1. Morning walks. Walks are good for you, in all kinds of ways. It’s said to improve your mood, improve your heart health, strengthen your bones, relieve joint pain, boost your immune system, aid digestion, boost your energy, enhance your quality of sleep, improve cognition, feed your creativity, help you feel connected — so many good things. I don’t think about any of that when I’m walking though. I’m looking for critters and things to take pictures of and talking to Ringo and enjoying the sunrise.
2. Good friends. Ones who make me laugh, send me pie, make art with me, send me texts and funny gifs, let me love on their dogs and kids, make me banana bread.
3. Ringo’s habits. Even the ones that are sort of annoying are cute, like when he boops me in the butt to try and get me to play with him, or how he digs up the couch every night when we sit down to watch TV after dinner, or how he finds lost things (toys, gloves, hats, socks, etc.) on his walk and brings them home to love, the way he spends the two weeks after we turn our clocks back an hour thinking I’ve forgotten to feed him and begging for the next hour, how he stands in the back yard barking in the hopes that one of the four neighbor dogs will come out and bark with him, how he goes down on one shoulder and flips over on to his back wagging his tail like crazy for the five people in the world he loves the most, how he’ll make a nest of pillows and blankets on the couch, and how happy it makes him to find a stick and carry it on his walk.
“It’s past my dinner time, Ma!”
4. Content — books, TV, movies, podcasts, magazines, music. This will most likely be one of my top regrets at the end of my life, that I didn’t have enough time to read all the books, watch all the TV, listen to all the podcasts, etc.
5. My tiny family, small house, little life. I love it here.
Bonus joy: practicing yoga at Red Sage, how much Ringo loves Chloe’ and Teri, having only one hour of rain on a day it was predicted to be wet and gloomy the whole entire day, writing with my Friday morning sangha, working on my book, stickers, rechargeable headlamps, potato chips, good neighbors, the opportunity to start over, naps, down blankets and pillows and coats, wool socks, bluetooth speakers, my infrared heating pad, writing in the morning with a hot mug of green tea and my HappyLight, clean sheets, bread, a big glass of cold clean water, houseplants, tarot, pens with refillable ink, paint, meditation, reading in bed at night while Eric and Ringo sleep.
Special mention: all the dogs I’ve loved and lost, which is more happy that we got to love you than sad we had to lose you, the kind of grief/love that never really goes away, you just wear it and carry it for so long that it gets a funny, awkward sort of comfortable.
14 years ago this week, we had to let go of our first dog, Obi
1. The emergence of a yellowtail butterfly. (video) Then, there was this related wisdom from Morgan Harper Nichols: “Kindness to yourself is like the patience the butterfly exhibits. It is understanding that not all processes happen immediately and that growth needs both effort and rest. You should not be harsh with yourself if you are not ready to soar right away. Instead, you should give yourself time to adjust, to let your wings dry, knowing that with patience and attention to your own needs, you will find the strength to rise and embrace the new heights that change brings.”
2. During my first case of Covid, a gorgeous poem from Jena Schwartz that isn’t about Covid at all, but rather everything else, “a leaf, a raindrop, the most beautiful feathered thing.”
3. Principle, a gorgeous poem from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “tossed again and again into the waters of difficulty, each toss another chance to practice buoyancy.” In related news, Whatever It Means, because this: “The weight of loving another, that weight without which I would be nothing.”
“As I write this, over 9,500 souls have been extinguished, and amongst these, children make up more than 40% of the deceased. These are not mere numbers; these are stories cut short, dreams unfulfilled, and futures eradicated.
This is not to say that Israel has not suffered losses of its own, or that the hostages taken by Hamas are somehow unimportant. But we cannot, in good conscience, ignore the staggering disparity in the scale of harm. Over 1.5 Million Palestinians have been displaced, over 26,000 Palestinians have been injured, more than 48,000 homes have been destroyed, and over 100 health facilities have been decimated. Not to mention resources such as water, food, electricity, and internet being cut off.”
21. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön: “If spiritual practice is relaxing, if it gives us some peace of mind, that’s great—but is this personal satisfaction helping us to address what’s happening in the world? The main question is, are we living in a way that adds further aggression and self-centeredness to the mix, or are we adding some much-needed sanity?”
34. How To Keep Goingfrom Ijeoma Oluo. “The struggle for liberation is more than struggle.”
35. Wisdom from Jena Schwartz: “Life is made up of so many different narratives that converge and diverge at different moments, and we can all tell our stories in many different ways. I could tell the story of my queerness, for example, or the story of how creativity and writing have continuously unfolded and evolved, or my professional story, or the story of my body.”
37. The Courage to Be New. “How do you have the courage to be new? How do you even head into the ‘new?’ How can you learn to tolerate wings when all you knew were legs?”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 