Bloggers
Written by Margaret Rutherford

I had never read a blog before I began writing mine last August. Even then, I just took a peek at one or two famous ones to make sure I was on track. A couple of my patients talked about them, but I had never met a blogger that I knew of, that’s for sure.

So I didn’t know what to expect when I went to BlogHer13 this summer in Chicago and was surrounded by 5000 bloggers at once! Would they be snooty? Welcoming? Generous? Cold? My major conference experiences had been going to therapist conventions where everyone sits around and talks about the best ways to help other people change and get better. Actually those conventions can be way too warm and touchy-feely for me most of the time. People ask you how you are “feeling” all the time. Yikes. This one in Chicago was going to be about ME and MY BLOG. That would be different.

Before I left, I knew I would be attending different seminars to learn about specific topics. But then I was told by my marketing guru that I was supposed to network. Meet and greet. Get known and get to know. Hand out my business cards and go for it! I hadn’t done this kind of thing since I was a nightclub singer in my twenties and was trying to convince every hotel manager in Dallas that I was the hottest thing since Chaka Khan. I was not by the way. That’s why I am a clinical psychologist and not a nightclub singer.

The convention was fantastic! The bloggers were some of the nicest people you could ever meet. Interested in each other, helpful with information no matter how much more experienced they were than you, and generally inclusive as a group. I had a somewhat more intimate conversation with one young woman, Lori Duron, about some family issues, her blog and mine. I knew she had a book coming out. but suddenly she looked at her watch, and said, “So sorry, I have an interview I have to get to with CNN”. Now she didn’t have to take the time to talk to me! (Her new book is “Raising My Rainbow”, a book about rearing her gender creative child).

The BlogHer folks themselves promote this attitude as did many of the speakers they selected. I noticed that the three co-founders of the organization were all over the place, very accessible to anyone who wanted to speak with them for a few minutes, not holed up somewhere to get away from the crowd.

I’ve talked to some of my great Arkansas Women Blogger friends since I got back about my experience. The main complaint? It’s a bit expensive to go, but I think it’s well worth it. Maybe next time it will be closer to the Razorback Nation. Can anyone say BlogHogHer?

Written by Monica Staton of Arky At Large

If you’ve ever gardened, chances are there are certain plants, or maybe a type of plant, that you’ve developed an attachment to. If you were to ask me my favorite plant, I’d probably give you a list: hydrangeas, with their lovely mop heads and tiny, delicate flowers; geraniums, which inexplicably remind me of my grandmother; or tulips, whose waxy, unfussy leaves and petals usher in the welcome spring. Yes, in the flower world I have many loves, but my very favorite flower, my old friend, is the rose.

This love for roses began early in my life and at the first opportunity I began my own tiny garden, growing roses in pots on the balcony of my college apartment. Once I had my first real patch of dirt, the modest yard of a rented duplex, the collection grew when my husband, then boyfriend, gave me the gift of a rosebush in lieu of cut flowers. Its glossy, deep green leaves and soft pink, fragrant blooms were absolutely perfect, and thus began a tradition – any time where one might receive a floral bouquet, for a birthday or anniversary, perhaps, I instead received a beautiful new specimen for my garden.

As each new rose was added, as I carefully tended and pruned through the spring, summer, and fall, my attachment to each one grew. When we left Fayetteville, Arkansas, and moved to Houston,Texas, in the winter of 2006, the roses were uprooted, potted and planted back yard of our rented home. When we moved back to Little Rock a year later, they were pulled, potted, and they came right back to Arkansas with us. They graced the porch of the house we rented there until finally finding their home in a bed created solely for them, at our very first purchased home. By the end of our final year there, in 2011, I had roughly ten plants, even adopting some poor Knockout roses and nursing them back to health. And then it happened. We moved again.

Initially this move, with regard to the rosebushes, anyway, seemed like any other. Granted, pulling up ten or so firmly rooted rosebushes, potting them, and shipping them to another state is a daunting task, but I was prepared to do it. By this time I was a pro. But then the unthinkable happened. When we finally got the right offer on our house, rather than the standard buyer’s request of including the refrigerator or the window treatments, our buyer insisted that I leave behind my roses. My roses – the ones that were in large part gifts from my husband, that I had toted to and fro for years by this point, the plants that were so dear to my heart. But we needed this. We needed to sell the house, we needed to move on. So, after a meltdown of fairly epic proportions, I conceded. I left them all, save one – the very first that my husband bought me so many years ago.

That rosebush now resides in Alabama and seems pretty happy here. It sat, halfway dormant and pitiful, for nearly a year before being given a place of honor in the front flower bed, where I can keep a close eye on it, alternately admiring its beauty and warding off the Japanese beetles. It now has a friend, too – a hearty floribunda with white blossoms, tinged with pink – so it seems my collection is finally growing again. And there’s something to learn from that rosebush, I think, even if it may sound a bit silly or contrived. It’s been dragged all over the place – certainly far more places than any rosebush could reasonably expect to travel. Sometimes it’s been doted on, sometimes it’s been stuck in a pot and left on the porch – a task to deal with when I finally found my footing in a new place and stopped pouting about where I’d landed. Given all that, one could say it is determined to grow anywhere, but what I think is that it’s determined to survive, to just be where it is and deal with what comes. Sometimes it will thrive, putting everything else to shame, sometimes it will do well to hold on to one last sickly leaf, but it always, always, makes it through.

Monica Staton is a dog wrangler, accountant, pretend blogger, and future farm owner. Though she married a Texan and resides in Alabama, she’s an Arkansan through and through.

Beyond the Garden
Written by Jessica Bauer of Life With the Bauer Bunch

At the end of every April, I step through my back door into the warm Arkansas sun with a handful of seeds and a heart full of hope.

After weeks of toiling over garden plans and veggie varieties, I know exactly where each individual seed will go. I dig my hands into the untouched soil and make neat rows, labeling as I go. The peppers will grow next to the tomatoes, the sweet corn will pop up with geometric precision, and my OCD tendencies will be at rest.

Then I watch closely, waiting to see my seeds grow where they were planted.
But when carrots form in the bean patch and watermelon vines sprout from the lawn, I quickly remember that’s not always the case.

This fact of life is not limited to the garden, either.

Although I’ve sown many seeds in my day, the three most important didn’t result in a basket full of produce. No, these precious seeds were planted by the love between my husband and me. As each little seed arrived and took his or her first breath, I swore I would do my part to ensure strong, sturdy roots, free and wandering vines, and a stalk that stretched to the sky.

Although these particular seeds are getting a fantastic head start here with me, that’s just it. It’s just the start.

They won’t stay where they are planted.

The wind will sweep across the back pasture and lift them from my home in the blink of an eye. It will carry them to new and foreign places that will scare, excite, and bewilder them all at the same time. They will attempt to bury beneath the soil, but before long Mother Nature will carry them off again. And I will stand back and watch them go. I will step back and let them grow.

There will be times when the roots I worked so hard to cultivate will be exposed, broken and bruised, and afraid to touch back down, but that will be okay. Life isn’t fair and it can be a hard world for such a tiny seed.

There will be times when my seeds land in a garden they’ve never seen. I hope they let their vines and minds wander and spread, accepting others and learning from new experiences. I hope I planted them deep enough to allow for such growth.

There will be times when everything is just right. The sun will shine warmer, the air will be crisper, the soil will be softer, and they will grow. They will grow wild and free and their roots will reach further than ever before.

My small seed will be a massive plant, weighted with successes, lessons learned, and fruits sweeter than I could imagine.

I won’t be their only gardener, either. Friends, teachers, co-workers, and perfect strangers will encourage growth in ways I cannot. Maybe even ways I didn’t intend, but that’s life. Life takes us where the wind blows and if I were to keep these seeds tucked into my hands, seeds are all they’d ever be.

We have a long way to go before that first sweep of wind and inspiration pushes my children from where they’re planted, but I pray I’m preparing them for the journey.

And each time I successfully harvest a vegetable that didn’t grow as this gardener intended, I know the future is bright for my seeds. I will work the soil, pick the weeds, and water the roots as long as they’ll let me, but I promise to let go when they’re ready to fly.

As long as they promise to come back to the place they were planted.

Hey y’all! I’m Jessica and I blog at Life With the Bauer Bunch. I’m a small-town girl just enjoying my slice of the good life with my husband Jonathan, our sons, Nathan, 6, and Owen, 2, and our brand-new baby girl, Nora. Stop by and visit sometime!

Blooming in Arkansas
Written by Kyran Pittman of Planting Dandelions, Arkansas Women Bloggers Miss August 2013

I love that August theme for ARBW is “Learning to Bloom Where You are Planted.” As the writer of a book and a blog called “Planting Dandelions,” it would be hard to come up with a more appropriate prompt for a series of guest posts from me.

I am a transplant to Arkansas, and I have certainly bloomed in the seventeen years since I drifted across the border from Canada, by way of a brief, bohemian detour through Mexico. I had no intention of staying long. More to the point, I had every determination not to stay long. I was a free spirit with a passport and the whole, wide world open to me.

Arkansas?

Please.

Fast forward through sixteen years of marriage, two green cards, and the births of three children who are being raised as Arkansans. This free spirit has put down roots.

Arkansas?

Yes, please. And thank you.

Life has arranged too many surprises for me to declare that I am here forever and for good. But Arkansas will always be a enormous part of my history, and I’m proud to think I may have had a little part in telling its story, too.

While I love representing my adopted home state to a national and international readership, it’s fun to get to address an “insider” audience on ARWB. Over the next few posts, I invite you to join me in sharing things we love about life in Arkansas – even a few things we love to hate (Summer humidity, anyone?).

I’ve got a list of topics in mind, but I’d like to hear from you first. So please leave a comment telling me how you came to Arkansas (by birth, design, or accident), and what it is that makes you stay (or stray). And just to make everyone think about this a little harder, I’m going to take “friendly people” off the table. There are nice and not-so-nice folks everywhere, and everyone thinks theirs are the nicest (of course, ours are). So let’s get specific. Tell me what it is about this place that keeps you blooming.

Find Your Spot

Written by Jaqueline Wolven, Arkansas Women Bloggers Miss July 2013

Ten years ago, after deciding we were ready to leave city life, we looked for a small community to move to that we thought might be a good fit for our little family. The prerequisites were that it had to be a tourist destination (we wanted to make sure that it was nice enough that visitors liked it too), had to have a Unitarian church, and it had to have a private independent school.

We used Find Your Spot online to narrow our choices. Every single time we put in our criteria Eureka Springs, Arkansas came up. I had never heard of the little Victorian village. My husband though had. When he was six years old he and his family had visited to attend the Great Passion Play. He remembered camels.

We knew we liked the Ozarks after living for a year at East Wind, an intentional community (read commune) in Missouri. It is it’s own bio-region with plants and animals found only here. It had four seasons that were pretty mild (except late July and August which are humidity hell.) So, my husband jumped in our little Hyundai and drove cross-country from San Francisco to check it out and, if he liked it, rent a house. After surveying the available properties, talking to the headmaster of the private school and attending church he decided that we should take the leap.

So we did. For me… sight unseen.

That was a little over 9 years ago. We celebrate our 10^th year anniversary in September.

Sure, there are things I miss in California and given a different economy and less people I might be interested in moving back. I am a Southern California girl with a San Francisco heart through and through, but I have found plenty of things to love about my little adopted town. So much so, that I am a community organizer (ie Main Street director) advocating to keep it alive and preserved. I want generations after me to fall in love with my little American dream town just like we did.

Sure, there are things that make me crazy. Small town things like gossip, stick in the muds, and how slow things are to change. There are things that make me crazy about my adopted state (ask me about that at another time). Even in the frustrating moments I can see why we decided that, yes, choosing this town was so right for us. In Eureka Springs, we are fierce advocates for small, we fought to keep a WalMart out and won, we are currently fighting a huge electric company from ruining our landscape with mega lines, we celebrate the arts, culture and each other, we advocate for our environment and our right to be eclectic, we offer domestic partnerships and celebrate diversity, we are a place for people to try new things and learn to love who they are, and mostly we who live here and visit love being here because we chose it.

I’m lucky because not only did we choose a great place to live, but also I get to spend part of my time advocating for it in my community and across the nation. I get to be part of what makes it special. That’s a pretty cool town that accepts someone from far away and lets her share that love in every little way.

So here’s to small towns; yours and mine. Celebrate each day you get to spend time in one because they are special places filled with people who are living their version of the American dream (and they are disappearing) and when it gets frustrating (trust me it will) remember that keeping these beautiful, eclectic places alive is an important part of our heritage. We all deserve to spend a little time walking down a quiet lane, meeting a shopkeeper in the street, and listening to the birds chirp in the trees above.

Stop by my site and let me know what Find Your Spot said where you should live or tell me what you love about your small town. I’d love to hear!

Written by Jacqueline Wolven, Arkansas Women Bloggers Miss July 2013

I was asked recently at a dinner what I blog about and I said a string of words that seemed coherent, but because of the din of the restaurant it was hard to make them out. It occurred to me on the drive home that I should be able to say what I blog about in 3 words.  I blog about making lives better. I blog about doing good work. I blog about taking the leap. I blog about finding contentment today.

Those are a LOT of three words, but they are what I blog about. I started my blog 7 years ago and it was just a place for me to talk about how I hack my life to make it more interesting.; my projects, life experiments, and occasional rants and raves.

I actually had two blogs. One for my work and one for life, but I realized that the world I have created is one world and this year I decided to combine both blogs under one domain. It was a big decision and one my husband wasn’t sure about – he is all about privacy and not over sharing. (Raise your hand if you are living with one of those and yet blog anyway.)

I realized though that the jump that I made from living in corporate America in San Francisco to 13 acres in a 123-year-old cottage in the Ozarks was the dream so many people want (well, maybe not the ticks, lack of health insurance, or stumbles along the way of adjusting). I have read countless articles and books about living your dream life, escaping 9-5, moving to the country and, by gosh, we had done it. That moment, the one when I realized we were living our fantasy, was an eye-opener. Sure, things aren’t perfect, but they are so much more fun and relaxed then they were when I was rushing on the subway everyday. Plus, people always tell me how happy and relaxed I look – that’s a kicker for a 43 year old! Trust me!

So, I blog to help small independent business in small towns across America do better at what they do, I write about how to stay inspired, I talk about community organizing and how to get stuff done, I share peeks at my life in the country, I write often about organizations, people and groups Doing Good Work and I try to share practical ways to navigate the world with gratitude, integrity and kindness. Life isn’t always easy and taking risks to do what we want in this lifetime come with challenges, but if I can solve a problem, connect some dots, or help someone see something through a new perspective I have done my job.

So, what do I blog about? Living the dream, because I am lucky enough to be doing that every single day. I hope you will stop by the blog and share in my excitement for living a simpler life and finding your own success on your own terms.

You can find me on Facebook, Instagram (love the new video), Twitter, LinkedIn, Vizify and Pinterest.

Our theme for the month of June has been focusing on travel and life adventures and we began the month with a {“Micro” Blogging Challenge} that encouraged you to Make Life Your Adventure.

Miss June 2013, Sarabeth Jones, challenged you to say YES, to think about what kind of story you want to tell, and invites you to choose-your-own adventure.

Sara Torbett talked about those page turning events in life like hitting those milestone birthdays, while Talya reminisced about summer, and Lisa invited education on vacation.

Every woman has a different story to tell.  We have some joyous stories and some heartbreaking ones.  What really matters in the end though, is the journey.  Each new journey is an adventure and a chance to find beauty, no matter the surroundings.

Today’s final “Micro” Blogging Challenge is about Enjoying the Journey.  So in reality this challenge isn’t about blogging at all but about life.  Life should be about Enjoying the Journey.  Whether through your blogging, to your spouse, to your children, your friends or the strangers you meet in Walmart; be a person who exudes Enjoying the Journey.