October Celebrations

♫Scarborough Fair♫

October, in Mary Mason Campbell's book, The New England Butt'ry Shelf Almanac, illustrated by  Tasha Tudor, includes stories about  Marigolds, Phoebes, and Sherman Pliny Fellows, a village blacksmith.  It also has Pumpkin recipes for Chiffon Pie, Custard, Fritters and Cookies. . .

This month in Tasha's A Time to Keep she celebrates Autumn by making apple cider and pumpkin moonshines. . . .

Click on photos to enlarge

Tasha's first book, Pumpkin Moonshine, was the first of her calico books.  Sylvie Ann's pumpkin ends up rolling down the hill, terrorizing everyone in its path.  But in the end Sylvie Ann gets her Pumpkin Moonshine. . . .

When my boys were still home we made jack-o-lanterns or pumpkin moonshines as Tasha called them. . . .

A few years ago I was feeling nostalgic and decided to invite my boys and spouses to a Pumpkin Carving Contest. . . .

We try to plan a weekend away in Autumn when the leaves have changed.  Sometimes we go hiking and other times we just drive along country roads.  Last year we visited the Endless Mountains region of Pennsylvania . . . .

This was my post about our trip last year:  Endless Mountains  We will be going up there again this month.  This time we've rented a house, and the whole family will be coming up.

All these activities bring me Joy because not only are all my senses being delighted by all there is to see, feel, smell, hear, and taste this time of year,  I'm also spending time with the people I love.  To top it off, I get to share it with all of you!

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Take Joy!

It's Time

Sarah Ban Breathnach writes in Simple Abundance. . . .

"Has the other path worked?  Have any of the world's gifts given you authentic happiness?......Here's what I think happens," she writes.  "Just before we come to earth to begin this life, we are given a photograph of our futures--the Divine Plan--to get us excited about the great adventure ahead.  As the photo pops out of the celestial camera, we're in such a hurry to get on with it, we grab the negative instead of the photograph. . . .

(Stock photo)

Now we've got the pattern of a fabulous life, but the perspective is reversed.  What's white looks black.  What's black appears white.  We've got the big picture, but it's backward.  So we cry when we should be laughing, are envious when we should feel inspired, experience deprivation instead of abundance, do it the hard way instead of the easy way, pull back instead of reaching out.  And worst of all, we close our hearts so we won't get hurt, when opening them is the only way we'll ever know joy."

"How many times have we waited for Spirit to move for us, when in fact, Spirit is waiting to work with us?  Today, take the negative of your Divine Plan and let Love develop it so that you can begin living the life for which you were created."

"It's time................"

art: Susan Branch

Mining Inspiration

"How Much Joy Can You Stand?

How to Push Past Your Fears and Create Your Dreams"

by Suzanne Falter

art:  Susan Branch

"The popular belief is that inspiration "strikes" us like a lightning bolt from the sky.  Actually, it's the other way around.  In reality we strike inspiration much the way miners strike gold.  By ceaselessly working, reworking and reworking the old territory, sooner or later we'll run into a little nugget of something wonderful, something better."

"And herein lies the difference between the average dreamer and the person who goes after their dreams.  The successful person is willing to put up with the hard work because inside of it he finds a joy like nothing else on earth.  But the average dreamer does not know this joy yet.  The average dreamer finds his joy in tangible rewards and gets stopped when he realizes all that hard work may ultimately be for nothing."

"Finally, you can understand all those curious twists and turns you took and see the larger, greater picture that they form.  And this is when all your doubts about your goal begin to blow away like so much dust in the wind.  This is also the point when you come close to sensing the divine in your work"

"It is the sheer poetry of creating something from nothing and working on it until it is truly and absolutely right that ultimately keeps you coming back.  This is the magic that can only be born of hard work, and this, ultimately, is realizing your dream."

Try This:  Suzanne suggests you use an oversized calendar to keep track of the days you actively work on your project.  Note the emotional climate of each day's work.  It will be a visual journal that you are making progress.

                  

http://www.suzannefalter.com/taster-of-joy/

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Take Joy!

Authentic Success

♫ Something of Time♫

art by:  Susan Branch

In Sarah Ban Breathnach's book, Simple Abundance, she writes that while wandering through an abandoned cemetery she discovered a wonderful definition of authentic success inscribed on the headstone of a woman who died in 1820:  "The only pain she ever caused was when she left us."

It's probably too late for any of us to live up to that inscription for our grave stones, so I thought I'd list some of the other examples Sarah gives for authentic success.  She begins with time.

Having time to. . . .

SB

• pursue personal pursuits that bring you pleasure
• make loving gestures for your family that you long to do
• care for your home, tend your garden
• nurture your soul

In your work you feel. . . . .

• focused and serene
• you're doing the best you possibly can and that is enough

With your gifts you've. . . . .

• accepted your limitations and made peace with your past
• discovered your passion and are calling forth your gifts so you can share them with the world

Authentic success is. . . . .

• not about accumulating but letting go because all you have is all you truly need
• feeling good about who you are, appreciating where you've been, celebrating your achievements, and honoring the distance you've already come
• reaching the point where being is as important as doing [afterall, we're human beings, not human doings]
• realizing that no matter how much time it takes for a dream to come true in the physical world, no day is ever wasted
• elevating labor to a craft and craft to an art by bestowing Love on every task you undertake
• is being grateful for the many blessings bestowed on you and yours that you can share your portion with others

art by: Maria Berg

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Take Joy!

To Believe

From time to time I will post a single music video that I feel expresses the Take Joy philosophy.  Then I will link back to it in the above MUSIC tab so you can find it again easily.  This song is called "To Believe" and is sung by a child, Jackie Evancho, written by her uncle, Matthew Evancho. . . .


                 

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Take Joy!

September Celebrations

♫Scarborough Fair♫

The First Day of each month is devoted to all things Tasha Tudor.  Each month's illustration is from The New England Butt'ry Shelf Almanac that she illustrated for Mary Mason Campbell.  The Almanac contains stories, poems, information on fauna and flora, and recipes.  Here is a recipe for Cranberry-Apple Crisp. . . .

Tasha's book, A Time to Keep, celebrates the year through seasonal activities each month.  "September is fair month," she says, and illustrates four pages of her Dolls' Fair. . . .

Click on photos to enlarge

The Take Peace group on Facebook recently toured Corgi Cottage and held their own Dolls' Fair afterwards.  You can read about it on Linnie Nolan's Web Journal The Butt'ry and Book'ry.

Tasha also wrote about fairs in her books, The County Fair and Corgiville Fair.  Tasha loved farming and animals and would attend the nearby Danbury, CT Fair when she was a teenager.  Her homemade oatmeal bread won 1st prize one year. . . .

The fact that Tasha held each season in reverence and ordered her life around them is one of the reasons I love Tasha Tudor.  Each month of each season was celebrated in some way even when there was not an official holiday.

Maria Berg, an artist in Germany, found me on the Web through my postings on Morning Musings about Tasha and sent me her watercolor of Tasha with her reason for loving Tasha Tudor which she was happy to share.  I've posted a link to her Web Journal HERE because it embodies the Take Joy philosophy.  If you sign-up for her e-mails at her site, you will receive her encouraging posts about living a joyful life.  Thank you, Maria! . . . .

If you have a story to tell or a drawing you've done of Tasha and her world and would like to share it here, e-mail it to me and I will include it in next month's post.  You can find my e-mail on my Profile page.

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Take Joy!

Tasha Tudor's 100th Birthday Anniversary

It is only fitting that the first post on Take Joy Society's web journal is one about Tasha Tudor's 100th birthday celebration.  Six members of the Maryland Chapter of the Tasha Tudor Museum Society gathered in my arbor for a supper of BBQ beef sandwiches, potato salad, corn on the cob, tomato, basil & watermelon salad, and strawberry iced tea. . . .

Using the quote by Henry David Thoreau that Tasha often shared. . . .

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.    

. . . .we will spend the coming year focusing on fulfilling our dreams--whether they've been in the background or newly acquired.  To facilitate this I presented each member with a journal in which they were to answer the following questions. . . .

1.  If you had the time each day, what would you do to have fun?

2.  If you had five other lives to lead what would you do in each of them?
3.  Is there something in one of those lives you could be doing now?

Then I sent them off into the woods to contemplate their answers. . . .

When they returned we celebrated Tasha's birthday with Becky's Birthday Cake with Cocoa Frosting. . . .

I had a list of corrections for this cookbook and corrected the amount of butter before printing this out.  When I made it I discovered that the 1/2 cup of milk was not nearly enough, so I added an additional 1/4 cup.  It was still almost like cookie dough rather than cake batter.  It was a very dense cake, so if you wish to make this recipe I would suggest you experiment using similar recipes to see what might be amiss. . . .

The frosting, however, turned out just right. . . .

We enjoyed our cake and ice cream . . . .

Cindy, Debra, Carol, Edie, Linda

As I was preparing for Tasha's birthday celebration on Friday I remembered how I was taken totally by surprise when I received the news in June 2008 that she had died.  I'd always believed she'd live to be 100.  She was such a vital, creative, hardworking person that I could not imagine her living any less than a century.  It was then I realized that she had lived to be 100 for me.  This past year I collected the last of her books to complete my collection, made recipes from her cookbook to serve at our gatherings, made crafts from her craft books, and read/watched again all the biographical books and videos about her.  I was a "student" of Tasha Tudor, learning everything I could about her and shared all this with the Chapter.

To name a few of our activities:  we made gingerbread ornaments. . . .

Cut-wool rabbits. . . .

Sparrow Post Boxes for Valentine's Day. . . .

Attended a Maple Syrup demonstration . . . .

I'd focused each of our gatherings around activities she wrote and drew about each month in her many books and in the process found like-minded friends.  Each of us were drawn to Tasha Tudor for different reasons, but the underlying quality that she held for each of us was her ability to take joy in her everyday life.  It seemed only fitting to highlight this aspect of Tasha as we moved into the next phase of our journey as a group. . . . which is when I announced I'd resigned as leader of the Maryland Chapter of the Tasha Tudor Museum Society and was starting my own Society. . . .

Art by Susan Branch

This Web Journal will be one of our resources for encouragement as will our get-togethers.  As the Take Joy Society we will broaden our focus to include other women of note who have forged their way in their field despite the challenges, using and developing their talents.  We will look for ways to spread Joy within our group and in our community.  To get us started I gave everyone a copy of Sarah Ban Breathnach's book, Simple Abundance, because Sarah is another woman I've greatly admired.  Simple Abundance contains daily readings based on the Simple Abundance Principles . . . .

Gratitude

At the heart of Simple Abundance is an authentic awakening, one that resonates within your soul: all you have is all you need to be genuinely happy. All you need is the awareness of how much you really have and then give thanks.

Simplicity The simpler we make our lives, the more abundant they become. There is no scarcity except in our souls.

Order Lasting change does not happen overnight. Lasting change happens in infinitesimal increments: a day, an hour, a minute, a heartbeat at a time.

Harmony Harmony is the inner cadence of contentment you feel when the melody of life is in tune.

Beauty Creating a beautiful life is your highest calling. It is in the ordinary and overlooked details of the every day that beauty is revealed, sustained and nurtured.

Joy Your happiness is not a frivolous expendable luxury. Joy is your soul’s purpose.

And because I like to give surprises, I had a copy of Tasha Tudor's A Time To Keep to give away.  This was the book I used to plan our monthly themes this past year.  I put a small flower sticker on the back of the gift tag of the bag containing the book Simple Abundance.  Cindy handed out the bags and Debra ended up with the winning tag!   She said she never won anything until she joined this group (she won the book at our Christmas Tea, too!)

Other handouts were . . . .

Susan Branch's. . . . 

. . . . and Susan's Vitality Bookmark which can be downloaded from her website.

I included a poem about keeping a dream in the making. . . .

We discussed the questions I'd sent them into the woods to contemplate and will use their answers to plan our gatherings for the coming year.  My dream has been to learn to draw so I can illustrate the many children's stories I've written.  These are a few of my renderings from Tasha's sketchbook that I've drawn. . . .

As we wrapped up our evening I took everyone past our little pond to see the lily pad candles--representing Becky's Birthday cake floating down the stream. . . .

It had grown dark by the time everyone departed, but "The gloom of the world is but a shadow.  Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.  TAKE JOY!

Our agenda this coming year?  We will explore what it means to Take Joy in the little things.  We'll express our creativity; look for ways to help others (i.e., make cards for members' shut-in mothers, visit them taking along tea and scones); take steps toward fulfilling our dreams; notice the beauty all around and share it with others.  These are just a few ideas so far....won't you join us?

P.S.  Take a moment to explore the resources on this web page:  The tabs at the top of the page:  Poetry, Music, Quotes, Movies, Books which I will add to as I find them (feel free to suggest links).  Along the side is the Fra Giovanni poem that inspired this Web Journal; a beautiful meditation with video that reminds me of a Monet painting; and other Web Journals, as I discover them, that embody the message of taking joy in the little things that life has to offer.

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Take Joy!

Cathy