Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • Whoa, kiddo!

    Day 27 of 52 Nia dance

    I just never know which me will show up for dance. Today, dancing at our local YMCA with Kellie Chambers, my six-year-old self ran the show. What a party!

    There was leaping, skipping, laughing, off the beat, on the beat. I barely kept her from bumping into other dancers. Also, there is this side hip bump thing in Nia that I’ve never really mastered. The six year old didn’t care. We (six-year-old me and sixty-nine-year-old me) just flung ourselves happily around.

    What a joy.

  • Pressed flowers

    The practice of preserving plants by pressing them goes back hundreds of years. I began playing with pressing this spring and am now making cards with the results, which come from our garden.

    It’s a sweet little hobby. Learning that American poet Emily Dickinson also preserved plants this way and retained them in an herbarium, a volume of her pressed flowers, was a pretty delightful surprise.

    Harvard University retains this volume, which is now too fragile for even the scholars to touch. But the university has created an online archive of the herbarium, which is an amazing and completely different record or her work.

    It’s worth a look. The delicate flowers and blossoms preserved across the centuries, I find quite touching.

  • Half way

    Day 26 of 52 Nia challenge

    I promised myself when I started this effort that even dancing for five minutes would be a success. Here on day 26, I gave myself permission to just do Nia’s five stages, which is a lovely floor exercise. Supported by the floor, not fighting gravity at the start, I revisited in about five minutes the arm-waving infant to the creeping, crawling, standing, walking toddler, the becoming upright process that all us humans go through.

    When I learned this exercise during white belt training, I started out thinking it was kind of silly. That was my skeptical brain. After doing it daily (white belt training is a seven-day intensive), my body gave the skeptical brain additional feedback. For the first three months after getting my white belt I did it daily. I’ve let it go a little but came back to it today.

    I like it.