{By Heather Baird from Sprinkle Bakes}

Oh, January. You are a chilly month.

Yesterday we had the kind of snow that makes mighty tree limbs bow in submission. On days like this I’m perfectly content to spend long hours in an oven-warmed kitchen, and that’s just what I did. Many treats were made; some for the book and some for the blog. I’m still determining where some should reside. After much hemming and hawing about what to make for this entry, I decided to revisit an old recipe.

{by Mary Murdoch of Wild Tigers Have I Known}

(photo credit)

In order to accumulate a soul, you have to suffer.

As if, once enough suffering has tumbled down upon you,
building up like a mountainside,
your second life will begin.

Like Athena you will sprout from Zeus’ head and appear in a ball of light, naked and red.

Love is what brings all the suffering.
Love is watching everyone you love leave, die, perish- each person wilting slowly.
Like day old geraniums in a Mason jar that sat on the kitchen counter when I was eight years old.
They dried and mummified like King Tut wrapped in cheesecloth.
Carelessly, I knocked over the glass jar and at once, everything fell to the ground.

Two weeks later my dog died, and I was convinced the falling jar was an omen.
A sign from the other side that death was creeping over into the living’s territory in a dense fog
(like there are chalk outlines dividing space between life and death, war zones, agreed upon plots of land.)

{By Brittany Gibbons, The Barefoot Foodie}

Have you ever been driving somewhere, and, before you know it, you’re there and you have no idea how you got there?

I haven’t been present for a while.

My body was here, and every so often, familiar words would escape from my mouth, but for months, my mind was somewhere else, and my heart was off laying in a mud puddle somewhere while someone poked at it with sticks.

I’m a cutter.

Not that kind.

With my brand of cutting, there is no visible blood. All the scars are internal.

I was never going to say anything. I was just going to cut. Bleed. Heal.

But, I wasn’t really healing. I wasn’t clotting.

I was gushing. Heavily. And, it was blocking me.

Everything just squatting on my frontal lobe. Making my words not work.

(I have no idea what your frontal lobe does. I’m not a professional doctor.)

{by Whit Honea of The Honea Express}

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray. The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line. Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance. There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire. Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in. I hadn’t been listening. I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down. Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect. I watched her watch the ground. She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead. Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own. We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave. Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl. It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started. But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed. All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

{by Alyson of New England Living}

• • •

Alyson is a mother of four and former California girl living in New Hampshire. She shares gorgeous pictures and words on her blog, New England Living. Alyson is newenglandliving on Instagram.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Color Bleed features images captured on mobile devices (phones, iPods, iPads) and shared via social networks (Instagram, twitter, twitpic, Facebook, etc.). Story Bleed consistently insists that art is made and shared online every day. Often casually. Phone photography consistently reveals itself to be breathtaking and insightful.

(by Jen Lee)

It’s okay to be quiet.
You don’t need to give the full report just yet, you may not need to give it at all. Reporting requires understanding, and sometimes you just need to follow the path and see where it leads before you know where you are.

It’s okay to be quiet.
You can declare your hope in a loaf of bread you bake by hand, you can put unnecessary things on the stoop as an act of faith in future provision. You can let the apple pie you’re making invite company, and the space you’re preparing for friends invite joy.

It’s okay to be quiet.
You can say all you really need to say with one look, with one touch. You can express your gratitude for his love in the way you smile when you see him come into the room. You can let them know how they melt your heart in the tenderness of your kiss on their foreheads.

The words are the last thing to arrive, but the love is here all along.

**

Jen Lee inspires me to live.
Read her perfect life words here.

{By Danielle of Knotty Yarn}

School starts in two weeks. I could not be more thrilled.

I love school. More importantly, I love being a student. Having the undeniable permission to pay attention, soak in, look around, experience, and learn. I’m good at it.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on how I generally feel from day to day. It’s easy to sidestep talking about depression when you aren’t actually depressed. If you believe in hocus pocus, you fear that talking about it will bring that black fog back into your life. If you’re easily overwhelmed, you just want to focus on each day. If you’re medicated, you often don’t care to talk about depression, as long as you have relief from the physical effects of it.

If you’re all of these things, it’s hard to sit down and reflect your emotions via the written word.

I’m not depressed. I’m not experiencing anxiety from the monumental task of getting out of bed and looking each day in the eye. I’m not exhausted from insomnia, forced awake by the constant worry and sadness. I don’t curl up and weep in the shower, on the kitchen floor, in the car, in bed. I don’t unplug the phone, ignore email, forget friendships. I don’t look at babies and think “What a shame to bring that kid into this pitiful, bleak world”.

I haven’t thought about quietly, unobtrusively killing myself in nearly two years.

Yet when referencing depression, either internally or externally, the only thing most of us can think to say is that we suffer. We suffer from depression. How can I be suffering from depression when I’m not actually feeling depressed? It’s a linguistic accusation.

I no longer think of myself as someone who suffers from depression. I experience depression. I acknowledge that yeah, I have the chemical version of the devil’s advocate living in me all the time. While I hope that it won’t rear it’s ugly head ever again, there’s no way for me to be certain. Things that come naturally for most people require a lot of thought and internalizing for me. Sometimes I need medication to help me…to help me. Help me get going, help me get on, help me get through. I spend a lot of time kicking my brain’s ASS.

This last time around, I was able to turn my depression into the impetus for making a big, tangible life changing decision. I had to plug in the phone, answer the email, say “yes” when I wanted to say “no”, persist when I wanted to take a nap. It took a team of loving, dedicated people to give me back my life. To get me to a point where I could open up a world of options for myself, be brave enough to try something new, make connections and new friendships, rediscover my creative life.

I’m not suffering.

And I’m not merely alive.

{by Gailt Breen of These Little Waves}

photo credit: Sean Hubbard/@seanhubbard

I look at him through red rimmed eyes. He wipes my cheek dry with one thumb and asks, Are you happy?

Yes. No. Sometimes.

Yes, when I’m focused.

No, when I falter.

Sometimes.

We sit in the center of our bed like our three children often do. Our room is large but this space in it is small. Our toes touch. Our voices conspire.

He is loving mixed with worry. I am anxious laced with anger.

Anger because he dared scratch beneath the surface of what I want seen. I am faltering.

When I’m focused, I see a straight path to my treasure. The obstacles along the way are simply tasks to complete.

But inevitably, I falter. I falter. It is my own undoing every single time. I steal my own confidence. My own vision. My own focus.

I hide these treasures somewhere deep inside until they are no longer visible. And I replace them with ugliness. Fear. Insecurity. Jealousy.

{By Jeanne Damoff at The View From Here}

The first time I saw him he was walking on a treadmill. A blond starlet dressed like an old-west prostitute posed seductively in a country music video on the television screen suspended in front of him. But he wasn’t watching the video. He was looking around at whomever or whatever, not furtively, but with blatant curiosity.

When our eyes met, I understood.

Some might call the expression vacant. As the mother of a brain-injured son, I saw it more as open. Unmasked. He had dark eyes, and black hair curled around his ears, and I guessed he was probably somewhere between eighteen and twenty. A slender, silver-haired woman walked beside him. His mother.

The world has labels for people like him. Damaged. Deficient. Broken. Unproductive. More than anything I was struck with the stark contrast between his unaffected expression and the video starlet’s heavily painted facade, and I wondered with more than a hint of irony how many people in that gym would laugh at the notion that his contribution to society might be more valuable than hers.

The encounter touched a deep, knowing place inside me, but it was a seeing and moving along. I soon forgot.

That was several months ago, and I hadn’t encountered the pair again until last Friday, when I spotted them in an area off to the side used for free weights and upper body machines. There were plenty of other things going on. In addition to the general hustle and bustle of the gym, heart-breaking scenes from Japan filled a television screen nearby, and another a few feet away aired clips of a defiant Gadhafi, and on yet another some poor guy rushed through his busy day carrying around a beaker full of green liquid that I’m pretty sure represented the acid in his stomach, but my attention kept returning to mother and son. I didn’t mean to stare, but the more I watched them, the more everything else faded into the background. World events, whirring machines, even my own physical exertion. Soon I was completely enthralled with the interaction of the two.

{By Megan of Undomestic Diva}

Today is one of those days – one of many recent and one of many more to come – where life’s new twists and turns have me walking out the door of several years of fond memories and unthought of heartache towards a future of Who Knows.

It isn’t a fancy place, this house. And while smaller than many, it was enough; certainly more than many others hope for and at the end of the day it wasn’t just stucco and wood and cement and shingles – it was our home.

This is the house that broke us, in many ways, though of course it’s not only to blame – not one single thing is. But it was also the house of much happiness – where two of the three boys were born, where many Halloweens and birthdays and summers were spent, where Easter eggs were hidden and found, where dinners were concocted and birthday cakes created, where oranges were picked and eaten in the yard, where swingsets were built and ignored, where gardens were planted and bloomed, where Christmas trees sat (and fell), where life moved at a speed quicker than we could register – all inside these walls that were being fixed and patched and painted as we fell apart.

I slowly circle one more time in the living room. It still feels oddly full, even in its bareness. Though the smell of cardboard boxes and laundered clothes and nostalgia has left in trucks and U-Hauls, a vaguely familiar scent remains – the way the house smelled the day we got the keys – of vacancy and emptiness. It sinks in. The truth is, this house didn’t break us. We did. And this house isn’t haunted. We are.

It’s hard to fathom that I’m taking one last look around our house and leaving it to go to my house. The newness of everything is jarring and yet exciting and the adventure of it all has its moments of hope and its share of fear.

I shut the door. I pause on the porch step, taking in this very moment, soaking in this change like sunlight on my skin, breath in my lungs. There’s nothing left here for me anymore. Today is another reminder of moving onward, this time, literally. I remind myself: A house is a house but a home is what you make it so I have not just packed our clothes and photographs and books and toys but our memories too. They, though the heaviest of all the things to carry, are the easiest to move.