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When life gets full or overwhelming, I find myself continually coming back to the simple comforts in which I find respite from the swirling life around me--watching my hands and fingers rhythmically move with a pair of needles and yarn, measuring and mixing and pouring in the kitchen, pruning and shaping the fruit trees in the orchard that have been sadly neglected by past owners of our home.

There is something special about these processes. Something unique about them. It's the starting with nothing, but a few ingredients--a favorite ball of yarn and set of worn wooden needles, a jar of flour, some spices and cream, a tired sagging tree and a pair of loppers.

It's the ability to start with nothing and produce something. That's the beauty. That's the simplicity. That's where the joy comes from. In creating. In providing. In restoring.

In creativity realizing itself in work.

Of course, you'd have to know that Wendell Berry would provide even more inspiration...from Andy Catlett:

"..the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world..."

And another that always sits somewhere closely in the back of my mind, also from Andy Catlett:

"The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work."

Of course there are many things I want to pass on to my children, but if mine were able to reflect upon their childhood and be struck by similar things as these, I would be content.