What has inspired me today?

I just woke up, lol.
But I went downstairs to make coffee and looked out the kitchen window to watch brood #2 of Mr. and Mrs. Hopeful (the sparrows nesting in the birdhouse a few feet from my kitchen window). There are at least two fledglings in the nest this time, and one of them, like the last time, is starting to get very curious about the bigger world and is sometimes poking her head out of the nest and looking around. Any day now she will be leaving the nest. The other fledgling I could not see this morning and the peeping was quite indignant. I imagine they were getting stepped on by their twin so they could reach the window, lol.

Things like this inspire me and keep me going when days are difficult. Yesterday while weeding, I saw that we had praying mantises hatch in the vegetable beds. Their little wee forms are perfect in shape to the adult ones, but they are sort of a light lime green, and tried weeding one twice because it was so camouflaged in the weeds! lol

It isn’t always nature that inspires. We are in the middle of super-cheap renovations of our kitchen – total DIY. And yesterday I had to unload the extra large cupboard of my dish collection, so I saw the dishes this morning stacked on the table and they make me happy. The arts and craft also inspires me. These dishes, many of which are hand made and hand painted, were cheap flea market rescues that I started collecting forty years ago. They are all blue and white, most of them “rice dishes” made in China with grains of dried rice pressed into the porcelain before firing, leaving thin spots in patterns so delicate that if you hold it up to light, the light comes through the porcelain! Manmade beauty, a craft that has all but disappeared in our assembly line world. When I would set the table for large gatherings, everyone loved it. Nothing matched! Everything looked like it belonged together, yet everyone had an unique, layered place setting, and everything blue and white. Art can be comforting, and deepen our experiences.

Labor for me, can also be inspiring. While my husband is working at replacing our counter and sink, my job is repairing the walls and painting, and I do a professional job of it. At the moment I’m working in the back entrance next to the kitchen, so we are out of each other’s way. When I went down this morning and saw the walls of this ancient house, all patched, “faked,” and painted a clean white base coat over what used to be a cobbled together room with a fallen ceiling, one very uneven cement wall, and an ANCIENT puke yellow paint with dull green underneath… I’m very satisfied and inspired to finish it up with the top coats. We picked several shades of light gray to match the “marble” (Formica) counter tops. It was literally the cheapest counter top we could find but it is looking quite pretty now. Everything is coming together with careful thought and more labor than money. And it is always nice, wherever we go, to leaving things in better condition than when we found it.

So, hum… lol. I guess that’s a lot of inspiration for being awake just five minutes. I wonder what the rest of the day will bring!