I saw this recently and it jumped off the page:

“Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the publisher of The New York Times during the second World War. Because of the world conflict, he found it almost impossible to sleep. He was never able to banish worries from his mind until he adopted as his motto these five words – ‘one step is enough for me’ – taken from the hymn Lead Kindly Light.

…God isn’t going to let you see the distant scene either. So you might as well quit looking for it. He promises a lamp unto your feet, not a crystal ball into the future. We do not need to know what will happen tomorrow. We only need to know he leads us and ‘we will find grace to help us when we need it.’”
-Max Lucado from Traveling Light p. 52.

It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day.

I have loved Nina Simone forever. Love this image of her.  I would credit the photographer if I knew their name.

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I’m really enjoying Tina Fey’s memoir, Bossy Pants.

“…it’s a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.  You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.”

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Interested to check out this book on Audrey. Love the illustrated cover:

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And a quote to chew on for the weekend:

Live with intention.
Walk to the edge.
Listen hard.
Practice wellness.
Play with abandon.
Laugh.
Choose with no regret.
Appreciate your friends.
Continue to learn.
Do what you love.
Live as if this is all there is.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

*Avec Eric. What a lovely show. You can watch episodes online including one shot in the Caymans. I love the aesthetic of the show – lots of white space, clean logo, simple premise. It’s therapeutic TV.

*On Being {the NPR show previously known as Speaking of Faith} aired Pursuing Happiness: a conversation at my husband’s alma mater, Emory, with His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth; Rev. Dr. Katharine Bishop Jefferts Schori, the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church; and Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr. I heard parts of it in the shower one day and had to look it up. My favorite conversation is at the one hour mark, when Rabbi Jonathon Sacks says: “Finding happiness doesn’t always follow from pursuing it. Sometimes, the deepest happiness comes when you are least expecting it.” He tells a story of a man looking at people rushing around in the center of town. The man stops someone and asks him why he is running and the man says, “I’m running to make a living.” The rabbi says to him, “how come you are so sure that the living is in front of you and you have to run to catch it up. Maybe it’s behind you and you’ve got to stop and let it catch up with you.”

“Sometimes we don’t need to pursue happiness, we just need to pause and let it catch up with us.”

*In The Heart Of The World – Mother Teresa. Love these quotes:
“There are many people who can do big things, but there are very few people who will do the small things.”

“The fullness of our heart is expressed in our eyes, in our touch, in what we write, in what we say, in the way we talk, the way we receive, the way we serve. That is the fullness of our heart expressing itself in many ways.”

*Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance by Julia Cameron is a nice follow up to The Artists Way about finding inspiration when the well is dry.

*Everyday Grace by Marianne Williamson is full of positive insights.
“With every thought, we ourselves decide whether to welcome God’s reality and its miraculous prospects.”

*Morning Glory by Diana Peterfreund {now a movie} was fluffy and enjoyable plane reading.

*In the read-but-not-too-keen-to-recommend category, I will say to skip Must You Go: Life With Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser which was disappointingly pretentious and cliche, and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris -darker than usual and not as funny. I still love Sedaris, but this one is not my fave.

Soon, I hope to spend time with my new book, The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz that I picked up via Amazon Goodwill for $7 bucks which is absolute aces because it’s out of print. On the cover is my homegirl, Eudora Welty.

The photographs are great, but the quotes from the authors themselves are just as fascinating, like this one from Saul Bellow:

“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” -Saul Bellow, Brattleboro, Vermont 1995 p. 99

Good luck with your work and with your sleep, but most of all with your moments of stillness in the midst of chaos.

This time, it seemed to roar.

I want to visit with her.  In my mind, we are now great imaginary friends. When I finished it earlier in the summer, I had to hold it up to my heart for a minute. Do you ever do that? Almost like a hug to push the last words in? I have no doubt that I am strange in this regard.  She wrote this book on Captiva, a place where I took sailing lessons as a child. There really are the most magical shells on the island.

Image by Leonarde McCombe-Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images taken in her home in Darien, Conn., in 1956.

I have too many favorite quotes to share them all.  It’s like a companion book for this blog – a search for something simple, quiet and beautiful amidst a lot of chaos. Honestly, there’s not a single Teaworthy post since 2007 that doesn’t touch on something she brings up in the book. Even the cover is aqua blue.

“My life in Connecticut, I begin to realize, lacks this quality of significance and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space.  The space is scribbled on; the time has been filled. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things and interesting people. For it is not merely the  trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well.  We can have a surfeit of treasures–an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.

Here on the island I have had space. Paradoxically in this limited area, space has been forced upon me….Here there is time; time to be quiet; time to work without pressure; time to think; time to watch the heron, watching with frozen patience for his prey. Time to look at the stars or to study a shell; time to see friends, to gossip, to talk. Time, even, not to talk.At home when I meet my friends in those cubby-holed hours, time is so precious we feel we must cram every available instant with conversation. We cannot afford the luxury of silence. Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day’s last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.” -p. 107-108.

Good grief, I love that.

Jill Krementz shared her photo journal of a visit with Lindbergh in this post on New York Social Diary.  LOVE these images. {Krementz has photographed many amazing writers. Love her work.}

She writes that she wants to bring back from her vacation the simplicity she feels in her beach house.

“Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.”

The Afterward, written a few years before I was born, could have been written today: “The original astonishment remains, never quite dimmed over the years, that a book of essays, written to work out my own problems should have spoken to so many other women.” -p. 123.

That was the line that really got me, sitting in a coffee shop and reading her words fifty-five years later and finding them healing, relevant and inspiring. I realized that much of what I read is from writers/bloggers to learn with them as we all try to figure out how to balance all of this. How awesome to get insight from a wife, mother, aviator, survivor of great tragedy, who still sees beauty in the world.

 I blog sometimes to share things going on with my photography business, but most of the time, I write, as W.H. Auden would say, “to know what I think,” to work out my own problems, to combat my negativity, to feel connected to something beautiful, to create something. I doubt anyone will read things I have written 55 years, or even 5 minutes from now, but I do hope that sometimes, a post speaks to someone else in the process.

*I’ve worn out the link to this wedding from Leigh Miller. Her work is so inspiring.

*I love this post from Hula Seventy: Things I’d Like to Tell My 17-Year Old Self. It’s brilliant and so very true.

*Tara Whitney started posted images of her work in the homes of her clients this week. I love that she is sharing these. It’s so hard to envision how photos will look on the wall and in our homes and I love some of these ideas.

*I am working through stacks of images tonight, but it doesn’t feel much like work.

What a sweetheart. Have a good week everyone!

Listening to: Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush – Don’t Give Up

On the rare occassion that I go to Keeneland and actually win a two dollar bet, I am the loudest, most surprised winner of the day. That was sort of my reaction to winning a giveaway from one of my favorite blogs, Notions and Threads! Each month they select a theme that inspires them. This month’s theme is Hope. Browsing through their recipes and essays and projects is absolutely perfect for tea time. I have wished and wished that some day, I will live in a neighborhood filled with people like the authors of this extraordinary blog.

Listening to: Regina Spektor – On The Radio

Regardless of how many cds and mp3s I collect, there’s no replacing the radio. Even Pandora {while very helpful} isn’t the same. During National Public Radio’s pledge season, I start to believe their messages of why I can’t live without radio. But I like more than just NPR. Michael Chabon cracked the code on the allure of radio in his book Manhood for Amateurs, p.272:

“No medium is a sensuously evocative of the past as radio. No other medium deploys that shocking full-immersion power of random remembrance….The song has to take you by surprise, catch you when your guard is down, when you aren’t expecting it–ideally, when you aren’t even listening to the radio at all. A bright little piece of your life passes you by in a car with the windows rolled down, wells up in the pain-relief aisle of a Rite-Aid. That kind of a chance encounter can’t happen as readily on an iPod you’ve programmed yourself.” -Michael Chabon

So true. There’s an entire era of music {Oh Sherrie by Steve Perry, Refugee by Tom Petty, Babe by Styx, Rio by Duran Duran} that puts me back in Paddock Pool, a place that is now filled with cement, feeling sunburned and waiting for my swim meet to begin. While the iPod is not the same, I have made a new discovery in iTunes Genius Mixes that help me feel surprised by the next song. In your iTunes application on the left-hand column you can select a Genius Mix. ITunes automatically prepares several mixes of your music based on categories. It’s a much more stylized mix than just a random shuffle setting. It always seems to find songs on albums that I have overlooked and matches them up nicely with others. It’s the closest thing I can find to a really good radio station when you are out of service area, or when the pledge drive drones on and on.

Listening to: Mushaboom – Feist

I love Michelle Slatalla’s article, 10 Secrets of an Unflappable Working Mom, in the March Real Simple. For 5 years, I’ve read everything from Working Mother Magazine to self-help books on this topic and this may be the most succinct collection of tips that actually work that I have come across.

Turns out, she has a regular column with The New York Times that you can find here, a blog here, and a Twitter feed here.

Definitely worthy of tea time.

Here is a link to an interactive excerpt. All profits from the book go to Room 13, “a unique initiative that provides an environment for underprivileged children to unfurl their imagination. Here they can express themselves in anything from painting and drawing to drama, poetry and storytelling.”

Links collected this week:

{I am sorry that links don’t appear in a new window. I am working on this.}

*100 Layer Cake featured a Jane Austen inspired wedding here. I remember a Sense & Sensibility wedding in an old Victoria Magazine years ago that was amazing. I remember the bride also wrote for the magazine and had this great name, Pip or Piper or something cool.

*Junebug shared these custom cake stands from Sarah’s Etsy shop that come in every color of the rainbow to work with your unique wedding colors. Personally, I don’t think you can go wrong with white milk bottle glass, but these are neat for color.

*Junebug Weddings also featured this Cozy Winter Wedding Table complete with knitted silverware holders, hot cocoa, square marshmallows and carafes of milk.

*Simple Blueprint featured this Summer Retreat that looks like the perfect studio space.

*NPR featured the book Making Toast in this article. I’m starting to wonder if they are reading Teaworthy {insert wink here}.

*The Food Beauty post on House Martin is mouthwatering. Something about the peaches and sugar in a jar reminds me of being a child.

*Stephmodo shared Martha Stewart’s tips for How To Fold A Fitted Sheet. I feel that one of the great mysteries of the world has been solved.

Lately, I have been folding them up and putting everything inside one of the pillow cases so that each set sheet is in its own bag in the closet. My sheets will never be as neat as Martha’s.

*The Diane Keaton Profile In Style from the Times Magazine here is very cool. I particularly like the family photos.