Get Real, Lucille! by Laura Petrisin is a colorful, fun picture book with a positive message.
Lucille is a rubber chicken who performs in a traveling circus with her friend, Peaches. But Lucille wants to be different. She wants to be real, like the chickens in a nearby farmyard.
Will Lucille get a magical transformation to make her real? Or will she learn to appreciate who she is and the talents she has?
It’s a positive message for kids ages 5-8/K-3rd grade, as well as the grown-ups who will read this book to them. With many colorful illustrations, this book will capture children’s attention while the sweet and nurturing storyline will encourage them to be proud of who they are. And maybe take up juggling!
I highly recommend Get Real, Lucille! for the child or children in your life.
Get Real, Lucille! is being released in less than a month, on Tuesday August 5th, 2025 and is available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble or wherever you purchase books.
Thanks to Monarch Educational Services for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Fun personal note: Laurie is a dear friend of mine who gave my two kids art lessons for many years when we homeschooled. She’s a gifted writer, as well as illustrator and artist, and I’m so happy she has a new book coming out into the world!
BelongingRosemerry Wahtola Trommer
And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.
You can find this poem on Grateful.org.
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First Snowby James Armstrong
As you lie in bed,
you can tell it has snowed
by the radiance in the window--
light comes from the ground and not the sky
as if you suddenly lived on the moon.
In that moment, you are back to childhood
when any change of the exterior world
is a change of heart, when the light
tells you what to feel, when you need the sky
and its endless changes.
When that first snow fell,
each snowflake whispered
a secret so intimate
it took the rest of your life to un-believe.
Here it is again.
Your chance to repent.
You can find this poem in The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal.
To Autumnby John Keats
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
You can find this poem on the Poetry Foundation.
All Hallowsby Louise Glück
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
You can find this poem on the Poetry Foundation website.
I’m starting a monthly post on what themes came up for me during the previous month. Some bloggers write about “What I Learned in (insert month)” and that can make for fascinating reading. Maybe I’m a bit slower than most bloggers because I usually don’t learn lessons that quickly. It takes me some time for me to have a real “aha” moment and discover some deep truth about myself.
For now, I’m going to share all the random, and perhaps not so random, quotes, words, numbers, symbols, animals, etc., that keep showing themselves to me in a month. Sometimes these will carry over from month to month as in the case of the word “luminous” that has been following me around since January 2022 when I began looking for it once a day. And now I can’t stop seeing it!
Ok, so for April…
Luminous continues to be a familiar. Lightness of being. Illumination. Luminosity. And for May’s Kindred Spirits Literary Society poetry pick, I’m recommending the poetry collection Luminous: Poems and Inquiry for the Soul’s Journey by Laura Weaver. I have more discovery and inner work to be done before I experience a luminous quality within me. And the work can’t be rushed. It will unfold as I am ready.
11:11 was an almost daily sighting. 1 is considered a number of new beginnings. And April was certainly that! It was my first month working for myself after leaving the non-profit I’ve worked at since 2/20. So when I started seeing this number every day, I took it as a sign that I am on the right path. And that is one of its messages: “You’re on the right path,”. It’s a big green light. It signifies creativity, spirituality, and intuition, and manifestation.
Sadhguru says that 11 represents anything in the material world. So knowing that and by seeing this number everywhere, the message seems to be that my business is and will continue to be successful and that I made the right choice to focus my energy on growing my business.
Softness was a word that began to crop up toward the end of April. After a New Moon meditation with Camille Maurine I did have a moment of revelation. I saw how I hadn’t welcomed myself, or provided a soft and safe place for all of myself, for much of my life. It was like each time I came home to myself, I would judge myself in the entryway and decide if I should be put in the “Too Much” or “Not Enough” or “Bad” or “Disappointing” rooms. And I have a choice now to welcome myself in without criticism or a good/bad measuring stick, only with love and acceptance. This will likely take some repeating to sink in and I’m committed to it.
Sparrow at our kitchen windows. For weeks, we’ve had a sparrow pecking at and looking in our kitchen windows, which currently don’t have screens on them. I assume this sparrow is looking at his or her reflection, but it seems as if they’re looking in at us. It struck me last week that perhaps our sparrow symbolized something. Here are a few things sparrows symbolize: In ancient Celtic tradition, sparrows were keepers of ancestral knowledge; they symbolize freedom, hard work, good luck, rebirth, love, spiritual connection, in Chinese culture sparrows are harbingers of spring, and in the Bible, the presence of God and the love and care of God for everything.
“Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul…” This is from, again, Walt Whitman and can be found in his preface to ‘Leaves of Grass‘. Maybe this is a sign that I am supposed to read ‘Leaves of Grass‘ again? I haven’t read it since I was in high school and I would read it from such a different perspective at this place in my life. Over the course of the month, I heard it in Yoga Teacher Training, in a book on Permaculture, and in another book I’m reading. Maybe it’s time for me to let some stuff go? Things I believed true for most of my life and now am finding I can’t honestly embrace any longer.
Edges came up several times this month. I read about “living in the margins” or “on the edges” in The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Magic and Wisdom of the Natural World by Sharon Blackie. And I heard it mentioned in this For the Wild podcast episode with Rosemary Gladstar where she talked about plants that grow up in places humans move to. In the newly turned up ground, on the edges, plants needed for healing such as dandelion, nettle, and plantain will grow. There are actually two newer episodes in this podcast that mention Edges in the title as well. And in this On Being podcast episode, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about living on the edges within the Christian faith. I think there is more to come with edges and margins in the next few months.
Alright, friends. These are the themes that were woven into April. Did any of these resonate with you? Or what themes came up for you? Please share in comments!
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In April the ponds open like black blossoms, the moon swims in every one; there’s fire everywhere: frogs shouting their desire, their satisfaction. What we know: that time chops at us all like an iron hoe, that death is a state of paralysis. What we long for: joy before death, nights in the swale – everything else can wait but not this thrust from the root of the body. What we know: we are more than blood – we are more than our hunger and yet we belong to the moon and when the ponds open, when the burning begins the most thoughtful among us dreams of hurrying down into the black petals into the fire, into the night where time lies shattered into the body of another.
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by Annie Lighthart
Some evening, almost accidentally, you might yet understand
that you belong, are meant to be, are sheltered---
still foolish, but looking out the door with a contented heart.
This is what the king wants and the old man and woman
and even the busy young if you knew, and you have it
by no grace of your own, standing in the doorway
with loose empty hands. Now your heart lights your mind,
a little lantern bobbing within you,
giving out not thought or feeling but confluence,
something else. On what do you pour out this light?
The wet street is empty, one wren in the yard. Let us
redefine love and wreckage, time and weeds.
Pour out your lantern light on the grass, on the bird,
great and small worlds. Don't go inside for a long, long time.
You can find this poem in Pax by Annie Lighthart.
The place I want to get back to is where in the pinewoods in the moments between the darkness and first light two deer came walking down the hill and when they saw me they said to each other, okay, this one is okay, let’s see who she is and why she is sitting on the ground like that, so quiet, as if asleep, or in a dream, but, anyway, harmless; and so they came on their slender legs and gazed upon me not unlike the way I go out to the dunes and look and look and look into the faces of the flowers; and then one of them leaned forward and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life bring to me that could exceed that brief moment? For twenty years I have gone every day to the same woods, not waiting, exactly, just lingering. Such gifts, bestowed, can’t be repeated. If you want to talk about this come to visit. I live in the house near the corner, which I have named Gratitude.
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.
Life of Kim 