Lately.

First fires:

Early mornings:

Celebrating a birthday (and the man who had it):

Traveling to Atlanta for work:

Watching the light change for Fall:

Growing (and growing!) firewood pile:

Puppy play date love to an excessive and charming degree:

Another season change:

Pumpkin muffins for the boy:

A budding book lover:

Recreating the ocean in the bathtub:

And always this smile:

And because there are no pictures of me to share, I will instead off  a little something that’s been on my mind:

I think that I go back and forth between fancying myself some kind of activist and equally some kind of peace maker. In this political season, I’ve felt the urge to wear both hats, but lately, that second one is feeling more and more correct to me. I’m not apathetic about the value of the political process, but I’m also not sure that I’m comfortable adding more negativity to what is increasingly feeling like a pool of vague buzz words that always seem to be true in one circle and false in another. My gut instinct is that this whole process is going to implode during my life time, and if and when that happens, (and I hope that it does, and I hope that this sentiment is a part of it) it is my hope that it’s done intelligently, compassionately, and not at the cost of our good sense.

I support our right to disagree and I support the foundation of democracy that we’re attempting to still stand on, but I do not support all of the rhetoric that gets tossed around at the cost of forgetting that there are humans behind those words, from both sides. My concern is that we get so attached to our perception of the issues, or to being the most clever or stinging in our rebuttal, that we forget which way is up. I am guilty of this, and that activist in me knows that there are things that I am absolutely willing to fight for, but not at the cost of behaving in a way that I would never allow my toddler to. I’m shelving any public name calling for a while and hoping to create another spot on the internet that isn’t based solely on what’s going wrong, as I still believe that there is a lot that is right. I read this quote in Oxford American’s June issue, and haven’t been able to shake the impact that it had on me: “Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?” (Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter). It’s not that I think, ‘oh, we’re all human so everyone can do anything and be just fine as long as we sugarcoat it and just say nice things’, it’s more that I think that we’re all human, we’re designed to disagree, and that the only way to move forward is to treat each other compassionately, no matter the degree of dissent. This lofty intention is, in my mind, the end of ignorance.

I think that the majority of the folks that I know and spend my time with feel this way, but as a way of affirming this for myself, I thought I might put it out there publicly too. My mouth often gets ahead of my heart, and something that I’ve been working on is being a bit more intentional with the content that I’m generating in this world wide web. I might get proven sorely wrong one day, but for the time being, I’m continuing to hope that it’s true that we can be the change that we wish to see, and in my case, I desperately hope to see a change for the positive.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.