Cultivating

Arts & Photography

synopsis

Synopsis

We are always creating and cultivating, even if we are unaware. What do you believe you are busiest creating? What are you truly cultivating? As a Southern journalist and writer, Dianne Poston Owens has learned something about nature and humans. In her essays she often explores people and the things they create. Always busy cultivating, people are at their best when they are cultivating what matters. But what matters? As an observer and recorder of people, places, and things, Owens wants to assure others that significance is found in the trivial, and the mundane matters. Cultivating, Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane, is a collection of short essays and poems intended for inspiration, encouragement and insight. Owens poses questions and offers photographs that allow readers to reflect and pause before heading full speed into the world around them. Through her essays Owens explores what we say, do and choose, and how that impacts what we cultivate each day.

bio

Author Biography

Dianne Poston Owens is a former newspaper reporter, columnist and editor, serving rural communities in South Carolina for more than 30 years. Though she wandered from her roots, she now lives in the same neck of the woods that her family has lived and died on for more than 250 years ... Along with two goats, at least four chickens, two cats and whatever else lives in the woods!

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Author Insight

Quiet enough to hear

There once was a time when being quiet enough to hear what others say was difficult for me. I would often jump in to finish other people's sentences and talk over them when they worked on making their cases. (Okay, it's true. I still struggle with keeping my mouth shut and listening. But I'm aware of my problem and working on it. That counts, right?) It appears I have trouble being quiet. Listening. I cannot wait to have my say. But I'm learning. Learning to be quiet enough to hear. I once heard someone say "If your mouth is open, your ears are closed." Ouch. I want to hear. I really do. As this excerpt from the essay "Hearing the Humming" in my book Cultivating: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane reveals, being still, being quiet, has its rewards. My brain sometimes shouts at me: Don't. Say. Anything. Don't fear the quiet, enjoy it!

Book Excerpt

Cultivating

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Hearing the Humming

While I intellectually knew a hummingbird was called a “humming” bird because of the sound its wings make when it flits about, I was more than fifty years old before I sat still long enough, in the right place, to hear their sounds for myself.

I was perched in the porch hammock swing when the whirring commanded my attention. I was befuddled by the noise and could not for the life of me discover where it was coming from. Putting down the book in my hands, I concentrated hard, scanning the area. Was my cell phone chirping?

I thought perhaps it was the sound of a dozen flies. A big horsefly? It was a mild spring day. Picture perfect. To my right were the hummingbird feeders. There it was again. The whirring, and then a chittering. A faraway drone?

No, it was not a nuisance horsefly or a snooping neighbor. It was the whirring and chittering of a thrilling new song. New to me, that is. This was not new to Mr. Ruby-Throated.

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Dianne Poston Owens

Cultivating

Synopsis

Author Biography

Author Insight

Quiet enough to hear

Book Excerpt

Cultivating

Comment on this Bubble