this is our walden babe

i found out where beauty and the beast's belle keeps her horse phillipe-in the pasture next to us! i've NEVER seen a horse so massive or with such big bell-bottoms:)

call me a late bloomer but i'm just reading henry david thoreau's famous book "walden". sometimes it's nice to think that our situation is similar to throeau's, and sometimes i want anything but to live in my own walden pond... either way, i've been thinking about thoreau's insight as i trudge slowly through the book-so much insight takes my mind a while to process. without any warning last night devin said to me, "This is our walden babe." i guess out of the mouth of two witnesses...

i wholeheartedly have believed, i think since i was young, that simplicity is beautiful. but when we freely chose a simpler life by moving here, the beauty is at times hard to emphasize. easier said than done. i love my anthro. i love a good salad spinner. i love nail polish. i love having more than five pairs of shoes. i love a couch to cuddle on. i love carpet. i love a bike to ride. i love unlimited text messaging. i love a good lunch with a close lady friend, or better yet a sunday dinner with family. gratefully, words of a prophet changed my erroneous thinking that our newly chosen simple life should be a concern-free, effortless, and hearty life. he said, "(it) is simple but not easy."

despite the lack of ease at times, this is our walden and if only i could be a little more like thoreau. he soaked up life. to quote him,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

my turn to soak up the marrow of life. I gotta love the rolling hills AND the smell of manuer. i gotta love the beautiful sound of french, AND that i don't fully understand sunday school even when everyone raises their hand but us and then they joke that we are americans:) i gotta love that i am surrounded by sweet design, AND that i live off a little suitcase of clothes. i gotta love the flat horizon sun rises AND the cloudy skies. i say gotta, because i'm trying hard to love the simplicity AND let go of the little details that prevented m

i am learning i can live, fully, with less. i am learning to appreciate the simple, even when it means sacrificing the ease. i am loving the reducing of cares, and the rush of realizing how little i need to live and how satisfying that can be. nevertheless i will i be excited to when our walden-living is up, and it's back to salad spinners and nail polish:)