For Tuesday, June 7: Get your Farmer on

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant. Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm a black thumb. I always say that if it's not human I can't help to keep it alive. :) Seriously. I follow watering and light directions exactly (or so I believe) and still anything I have planted (and I use that term loosely and if you know me well enough you know what I mean!) or anything given to me to keep alive I manage to kill off. It's frustrating.
Sometimes my life feels like that. I imagine you might be nodding your head in agreement. You know what I'm saying right? We take time to till the soil, plant the seeds, water and we wait and wait and wait and get nothing. It could be a relationship, it could be a dream job, it could be a dream, it could be just about anything. I think part of our problem may be our patience - or lack thereof. See, the Farmer knows that you plant but then you wait. The Farmer knows that you can't plant seeds and within hours and days there is a bountiful harvest. It takes time. It takes patience. Sometimes it takes setbacks and so you have to re-group. At some point, if all the conditions were favorable, a harvest comes. Where we differ from a literal harvest is this: the Farmer almost always sees the harvest and then is able to reap it. We may never, in the figurative world, see nor reap the harvest of seeds that we planted and tended to. ARG. Right? :) This is the exact reason why we cannot judge our days - and the success or "failure" of them - by any sign of harvest. We just have to be faithful planters. Quit looking for the shoots of green and just plant. Plant kindness, plant hope, plant ideas, plant whatever seeds land in your life that will take you toward that harvest you are hoping for. Take some lessons from the Farmer and get your Farmer on.

Comments

A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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