of Georgia O’Keefe and Arthur Dove to inspire my watercolors and clays sculptures.
Then we found this farm down long lane in Leaf River, Illinois and I began to photograph the gardens that I created using donated split clumps of Hostas and salvaged Peonies and Iris tubers I carved from the limestone foundation and the crevices of a deteriorating concrete retaining wall. Later I added Day Lily bulbs and Crocuses. I watered, weeded, mulched, and fertilized with horse manure and compost from our kitchen and the garden flourished.
As I nurture my gardens, I am inspired and healed. Even now, when technology becomes overwhelming or I’m stuck and flustered with my writing, I step into the garden and put my hands in the soil as therapy. As I pull a weed or transplant a walnut tree from the squirrels burying nuts, I feel the stress melt away and my muses return.
I am uplifted by spectacular sunsets when I go out to feed the horses. and grounded by standing at the base of an ancient Burr Oak or Shagbark Hickory in our woods.
I know I am blessed to be able to live here and I am grateful. My hope is that I may share some of my joy with you through my pictures and writing. Welcome.
Never enough time to write.
Throughout this last winter and early spring, I was able to write everyday, not just for an hour or two, but four to six hours each and every day. I’d hoped to maintain that pac
Over the holidays, as I prepared for the first of two cataract surgeries, eye drops, dark glasses, a ride to the surgery center and subsequent appointments, I missed the part about the reading restriction: only ten minutes an hour for three weeks following surgery. No email, no facebook, no twitter
