I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but while you are on your blissful vacation getaway with your family, there will be tension. There will be crankyness. There will be botched communication.
If you are roadtripping, you will miscalculate miles. You may not stay at the hotel you planned to stay in and if you couchsurf like we do, you may have to write to your planned hosts and say, “Sorry, we can’t come stay with you after all.
Believe it or not, hosts look forward to having couchsurfing guests, even rag tag lots like us. I am chronically afraid of disappointing people.
It wasn’t daily but it was near daily when we were going from nature spot to nature spot that Emma verbally lashed out at me for making her attend this worst ever family vacation and why do we go on these stupid vacations because we always end up hating each other.
I listened, I agreed with most of what she said, but I had to deny the hating each other part.
Yes, it wasn’t her idea of nirvana like it was my idea of nirvana, but we will remember certain things until the end of time. Things like Samuel’s silent but deadly farts that were so bad, we had to roll down our windows to keep from coughing “to death” Katherine would shriek, “Samuel, you are killing us!”
This, naturally, would make Samuel laugh, howl and fart more.
He is eleven. I think we will have many years in the future of Samuel farting when the roadside gets uninteresting to him. He can fart and entertain himself by making his sisters scream and then laugh hysterically. He is the star!
I like to think (delude myself?) I have raised my children to be healthy by nature of allowing them to speak up about how they are feeling. I come from a long line of WASPy people who don’t believe in emotions and certainly don’t believe in airing their emotions to anyone unless they are happy, content or an accomplishment laundry list.
I allow Emma to complain. I allow Samuel to fart. I allow Samuel’s rituals to stay intact as much as I can.
I allow them to see ME have a rough time.
Traveling alone with three children – even when one of them is twenty-years-old – isn’t easy.
Tomorrow I will share with you my biggest secret trick that helped make this entire trip happier for each of us. It is a secret trick you can easily replicate. I can see you smiling from here –
Now, just watch out for those silent by deadly gas emissions.
And know that if your daughter is upset, let her say it and then watch the venom dissipate. If you insist she hold it in, your vacation will quickly go further downhill.
Happy Travels!
Writing Challenge:
Tell about a time when you were cranky and lived to tell the tale. What solutions did you find? Please share your stories with us!
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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I didn’t know leaves could wear so many shades of green. There is no memory of such greens on any trees from my past experience.
I also don’t remember when I first learned about Mesa Verde. I know it was sometime in childhood, sometime when I spent my days in classrooms with black chalkboards and long banners showing perfect cursive penmanship (or today, penpersonship) atop the bulletin boards.
I looked at pictures of the cliff dwellings in Colorado and wished, hoped, prayed I would someday go there even though the thought of climbing down ladders to access the ruins frightened me even then.
It may have been a text book that turned me on to Mesa Verde. I found one on Amazon published in 1961 by a gentleman named Don Watson. Perhaps that was my trigger. The Pueblo Indians are a long way from the New Jersey Leni Lenape our teachers faithfully taught us in Linden Avenue School. Maybe it was that my mother was born in Colorado. The kinship I felt came from my mother’s soul-bloodline so I felt to the Puebloan Natives of the 13th or so century.
The today Julie might say, “These dwellings were being built when Rumi was writing his poetry. There is the connection!”
Fact is, I don’t know and I will most likely never know but I may continue to surmise.
I do remember standing on the edge of the canyon and looking down, not too terribly far, and seeing dwellings. It was just a week ago yet it seems like it was forever ago and just a split second past.
There they were: just like the photos I remember as a little girl.
The path we chose was a paved one. It was also wheelchair friendly, something I didn’t know they had in Mesa Verde. I was still holding the belief I would need to hoist myself up and down a scary ladder across a grueling precipice.
None of that was true.
Well, none of that was true in this particular spot at Mesa Verde.
Samuel and Katherine walked ahead of me on the path. Emma gave up before she started. I slowly, ploddingly in places, made the trip down the path. I preferred it this way. I liked feeling as if the dwellings and the people who once lived in them were wooing me with the slight breeze and the mottled pathway, shaded by leaves I didn’t know in many shades of green.
Everything green is unique here, I discovered. It isn’t a flat green or a sort of brownish, faded, choking “I need water!” green I see so often in my Bakersfield landscape. The green on these trees seemed to celebrate the fact I was finally showing up. I was finally listening to the invitation they extended to that little girl at Linden Avenue School so many years in the past.
One irony of this dream finally come true is I didn’t even know consciously it was waiting.
When we planned to visit Cortez, Colorado on our trip the sole reason was its proximity to the border. I wanted to give my children the experience of as many states as possible. They’ve covered lots of ground in the past from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota to California, Arizona and Nevada. We needed to fill out the rest of the west with Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.
I didn’t realize I would be dipping into a romance long dormant not unlike the dormant romances I have had in the past with theater and poetry and photography.
I didn’t know leaves could wear so many shades of green before that warm day last week when I stood in front of these centuries old Pueblo homes. I didn’t know until I looked outside the kiva room from buildings some people call ruins but I prefer to call “Places Left Behind.”
There are so many things to say about this and I plan to gently unfold the almost here and now memories over the next several days.
When I was traveling I kept saying, “I can’t wordify this! I can’t write this” and until I sat down today to write, I made that belief into truth.
I didn’t even dare bring my notebook with me. It wasn’t until later in our journey that I started jotting notes in my cell phone. It all felt like too much, too grand an extension of the reality I thought I knew.
Like I made the dream I had forgotten into truth, I will begin to translate my experience here, now, for you.
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield.
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I talked about it last week with Chrissi, actually.
Chrissi was one of my recent couchsurfing guests and we were hiking together at Trail of 100 Giants at the Sequoia National Forest. I said something about how Americans always seem to insist on big goofy grins in their photos. “One of my French exchange students back, oh, fifteen years ago, commented on this. She was right. But I think now, it has changed. With digital photography, people seem to have calmed down the need for the whole “chhheeeeeeze!” pose constantly.”
My Mother had a favorite photo of me when I was a little girl. I haven’t seen it in years, but I can still see myself in it. I am sitting on a bench at Turtleback Zoo. I sat with my hair in braids, as always, a blue gingham sleeveless shirt, my hands on either side of my frame. I was probably waiting as I sat on the bench. I was eight years old, looking straight ahead of my view but you can only see my profile in the photo. I had no idea my photo was being taken or I would have hidden the question living in my face, my heart, my spirit.
This morning I was inspired by my friend Paula D’Andrea to focus on a song today. Well, Paula is always focused on Rockin' Life! but when my breakfast was accompanied by Jackson Browne on the Muzak, I laughed quietly at first and then thought, “This is not a song you hear often.”
By the time I got home, I felt the song was an assignment of sorts.
The first two stanzas:
Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer I was taken by a photograph of you There were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more But they didn't show your spirit quite as true
You were turning 'round to see who was behind you And I took your childish laughter by surprise And at the moment that my camera happened to find you There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes
I feel a call today to study images of my own authenticity, to put those on display, to not concern myself with conventional norms like ugly or pretty or middle aged or out of shape or embarrassed, but instead focus on showing you my true spirit: unmasked, unafraid and non judgemental.
Cameron has told me my face is one of the most changeable he has encountered. I can look so different on any given day. Sometimes I think that is from being an actor but then, upon thinking, I think it is from being true. My face shows my emotions in that precise moment.
My emotions are worn differently on my face. I think they are authentic. Some of these photos I look prettier or more “conventionally acceptable” than others. What I love about them all is they are all perfectly 1,000% me.
This Spring I sat on a hill overlooking Bakersfield, one of my favorite spots in the world. My friend mentioned me and the words “deliriously happy” in the same sentence.
“I wouldn’t describe myself as happy.”
This photo was taken of me on that day
I wasn’t sure what prompted me to say this, but it is true.
I love and hate this photo. He used to capture fantastic photos of me, true photos of me. I am praying in this photo, perhaps trying to block out the lack of the love I used to feel and an attempt at being content with the love that remains.
It is truly me, even with the spot on my cheek waiting to be checked out by my doctor, the eyebrows that need reshaping, and my hair that was way too blonde for a while.
I am beyond happy. I don’t see happy as better than sad or maudlin as worse than blissful.
Authentic emotions, in the moment. That’s what I want to wear on my face.
This is me in the beginning of October, 2011. It is a very clear portrayal of precisely how I was feeling in that moment. I was in Westwood with my friend, Cameron. I asked him to take the shot and he just clicked away as I stood and "felt" - it is significant as a model (even if the only audience is you) to just be with what you are feeling instead of playing fashion model with the photographer choreographing the whole thing. If your intent is for a specific purpose other than catching your own authenticity, that is a whole different experience.
This photo was taken in September 2008, by my friend, Todd Powers with
Foxglove Photography. We did a session that night with these wonders of nature I had collected on a walk while I was working on a collection of poetry and essays called “Last Years Leaves.” I wish this photo shoot had an element of smell. It was soooooo heavenly with overripe and weathered, hungry leaves.
What I love is Todd gives me space to just experience and he just clicks. See how intent I am on the berries? I am not even thinking Todd is taking photos me me, I am clearly in the moment, a little sad, a little curious, a little hopeful, a little grounded, a little wishing I could float up and out of where I was.
This is Emma in Alice in Wonderland this November at her first High School play. She is an extension of me, always will be, and in this photo she reminds me so much of myself I decided to include it. She had a pretty miserable time during this process. This shot has the quality it does because I had to crop her out of a group but I love what her face says. “I am trying, I am here, I am successful because in my trying, I am doing, no matter how awkward or sad or lonely I am, I am here, on stage and in life, I am giving my all.”
My final photo for today is a self portrait I took. It was a part of my Soul Grief series. There was a time when I cried for 142 days in a row. I consciously created this because when I cried, I remembered, "I have no crying photos. Shoot this, now."
I wasn't faking these tears, I was feeling them.
I laugh now when I see women whose faces have been frozen in place by a variety of procedures so they can keep their skin smooth no matter what they are feeling. I would rather look conventionally ugly than falsely, conventionally beautiful.
Ironically, the second photo here - the one with my eyes open - is one of my favorite photos of myself looking, in my opinion, beautiful.
Don't you love photos like Emma's that say, "“I am trying, I am here, I am successful because in my trying, I am doing, no matter how awkward or sad or lonely I am, I am here, on stage and in life, I am giving my all.”
What more could life ask?
In the old days, I would plaster on my happy mask and move through my day, smiling no matter what. My mother even noted in my baby book, “Julie even smiles through her tears.” As a baby I had this life skill. As a baby I had this life skill.
It is a skill I no longer use. I am grateful for that.
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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I hear dust from the days before the Vikings falling through the forest. I hear branches, creaking – born before the printing press – being torn from the body that had supported them for so long.
I see confusion.
I see stained glass.
I see awe on the faces of those who look upon her now.
I step into your veins and feel like I am stepping into every cavern I have ever visited. I become one with every nightmare and every pipedream I have ever breathed not into existence.
I feel my breasts fill with milk even though I have not had a baby in eleven years. I feel the urge to feed the babies, the ones who cannot speak or walk for whom there is only hope.
I see Moses’ mother and sister, waiting for safety for their little boy.
I see my mother and sister, giggling as I struggle to slide my feet into my short sheeted bed when I couldn’t translate their giggles and my complete confusion and heart pounding fear to be responding to the same thing.
I touch your protective coating – splintered and your inner coating, smooth. I notice the hands, the others, reaching out, and another other, speaking as if expert but knowing nothing, after all.
I touch inside you with my camera.
I feel miniscule.
I feel incapable to communicate who, what, how you are.
I want to bring people here, to sit with you, to engage with you, to come to know you intimately instead of sitting back and looking at photos or watching videos or thinking they know when they don’t know what it is like to touch the inside of a Sequoia’s bloodstream and suddenly understand how similar you are, only the tree is infinitely wiser and infinitely more capable to communicate even without the benefit of translatable language.
“All afternoon it rained, then
such a power came down from the clouds
on a yellow thread,
as authoritative as God is supposed to be.
When it hit the tree, her body
opened forever.”
In the spring it rained and the stream, as always, moved alongside these twin trees, standing tall like the twin towers had before they fell.
Somehow, they surmise, the life blood of the trees brought death to these two. Like all grief, it isn’t completely understandable yet how it happened. Scientists are in wonder, still now – and don’t logically try to explain it all away.
What I know is the tree and her innards touched me, my mind, my heart, my chest, my fingers, my awe has now opened forever.
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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Because I constantly talked about Word Love in my original A to Z Challenge posts, I figured I would start the A to Z Roadtrip with a Word-love post. I am so glad I discovered the roadtrip! I have missed all of you!
I have refilled my coffee. I have grabbed an extra oreo. I have taken my butt and seated myself squarely in my chair to be sure I write, write, write without stopping as I share with you straight off the top of my head why my mission, to spread word love throughout the world is so important.
I am also going to offer to you the option of catching word-love fever.
I sat in a café in the unlikely location of Pierpoint Springs last week with a new friend from Austria. She was a couchsurfer and my family and home were the couchsurfees.
I have a compulsion to make each visit from each couchsurfer as memorable as possible. This is why we found ourselves at such a locale: we were on our way to Sequoia National Monument taking a different road than usual. I wanted to visit Miss Julie’s Bar which is back behind this gem of a diner in Pierpoint Springs, right on the edge of Camp Nelson, right on the edge of Sequoia National Monument’s Trail of 100 Giants.
The trail was our (supposed) destination after all.
We nibbled and chatted and I knew Chrissi, like myself, wasn’t one for idle chatter, so I pulled out my phone and started taking notes. Mostly I was transposing the words of a guy seated in the booth behind me. He was a sheriff’s officer, who was calling in a report on not his phone, but the diner’s phone. Once I heard “357 Magnum” I knew I needed to write this down.
No one would believe this was actually happening. It all seems too cliché and too “America has the craziest and most lovable wacky cast of characters imagineable.”
Chrissi asked me when I looked up, “Have you always known you were going to be a writer?” she asked.
I smiled and said, “I wrote before I knew how to write. I would dictate to my mother what I wanted to write, she would write my words on paper and I would then copy my words she had written.”
Before I was literate, I was in love with words.
I understood their power to create. I didn’t yet understand their power to destroy.
That would come later.
These days, though, I not only write, I teach writing to some and inspire the writing of others. Sometimes the “teaching” and “inspiring” are synonymous. I do this because I know lives are changed when we express what is inside us, begging for us to communicate it.
Even if the only reader is ourselves as we write in a journal which we may later burn, the words are given space outside our overfilled head. This is a huge blessing and this is where the word-romance begins.
Two words come together. They meet. They grow into more words, perhaps with a question mark attached.
I promised myself not to stretch these words out beyond my timer’s song. It just went off.
I love words.
I hope you love words OR if your romance is idle or dull or hasn’t begun yet, take a moment to write a sentence. “Writing and words serve me when they……” and just write a sentence. Be aware of how words show their love to you and you show your love to them.
And then spread the word-love, starting now.
I always have been a matchmaker, after all, a romantic seeking a world of surprising relationships.
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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I have a whirlwind tour of the Southwestern US planned at the end of July/beginning of August. My eldest daughter has spent her Summer in the Navajo Nation working at a camp in Northeastern Arizona. My plan is to pick her up and then, together with my other two children, visit New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and skirt Las Vegas, Nevada, on the way home.
Right now my primary focus is accommodations since we will be Couchsurfing.
I am not talking (necessarily) about staying with friends, I am talking about changing the world, one couch at a time. Actually, one of our couchsurfing accommodations will be a yurt and another may be a tent, so I am not sure… well… here is couchsurfing in a nutshell.
Couchsurfing is a grassroots, volunteer organization that is committed to positive change around the planet via hospitality that is given and received without any sort of financial renumeration. It is all based on goodwill and the old fashioned norm of “Love Our Neighbors” and “Love One Another.”
I am including some photos of our couchsurfing adventures here, too, so you can see how lovely (and rewarding!) it is both as a host and as a "surfer".
My children and I couchsurfed up the west coast to Washington and then over to South Dakota, where the transmission on our car failed and our trip was aborted. The cool thing is this: we met tons of great people and when the car broke down, people we didn’t even know were willing to come help us, whether that meant putting us up in their home, feeding us, driving us two hours out of their way.
It was remarkable and yes, life changing.
Since then we have surfed around New England and hosted travelers from all across the world.
We have introduced many friends to couchsurfing.
I know it may not be for you (or maybe it is!) and with that – I will also share:
Day 30 Catch Up: I would love to wear some of these dresses while I travel!
I was wearing one of my favorite, ultra feminine shirts Saturday and Emma said, “Mommy, I like your new shirt… where did you ge… I mean, who gave it to you?”
I rarely buy my own clothes. I buy my own undies. I buy the occasional pair of jeans but she is right. Me, buying for me is rare! I do buy costumes. And I do want to buy a sewing machine so I may begin making more “me” clothes than the standard off the rack.
That being said, I love how rock-a-billy style clothes look: you know, the flared skirts, the pleats, the showing off of the waistline – the one part of me that I feel isn’t completely horrid. I just love how flattering the styles can look on me.
I don’t have any of these clothes, but I sure was inspired hunting around on-line for some new looks.
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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Listen: It is to live consistently as simply as this inhale and that
exhale, one in and one out, peaceful, content and open for whatever the next
thing is your children, your boss, your partner or the weather or the
construction on your street sends you next.
This is the most basic sense of what it means to be a Haiku
Mama.
One of my great and simple joys is teaching people in
journaling and writing classes the pure joy of writing one of the most
condensed forms of poetry possible: the haiku. If you don’t remember from
elementary school it is – traditionally in Japanese and this is only a very
short bit of it – a three line poem with the first and third line consisting of
five syllables and the middle line being seven syllables.
A Haiku Mama (or Mommy, which is what my children call me) is a Mom who takes live one moment at a time not with a heart pounding in fear about the "what shoe will drop next!" but rather knowing that whatever comes, everything will truly be just fine.
I do some of my best contemplative “work” while driving. Maybe it is because as a Mommy, I spend more time than I would necessarily choose to spend behind the wheel of my Mom - Mobile. I don’t know how it works, but today I was driving along thinking about this exceptionally fine, exceptionally full week I just experienced.
There were whirlwind elements and a lot of moving and hustle and bustle, but within all that flittering and fluttering there were moments of deep soul that will carry be above and beyond all the heres and theres and the other places.
This is important, especially during the Summer when the children’s needs are not only the highest priority, but everyone is underfoot all the time and reminding me I need to spread myself out amongst them… as equally and lovingly as possible.
If I look back and tell you all the activities from this week, you might get tired before I highlight three major “wow” moments. These are times when everything slows and expands, moments where we will remember and tell and retell or perhaps just like at each other and smile, connecting over and over again.
1) For the love of a fallen Sequoia.
My love of Sequoia trees is not a very well kept secret. I love my Sequoias so much I have put off visiting Yosemite again because it feels like I am cheating on Sequoia. I know, my logic isn’t sound but my love is pure. I took Emma, Samuel and our Couchsurfing visitor, Sara, to the Trail of 100 Giants – a very familiar and beloved place only this time we were in for a surprise. One of the giants had fallen. These are no minor giants, either. These are fifteen hundred year old trees, as in were one thousand years old when Shakespeare was first putting quill to paper. To see a friend, fallen was breathtaking. To reach into her cracked open side, like reaching inside a living person, offering her heart to me. I need to work on the description of that moment. It is so beyond words still for me.
2) Space Mountain & Trust at Disney– I wrote about our Space Mountain adventure in my blog yesterday. You may read that here. I loved exploring Disney with my children, but I was also gripped in fear and anxiety much of the time. Each time Samuel, my son with autism, said, “I want to go on that again!” my heart stretched. He was so afraid of Disney until we went there and he overcame each and all of his fears. We all stretched on this trip. I will also forever remember when Emma and I spent time there alone in Fantasy Land, primarily, going on the kiddo rides and Small World and laughing a lot together.
3) Jacaranda Buds Fall into my Hair – I took the train home and left my children with their Dad because I had a show and didn’t want to worry about being late home. You can never tell with Los Angeles traffic. I had a bit of a layover in Union Station which I filled with writing. I sat inside for one point and a random woman asked me to watch her things. I agreed, knowing it was impeding on “what I wanted to do” but I also believe random kindnesses are important in this day and age. In doing so, I got some incredible photos I wouldn’t have gotten if I turned down her request. I also went back into the garden at a glass topped table under a jacaranda tree. I was in heaven just at that, but when one of the flowers from the tree offered herself to me by landing in my hair unexpectedly, once again my heart grew in my chest.
If I had to dissect each moment, I would say they were an exercise in mindfulness, just like the haiku poetry form. Awareness + breath + full hearted experience = abundant rewards as a way of life.
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS & this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she finds the passion & the interest.
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How do I you see yourself at the end of 2012? – Thanks to the The Summer Blog Hop Challenge, I get to contemplate more of my near future. It feels very good, actually ~ I decided to make it into a list because #1) I love lists. #2) I am in a listmaking mood. #3) It helped me stay focused and intentionally powerful with few words. Perhaps it would be wise for you to make your list?
I will have traveled more with my children: explored more of the Southwest instead of plugging into the Northeast. Since Katherine started attending Smith College in Western Massachusetts, I have made more trips to New England than I ever did in the past. Thankfully I love it there, but I also feel like it is time to expose my children to more of the west since we are Californians.
I will have made my first trip to Europe. Katherine is taking her senior year abroad. I am going to visit her in December and fly home with her. Fantastic!
I will have more Writing Campers from more places. YAY! My unique writing and creativity virtual retreat/camp/space of inspiration is growing. Usually in Summer it slows. Not this year. I am grateful.
I will have more books published. Love the options from CreateSpace.
My children will be content educationally and socially. Each of them are having adventures in learning for which I feel so fortunate.
My home will be even more welcoming than it is now. I have several projects in the works. Emma’s room, the hallway, and continuing to show my photography, my painting and more of my Women’s Sphere? projects. I want to continue to share hospitality with couch surfers.
7. I will have continued to spread my artistic wings. So excited to do more paper art. Learning to make paper is exciting me so much… more mixed media techniques here I come!
I will have active spiritual practices that delight and inspire me. Morning pages, walking, art, Lectio Devina… what else? I’ll be shown!
9. I will laugh, daily. Since October of 2011 I have been actively engaged in another battle with depression. I am grateful to say I am winning. I will continue to be victorious.I will laugh, daily.
I will remember to let go of attachment to outcomes – so if the ways I see myself are 1,000 times different than I write now, almost halfway through, I will know everything IS going to be just fine because with resilience it always is, it always is... just fine.
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