Category Archives: Musings and Inspiration

NEW’s first Birthday

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” ~ Albert Schweitzer Last year, an inner fire went out on a group I was a part of. […]

Close encounters with an Atlas Moth

Just before Memorial Day weekend the Chicago Botanic Garden announced the arrival of an Atlas Moth in their Butterflies & Blooms exhibit. I eagerly drove up that Saturday, but many in Chicagoland had the same idea, and I didn’t feel like wasting fuel in a long line of cars. Instead, I returned last week and […]

Celebrating Ruth McBride at NEW

Time flies when you’re having fun, and so it has been with NEW. We founded the Network of Entrepreneurial Women to incorporate some fun in networking while being truly supportive of our members, and add some geographic scope to our business endeavors. More than a year later, we have 159 Meetup members and 61 ‘likes’ […]

Life is Blossoming

So yeah, I’m the eccentric woman crouching in front of other people’s gardens these days. Only my photo time stamp tells me I do this for 40 minutes or so. Ooops. To me it feels like I only spend ten minutes snapping pretty petals. Oh well, call me crazy, but seeing these blooms fills my […]

Creating an in-home gallery (Part 1)

When I moved in 2008 I had one big wall that I wanted to turn into a gallery, but didn’t have much art to fill it up with. The vintage walls are also quite “rubbery” which makes putting nails in the walls a tricky process. So the project lingered until 2012, when I started collecting […]

Pinning my Butterfly Specimens

In late 2012 I took a butterfly pinning class at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. Thanks to my drawing workshops I learned to de-sensitize to the morbidity of handling dead butterflies and appreciate the preservation of these lovely creatures. With the ambition to raise my own I decided it would be good to know how […]

Ambling Caldwell Woods

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. […]

Existentialism

“. . . each of us has to inhabit his or her own soul in order to find out who he or she is and where the intimacy of his or her heart touches the world. No one else can tell you that; the maps that others have are of no use. Each life must […]

Pact with Self

During a recent Tarot reading the King of Wands was my outcome. Now I’ve done numerous card-reading/astrology/pendulum/horoscope experiments when it comes to romance without avail, but as I read the description this representation of a man warmed up to me. “He is a man of vision filled with energy and is happy and willing to […]

Memory Makers

I’ve always been a girly girl and enjoyed playing with dolls. I could lose myself for hours making up stories and adventures for them. One year my mom made me a ‘fabric shop’ out of a cutlery drawer insert. When we were clearing out storage items it was recovered, and she shipped it to me. […]

Verified by MonsterInsights