Our native sporting style mirrors our climate (wet and grey, lifted by the occasional bright spot); and generations of Saturday practice on sticky, muddy, rain-soaked fields seem to reveal themselves in our patterns of play.
That is what patience does: It invites us to embrace the moment and get our hands in that sticky, muddy clay called life and mindfully shape it in a manner that expresses who we authentically are.
While my inner mindfulness-meditation teacher took a deep breath and smiled, silently affirming, "But of course it will," that 10-year-old boy trapped in this man's body was clamoring to get his hands into the sticky, muddy clay and go for it ASAP with abandon.
Thorny, or, if you prefer, spiny, prickly, buggy, sticky, slimy, muddy, and, occasionally, so toxic that one of the books I consulted for my summer forays carried a disclaimer absolving the publisher of responsibility should I happen to end up in the hospital or, worse, in the ground, moldering next to the Amanita phalloides that I'd mistaken for a porcini.
Clay soil - If the soil is sticky and muddy then it is clay soil.
And now at last, after years of fabrics and fibers that could withstand sticky fingers and muddy footprints, how lovely to be a woman with adult décor — in this case, soft earth tones with red and coral accents in the living room, where an Augustus John drawing hangs near the piano; beiges and greens in the library/sunroom, Mr. Strouse's retreat.
"This morning was cool but quite often it's hot, it's sticky, there are spiders, it's muddy.
But this muddy-tasting branzino with its sticky, over-rich mustard cream sauce — $36?
The climb through damp cloud forest got progressively muddier and stickier as we scrambled over slippery rocks and roots.
If the brain is like a paintbrush, then H.P.P.D. appears to make the bristles sticky, and the old stimuli — colors, shapes, and motions — muddy the new.
Footprints that look like a strange tank has rolled across the muddy track are in fact from a living tank – a sticky pug of a hippo on a night-grazing sortie from the river.
