chester springs

Posted on June 29, 2017 by carla

sometimes you have to slow down and smell the flowers…and help a turtle cross the road

Posted on June 27, 2017 by carla

I read this quote today on a friend’s Facebook timeline:

“This is what Christianity is about. Whether it’s ethics, our understanding of God, our thoughts about the future, or the central image of the Christian story—it’s all love, from first to last. Every bit of it is an attempt to explain, demonstrate, or extrapolate on love.”

It was shared along with this blog post : by Micha Redding “Christianity is Love”

So simple, yet so powerful. The post also contained this:

Love your neighbor as yourself’. Love does no harm to its neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law.” (Romans 13:8-10)

Yet we seem to live in a country that seems so blood thirsty today for lack of a better description. Some people absolutely can’t feel good about themselves unless they are trying to beat someone else down. They seem to think they find their power by hurting others. Do they? Or does that just make them sad and mean?

I saw these quote after I was thinking about this post, which is about most simply put sometimes you have to slow down and smell the flowers…and help a turtle cross the road.

Seriously.

This morning I was enjoying the simple majesty of a cool, slightly damp morning, my song birds and my flowers, when I saw something in the road.

Yes it is a turtle. As I later found out, a snapping turtle. I gave it wide berth and walked behind it like a shepherd until it crossed the road.

And the marvelous thing about the snapping turtle that did not snap? It got people outside for a few minutes, away from the minutia of daily life to see a creature we do not often get a glimpse at.

It was nice. It was one of life’s little interludes. Maybe the universe is telling us all something?

happy summer solstice!

Posted on June 21, 2017 by carla

Photo Credit Buzz Feed News 2016

Today is the summer solstice, or the first day of summer. This is an important celebration and I am told (and have read) this is a time when many rituals issue forth to send positive energies into the months which lie ahead. It is a celebration of the gentle days of summer and hope and blessings for crops, fertility, and the fortune for remaining months of the year. If you are a wee bit fey, you will celebrate wherever you are.

Summer solstice is also known as Midsummer. As per Wikipedia:

Photo credit the Scientific American Facebook Page

The summer solstice (or estival solstice), also known as midsummer, occurs when a planet’s rotational axis, or geographic pole on either its northern or its southern hemisphere, is most inclined toward the star that it orbits. On the summer solstice, Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the Sun is 23.44°. (Likewise, the Sun’s declination from the celestial equator is +23.44° in the Northern Sky and −23.44° in the Southern Sky.) This happens twice each year (once in each hemisphere), when the Sun reaches its highest position in the sky as seen from the north or south pole.

The summer solstice occurs during the hemisphere’s summer.^[2] This is the northern solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the southern solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the summer solstice occurs some time between June 20 and June 22 in the Northern Hemisphere^[3]^[4] and between December 20 and December 23 each year in the Southern Hemisphere.^[5] The same dates in the opposite hemisphere are referred to as the winter solstice.

As seen from a geographic pole, the Sun reaches its highest altitude of the year on the summer solstice. It can be solar noon only along that longitude, which at that moment lies in the direction of the Sun from the pole. For other longitudes, it is not noon. Noon has either passed or has yet to come. Hence the notion of a solstice day is useful. The term is colloquially used like “midsummer” to refer to the day on which solstice occurs. The summer solstice day has the longest period of daylight, except in the polar regions, where daytime remains continuous for 24 hours every day during a period ranging from a few days to six months around the summer solstice….

Worldwide, interpretation of the event has varied among cultures, but most recognize the event in some way with holidays, festivals, and rituals around that time with themes of religion or fertility.^[9] In some regions, the summer solstice is seen as the beginning of summer and the end of spring. In other cultural conventions, the solstice is closer to the middle of summer.^[10]

Solstice is derived from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still).

Image may contain: 16 people, people smiling, child and outdoor

Photo courtesy English Heritage Facebook Page

“This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath…”

― Margaret Atwood, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995

bucks county barn

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restaurant rave: mino in malvern

Posted on June 16, 2017 by carla

Mino in Malvern on Lancaster Avenue is marvelous! We had never eaten there and decided to try it this evening.

Hands down, the best sushi around. I have enjoyed other sushi places, but this is the best. Friends of mine have been telling me for years it’s the best, and now I must say I concur wholeheartedly.

The fish is super fresh, and other things like the dumplings are divine. They also have a house blend matcha green tea that has this nutty note to it because I believe it is also brewed with roasted brown rice if I understood the waitress correctly.

And also the staff – they have an amazing waitstaff at Mino. So nice and so knowledgeable about their own menu.

If you have never been, you should definitely check it out. Extraordinary menu, reasonably priced. It also has a super nice atmosphere with their new interior makeover.

Mino – 321 Lancaster Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355. 610-651-8756.

bogus breast cancer charity shut down.

Posted on June 16, 2017 by carla

This is a really big deal. There are far too many scam charities out there in this world. This video and a link to the official press release came with a note from an Assistant New York Attorney General:

I thought you’d be interested in this…..And thank you for assisting us in the investigation.

I was one of the people who had been contacted by this non-profit (and one of thousands who complained about phone calls from bogus breast cancer charities) and was one of the every day people who cooperated with the efforts of the New York State Attorney General’s Bureau of Charities investigation.

Why I am posting this here? Because every day someone gets a call from a cold caller. This is yet another reason to not take their calls. Legitimate charities are not going to pay oodles of money each year to cold calling companies to press innocent people on making donations to an organization they have never heard of. I started getting calls about this fake breast cancer charity within days of my partial mastectomy six years ago. When they called, they already knew I was a “survivor”. To this day, I do not know how they got my name or information.

Anyway, I think this is pretty cool. Even in today’s world sometimes the white hats actually prevail.