Dreams
[Taken in Madison, Wisconsin at the beginning of this year.]
Dreams
All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.
In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine
if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,
and not an easy one -
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions -
birds that come and go,
the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.
Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots
and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense
of loss – a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer -
only how it feels
when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.
-Mary Oliver
*****
Holiday Extravaganza Announcements:
Yesterday: The winner of yesterday’s Free Postcard Set Giveaway is Jennifer! Congratulations!!
Today: All softcover editions of Ordinary Sparkling Moments are 25% off today!! Order through my Etsy shop for the discount which ends at 6:00pm PST today. Original softcover price is $28; discounted price of $21 is on the Etsy listing.
Tomorrow: Another giveaway!
The Holiday Extravaganza Begins!
I am writing this post one day ahead of time since I am headed to Arroyo Grande in about an hour for my last book event of the year! By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way back home, with a few stops in Santa Barbara. So today’s post is a quickie, but a good one – leave a comment today and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free postcard set! This is the first day of my Holiday Extravaganza, when I’ll be offering giveaways and specials every day through the 17th. Don’t forget to check out my other holiday specials on the link in my sidebar. Happy Monday!
Awake
[Holiday Colors :: Taken in NYC earlier this month]
As much as I know in my heart and mind what a valuable, necessary, beautiful thing rest is, I have learned over the past many weeks that I’m not especially good at it. This month I have been trying to let the time between my travels stay on the quieter side and I have to say it has been a huge challenge. Of course my life has not been quite as footloose and fancy free as that, where the only angst I’ve had is trying to be comfortable with taking life a little slower – other circumstances have been playing their part in this particular act of my play – but beneath all the things I’ve been dealing with I have still been able to see pretty clearly that slowing down is not my forte.
But today, instead of resisting that this just might be an undeniable fact of who I am, I am here to prattle on about all kinds of details that are going to keep me pretty busy for the next few weeks. In celebration of some of the Ordinary Sparkling Moments I have to look forward to, here’s a glimpse…
* Today I’m buying a Christmas tree and making the house all sparkly. I’m also determined to get through all those little bitty tasks around the house that have been staring at me since the summer. Felt pads on the bottom of our kitchen chairs – check! Taking a stack of artwork up to my studio from the dining room – check! Buying a shoe rack for the downstairs closet – check! Oh so gratifying…
* This weekend I’m going to be hopping all over the place for events & shows. On Saturday I am hoping to have the time to go here to do some holiday shopping (this talented soul will be displaying her colorful wares there), then I have to trek to the other side of town for the opening of the 3rd Annual Holiday Show at Peach Tree Gallery that I’m participating in. On Sunday I head north to Arroyo Grande for an Ordinary Sparkling Moments event at Mari Robeson Home from 4:00 -8:00pm. Will I see you at any of these events? I hope so!
* Monday our home reverts back to being a Bed & Breakfast for a number of guests and I am looking forward to having more people at our kitchen table in the mornings. This is my absolute favorite thing about our home, that our friends and family know it as a haven, and don’t hesitate to unpack their bags and park themselves here for long strings of days and weeks.
* In the studio, I am working on a stack of new tiny creations for the holidays. 4″ x 4″ original collages mounted on wood blocks. I love working on them and will be putting up the first batch early next week.
* Next week also marks the beginning of my Holiday Extravaganza, with special offers & giveaways through this blog only every single day through December 17th. The fun starts Monday.
That’s all I’ve got – nothing especially philosophical or compelling, nothing groundbreaking, mind-blowing or rock-star fabulous. Just a few days in my life, a few more threads being woven into my story. As much as it is not completely in my nature to live life on the slower side, I have lately been savoring those parts of my days that look a lot more humdrum. In those little routines of cleaning the kitchen each morning and packaging stacks of books, I have heard a gentle humming that enables me to breathe more softly and daydream more easily. The gentle hum that says life is good and I am OK, in every sense of the word.
Walkabout
[Do you see the bee? Taken in 2003]
[Commerical Break: Head over to Shutter Sisters today for my guest entry and an Ordinary Sparkling Moments giveaway - today only!]
*****
If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you know I have an immense passion for travel. A significant piece of my daydream pie chart is devoted to wild imaginings that take place in Madagascar, Istanbul, Chile, Jordan and Israel. I fantasize about giving away everything I own and going on my own personal walkabout all over the world. Some day I might get to do this for an extended period of time, but for now I am grateful for all the little walkabouts I've been blessed with in some amazing parts of the world.
Whenever I get into a conversation about travel, I always say the same thing – that I am much more mellow when I travel, much more open to letting each journey unfold however it is going to unfold. I may peruse a guide book to decide what area of a city I want to explore, but beyond that I tend go in the direction I've chosen and see where the wind takes me. I explain that there are things in my day to day life that have a tendency to upset me, annoy me and/or sometimes send me into a total meltdown, but when I'm traveling a lot of those same experiences simply roll of my back. My energy is softer, I observe more deeply, and I do a better job of accepting when things don't go the way I thought they would (mainly because I tend not to have specific expectations about my trips.) Every element of any journey I take is part of the story of that adventure.
And then there is my "real life"…the life I live at home with my husband, doing the work I do and trying to maintain, nurture and sometimes muddle through all my relationships. I realize it is not the wisest choice to wake up every day and just "see where the wind takes me" when there are bills to pay, responsibilities to manage and people to take care of, but it would not do me any harm to bring a little bit more of my travel-induced gentleness and flexibility into my day to day life. I might not be able to embrace a devil-may-care attitude 24/7, but I can put more effort towards appreciating that all the moments of my life – whether I consider them good, bad, fun, miserable or otherwise – are being strung together to create a wonderfully unique story.
The story of my life is being written right now, it is growing and evolving with every breath that I take. The days I have already lived now exist in the past, so those parts of my story cannot be changed. They are what they are, they have led me to right now, and right now I have very little to complain about. My life is much like the journeys I've taken to Havana, Tokyo, Sydney and even Milwaukee – lot of wonderful moments and memories, some frustrations here and there, a camera stolen, getting lost, not being able to understand what another person is saying, feeling deeply content, profoundly blessed, immensely exhausted, and thrilled about unexpected discoveries. I will never forget traveling in Rome by myself when I was 22 years old, walking through the city at dusk. I turned a corner and was taken by complete surprise when I saw the Colosseum in front of me, glowing beneath an evening sky. I was absolutely breathless. Sometimes magnificent gifts appear when we're not even paying much attention to where we're going. All we have to do is look up and see them.
If I were to get on a plane and fly to Amsterdam today, I would go with heart and mind open and a giddy excitement over all the unknowns. Perhaps I need to stoke more of those adventurous fires when I get out of bed each day. It is entirely possible I have separated these two worlds – my travel world and my day to day world – too much and it is time to narrow the gap between the ways I approach each of them. As obvious and meaningful as the "life is a journey" analogy is for me, particularly because of my love of travel, it is still all too easy for me to lose my way when I'm not paying attention.
But perhaps that is the key – that it is OK to lose my way now and then, as long as I make my way back to my own center. In those diversions and detours there are blessings and gifts and tools and messages, and every step creates a word, a letter, an image and a passage in the story of my life. Onward I go.
Saying YES
[Commerical Break: This is a busy weekend for Ordinary Sparkling Moments. I'll be at Peach Tree Gallery in Mar Vista, CA this Saturday afternoon for the opening of their 3rd Annual Holiday Show and on Sunday I'll be at Mari Robeson Home in Arroyo Grande, CA from 3:00 - 8:00pm for a sparkling evening of fun. I hope to see you there!]
*****
“…’Yes’ has the power. It is the acceptance of what is, even the bad, and it is the faith that what happens is just part of the process, part of your journey, leading you to your… well… destiny.” -posted by Rowena
As my circle of friends knows, I am a card and stationery fanatic. And by fanatic I don’t mean I always send birthday cards on time (I don’t, I’m a usually a complete failure when it comes to birthdays), I mean I buy boxes and stacks of cards at a time and they all get sent to various parts of the world within days. In a culture that fills our mailboxes with heaps of retail catalogs and mass marketing mailers, I love the idea of giving those I adore a little smile when a colorful envelope falls out of their mailbox with their name in actual handwriting. It has become downright Old School, this sending of cards and letters, and it is an addiction I am more than happy to feed whenever the opportunity to do so arises.
In a nutshell, I say YES to stationery. I say yes to colorful, glittery cards and very silly postcards. I say yes to rolls of 100 stamps at a time and yes to taking the time to write thank you notes. This is one of my favorite ways of saying yes.
There are a few cards that I have purchased repeatedly and sent to different friends, one of which is a tall turquoise blue card with a big gold Buddha on the front. The Buddha’s arms are up above his head and he has a huge smile on his face. When you open the card, the greeting is bold and simple. It says: YES! I love this card – love its energy, its message, its joy. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve sent it.
The idea behind that card is to say yes to unbridled enthusiasm and joy, to shout from the rooftops YES to love! YES to hope! YES to fun! YES! YES! YES! But what of the quieter yeses – those affirmations that are not necessarily easy, exciting or fun? How can we channel the energy of that gold laughing YES! Buddha towards those moments in our lives where saying the word yes feels more like trying to squeeze through the center of an hourglass? How easily do we give such an enthusiastic yes to forgiveness, to letting go, to sadness? How much freedom and centeredness do we deny ourselves by resisting that resounding YES in some of our more challenging moments?
There is a story you may very well be familiar with that goes like this:
Amy Biehl, an idealistic white Californian college student, wins a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to South Africa to assist the anti apartheid movement; caught in a 1993 race riot, she is murdered by a black mob.
Following years of grief, Amy’s parents Linda and Peter gave up their fashionable upper middleclass Californian lifestyle and moved to South Africa to try and complete the work their daughter had started. The Biehls not only met two of the young men who killed Amy but, learning of the chaotic circumstances of the riot and the heartfelt remorse of the killers, gradually became friends with the men who helped murder their daughter.
The young men asked if they could atone for their crime by doing public service for a foundation the Biehls established in Amy’s name. For two years they worked with Amy’s parents daily, and eventually became close enough that they addressed Linda Biehl as “mom.”
[For a more detailed version of the entire story, click here]
This is a story I think about fairly often, this along with a similar one I heard on NPR many years ago about families who befriended their loved ones’ convicted killers by visiting them in prison. In that program, I remember listening to one woman explain that she reached a point where she felt like she had no choice but to forgive because she had been living every moment of her life filled with seething rage. She said on the program, “Can you imagine what it might feel like to walk around with that every single day?” When she asked the reporter that question, I actually understood her motivation. It made perfect sense that she would reach a point of darkness to such an extreme as to need a seemingly outrageous solution, a course of action as outrageous as taking the time and energy to get to know your loved one’s killer.
These stories have stayed with me because they show me all that is possible, beautiful and divine in humanity. I am in awe of the courage, compassion and determination it must have taken to take a step away from what was the greatest loss of their life and towards the very person responsible for that loss. What does it feel like to say yes to that?
Despite their sad beginnings, these stories give me hope and encouragement to say YES in those moments where it would be much easier to say no – no to trusting, no to acceptance, no to believing the best story I can believe. It does not take any practice to say yes to a scoop of chocolate ice cream, but saying yes throughout our more challenging experiences is a skill that must be honed. I am not sure I have what it would take to follow in Linda and Peter Biehl’s footsteps, but they have still shown me all the light and freedom that exists when we say yes to compassion in every sense of the word.
Yes is powerful when we fill our lungs with air and howl it up to the moon, but it is also magnificent in its force when we say it quietly to someone who has wronged us, when we wonder if we can really trust our friends in a vulnerable moment, when we look in the mirror and ask ourselves if our wildest dreams are worth our time and energy. Yes sometimes comes in less than appealing forms, but sometimes all it takes is our willingness to embrace those yeses to transform them into something beautiful, comforting and sacred.
A Letter to the Universe
[Commercial break: I'm participating in my friend Nancy Mills' "blog tour" to help promote her Spirited Woman Holiday Guide over at Sparkletopia today. Take a peek for a great interview & fabulous holiday shopping guide at 9:00am PST Tuesday, December 2nd.]
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
“…I wanted the wind to carry a letter to the universe…” -posted by Nathalie
A letter to the universe…oh, there have been many of those I have drafted in my mind over the years. Letters of gratitude, love and joy, yes, but also letters of frustration, anger and a litany of why, why and more WHY? As much as I try not to dwell on that tiny three letter word (is there another three letter combination that packs more punch in such a small space?), I must admit it sometimes plagues me like a mosquito in the middle of a toasty summer night, buzzing incessantly in my ear. This question of why is one the universe usually doesn’t have an immediate answer for, but damn if I don’t keep banging on her door begging for whatever morsel of insight she might have to spare.
There is the notion that our souls are on a journey, that we chose the life we are now living in order to fulfill a grander mission that only makes sense in an entirely different realm of existence. We are here in our part of the world, with the people in our lives, doing what we are doing, because we need to work through certain things that, for whatever reason and in whatever other possible life or way of being, have yet to be resolved. I am not a big believer in the details of our lives being entirely pre-ordained, but I do often wonder how and why (that word!) one very specific struggle I cannot seem to escape is going to serve me or take me to a place where I feel whole. I sometimes feel like all the work I do to process and move past issues in this particular area of my life is built on nothing but sand, where all it takes is one foamy swissssssshhhhhh from the ocean to melt it all away. And then I’m left on the shore, forced to start all over again, with nothing but a plastic pink bucket and a few scattered seashells.
Maybe there is some truth to that analogy, but maybe I’m also learning a few things each time my castle gets knocked down. Perhaps I am moving farther up the beach each time the tide washes in, and maybe I am closer to solid ground than I realize. Better yet, it just might be possible that I’ve managed to create more of a foundation than I imagined, and even though I’m still needing to rebuild, I’m not having to dig as deep in order to lay down the framework for what I really want. I suppose the most fundamental problem might be that there are some moments in my life where I just might not feel like doing this work, but circumstances beyond my control take away my freedom to choose when I feel like putting on my hardhat and getting to it.
I guess that’s what they call determination, persistance or maybe even courage. You don’t feel like making the effort, you aren’t in the mood to keep trying to be the best person you can be, but you do it anyway, you keep going. I know this sounds very searching-for-water-in-the-desert-for-ten-days dramatic, but most of the time it isn’t at all. It is making small choices throughout your day that serve your highest purpose, that journey your soul is on. I am not always especially fond of this journey, but it has made me who I am. I have to trust that all is happening as it needs to, that I am finding my way to grace even when I feel like I’m fumbling.
In my letter to the universe today I do not ask for the difficulties of my life to disappear or for my challenges to dissolve quietly in the night. What I would like to say to the universe right now is that I am trying to trust that all of these experiences are necessary for reasons I might not ever fully understand. I would like to ask for patience, and I would like to offer my continued commitment to doing my best. And whatever kind of wind comes along to carry my letter to the universe, whether a barely there breeze or a swirling gust of feathers and leaves, I will continue to construct the best possible dwelling for my soul no matter how many times I have to rebuild.
