I bought my first SLR camera this weekend and then I kept making my kids go on hikes with me so that I could go out there and find things to take pictures of and so I wouldn’t feel so silly and alone while lying belly down on the trail to get close to things like this little sweetie.

I know I have a lot to learn because I’m sure it’s supposed to be, you know, in focus, but when I put it on my computer, and I could see the little tiny baby hairs on its stem, it made very glad in a way down deep way.

I love taking pictures of my kids and the other things in the woods. I love it so much I get butterflies when I think about it. It’s been a long time since I discovered something new that I love this much.

So that first day, I snapped photos of the trail that winds behind my house.

When I have this camera in my hand, it’s like I am on a hunt for things beautiful.

Then I was reading this John Shaw’s Nature Photography Field Guide before bed and the author said something that gets to the meat of why I think it’s so brazenly fun.

“In the process of photography,” Shaw writes, “we order the chaos of the world around us by making decisions. We decide to emphasize one aspect of the world – what we have discovered – and ignore all others.”

That means that you get to make the decisions on what to focus on. You are deciding what is beautiful and what you are going to share with the world this day.

It’s like the art of photography and the art of writing and the art of living have this one tremendous thing in common. You get to decide what is exquisite and what is good, and you focus in on it as much as you can stand to.

My son’s legs look just like his daddy’s. They are long and lean. I can see his hamstrings. This morning, he is wearing only a t-shirt and underwear, which is on backwards. He needs a haircut and his hair curls in around his eyes, which makes him look sort of elfin.

He is eating Lucky Charms and, every now and then, he has something to say.

When he doesn’t know something, he asks me as though he were the host of a quiz show, pretending that he knows the answer and checking to see if I know the answer, as well.

“So, if someone can swim in 800 feet, could they also swim in 1000 feet?”

He pokes at one of the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms.

“Hmm?” he prompts me.

“Yes.” I tell him, “Once someone can swim and doesn’t need to touch the bottom, he or she can swim in any depth.”

“That’s right!” he shouts.

I win.

My son’s eyes are big and brown like two spots of hershey’s syrup. He dunks his marshmallows with the back of his spoon.

Time was, he ate only the marshmallows. Now he eats all the frosted oats first, then goes back and eats the sweets.  But he’s not all grown up yet because he still eats just the m&ms from the bag of trail mix.

He pushes back from the table.

“I’m going to go and play.”

Few words are spoken in the mornings. I love them.

Yesterday, my mind was all bound up with too much, too much, too much. The day had been full of too many kids in my house who had been spending too much time together with too much time on their hands. There is too much pollen puffing off the trees with every passing breeze, and it’s making my eyes and throat itch way too much. There is too much dog poo in my yard, too much pent-up energy in my Labrador, and way, way, way too much laundry.

Typically, my saving grace on days like these comes at around 6 pm when a white diesel truck rattles into the garage. But today Ty had a mountain bike race after work. He’s been putting in way longer hours than normal (too much, too much, too much work) and hasn’t been on his bike enough. The kids and I all wanted to support his biking-ness, so we packed a backpack with almonds and bananas and potato chips, water and Capri suns and we headed out to the start line.

Once the race had begun, we had nothing to do but wait in the woods for Ty’s speedy return but this was a 17 mile race, so we had some time to kill, which was just as well for the kids. Waiting in woods such as these is nirvana for kids. This was a part of the valley that was new to all of us, even though it’s just a few miles from our home, and everyone  wanted to explore. Except for me. I wasn’t really in the mood for much of anything except sitting and sneezing.

I always know that I’m not in a proper frame of mind for parenting when I want to say no to everything the kids want to do, without even thinking about it. The kids wanted to balance on the log fences. No, I said instinctively, snapping the word in a way that was oddly satisfying. Okay, I softened when I looked at their dirty little faces, staring up at me. “Actually, why not?” It got to the point where my kids were actually waiting after my “No” for me to reverse myself.

“Can we chuck rocks in the river?” No. Actually, why not?

“Can we hike down that trail to see what is at the end of it?” No. Actually, why not?

“Can we climb that hill of rocks?” No. Actually, why not?

“Can we take off your hat and braid your hair?” No, actually why not?

The evening sun squinted through the valley, and filtered through the pollen, it looked almost misty and altogether beautiful. It was nice to wait for a while, in the woods.

Written by Momscape founder Susie Michelle Cortright. Follow her on Twitter.

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

When our tee-ball team gets tired, they lose all focus. Some of them can’t muster the energy to stand so they sit smack down on the base. Some of them droop their torsos and let their arms hang long like butter noodles. Some get wild with laughter and have snorting contests. Some cry.

When you think about it, these tiny humans have been in preschool or kindergarten all day and by 6 or 7 in the evening, most of them just want their Capri Sun and cupcake from the Snack Mom and to curl up in the backseat with a blankie.

It was the last inning of the second game in my son’s first t-ball season. The sun was low enough that it made colors look surreal, and it cast a long shadow as one 5-year-old, whom I’ll never forget, loped up to the tee. He had spent the previous inning filling his baseball hat with dirt from center field and, at some point, he had begun to cry, so the red soil in his hat and hair now streaked down his face in pinkish streams.

I didn’t know this particular boy and I don’t recall him making contact with the ball on his previous batting attempts. Judging by his tears, he would have preferred to be somewhere else, but his dad was the coach, so there he was. He scanned the crowd and looked down again when he caught my eye. Something about the look on his wee little boy face made we want to go over and give him a cuddle and let him watch the game with me from the other side of the fence until it was all over.

His dad held out the batting helmet, which he slid on. It knocked his glasses crooked and didn’t quite fit right so it perched on top, and, with his small frame, he looked remarkably like a bobblehead.

He pushed the helmet down as far as could and took the bat from his dad, who was kneeling to give him some last minute instructions. The boy’s attention was focused exclusively on home plate, as he tried to cover it with dirt by kicking with his tiny cleats. That’s when a spectator from our team yelled out, “Heads up, team! This kid’s a real whacker!”

The little boy jerked up his head to find the source of the voice. It was a stranger. A stranger who expected that he would hit this ball hard. A stranger who expected that he would astonish everyone with his mighty swing. A stranger who thought him to be a genuine, bona fide athlete.

This was not a boy who had likely thought of himself in such a way before, and you could see it happen, even from behind: A shift took place. Where once he didn’t believe he could hit the ball, he now all of a sudden did.

Now I wish I could say that he swung that bat and slugged the ball right out of the park. (He didn’t). But he did stand a little taller and suddenly and maybe for the first time, thought of himself as a true ballwhacker indeed.
That man planted a seed in his mind. And the cool thing is that we have no way of knowing where that seed eventually ended up. All of a sudden, this awkward little kid starts to think of himself as a guy whom the crowd is watching; a guy whom the players on the other team had better be wary of.

Sometimes I think that’s the most important part of parenting: just planting seeds. You are smart. You are calm. You are peaceful. You are a beautiful. You are a risktaker. You can do this. You sure have a gift for music. My, my, what a whacker you are.

The seeds you plant have to be sincere – otherwise it’s manipulation, and the kids can tell and it’s no good. Also, you have to assume that many of the seeds will get washed down the gutter with the next rainstorm. Still, it takes so much of the pressure off to think only about scattering them and not about where they might someday end up.

Life is so messy, after all. There are all kinds of big and wonderful, bright and shiny moments where I am really at my best, but there are also a lot of moments raising kids that maybe I didn’t exactly make a good, conscious decision. I just went along. When I have so much to do, and it all gets overwhelming, I can think of it as just planting a few seeds, which comes naturally to me when my head’s on right, and I can do it right from where I am. If I plant enough, some of them, somewhere, are bound to stick. It is this thought alone that gets me through, some days.

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Reflections on a Simple Life

Though these days I live a simple life out of choice, there have been times when I lived it out of necessity. My husband and I have both created businesses that encompass only what we love to do, and, over the years, we have discovered that this type of lifestyle can, at times, make you poor.

It was during one of those times that we discovered our needs are small – tiny, even. When Ty and I were first married, we rented a teeny tiny run-down house in a teeny tiny run-down town, thirty or so miles from the town where we worked.

On Friday nights, we would walk down a gravel road to the video rental store, and we would pick out our movie of the week, which didn’t quite play right on our hand-me-down VCR. The picture would scroll endlessly, but the dialogue came through so it kept our attention, somehow, until the end. After listening to our movie, we would lie in the teeny tiny loft of our teeny tiny cabin, just inches from the ceiling and from each other, and listen to the pinging sound of the rain on our leaky metal roof.

My memories of those days and of that house are as fond as those that I reflect on from yesterday and from last week.

More than a decade later, we look back on all the phases of our lives – those when we lived simply and those when we were too busy, too ambitious – and we strive to strike the best balance so that we can model it to our kids.

In the meantime, we have worked to redefine abundance for ourselves, and, since then, it has become clear to me that we do ourselves a disservice when we think of prosperity and abundance only in monetary terms.

Not long ago, I read a piece of advice that asked me to identify what abundance looked like, smelled like, felt like, and tasted like. It’s a journaling exercise that can bring a lot of insight. I decided that, though no one will ever make a home décor spray from it, abundance smells like my Labrador after he’s been lying in the sun all day. He knows where to sprawl his limbs to extract the most enjoyment from an afternoon, so the sun can strike him just so. He doesn’t hurry off anywhere unless he’s chasing something just for the thrill of it. And he revels in the joy of work, whether it’s chasing sticks or breaking trail for our Nordic skis.

The times when I have felt the most abundance are those times in the early morning when I enjoy a quiet time to work in a silent home as my family sleeps; when I make the time to venture deep into the forest with my kids in the summertime, simply to sit cross-legged and eat raspberries; when my son grasps my finger with his whole entire hand and takes me for a walk, anywhere at all.

I think we’re best served when abundance is defined as that feeling of abundant goodwill, abundant love, and abundant peace. No rushing but a simple, peaceful procession from one moment of life to another.

No matter what your income, it’s infinitely inspiring to slow down and see if you can recognize true abundance and prosperity, not in six and seven figure incomes, but in the physical, mental, and spiritual experience of having plenty: plenty of time and plenty of peace of mind.

I pray that my kids will take pleasure in the simple life for the rest of their days. I pray that they will continue to appreciate tent camping vacations, home cooked meals with fresh vegetables from a local farm and all of the other small and simple splurges that punctuate our days. I pray that they will understand and enjoy the pleasure of lying in the sun for an afternoon as well as the feeling that comes only with hard work, well done.

I’ve just published an excerpt from Denise Roy’s new book Momfulness: Mothering with Mindfulness, Compassion, and Grace.
It’s called The River, and it’s a poignant reminder for parents that “Everything is connected; everything changes; pay attention.”