1. Morning walks. I love fall in Colorado, so much. It’s just gorgeous right now.
2. A short trip to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We spent the weekend up at Beaver Meadows. They recently did a bunch of updates to the cabins and grounds and they were really nice. It was so good to be together, just the three of us, do some hiking and resting. On our first morning hike, we saw a MOOSE!
3. Practice. “Do practice while you can. You’ll need it when you can’t.” ~Krishna Das I had lunch with a dear friend yesterday who lost her mom three years ago. She pointed out I had a “head start” of sorts with my experience of caring for my mom while losing my dad. I absolutely did: 15 years of study, practice, therapy, and holding space for others. It supported me, soothed me, saved me. Practice, do the work now, even if you can’t imagine the outcome or where it will take you. You’ll know when you get there and your effort and your ease will be worth it.
Inspired by Jami Attenberg, I started a new challenge: 1000 words a day for 30 days. This is how I built this blog, with 30 day challenges, and it now has 2700 posts after 12 years of writing. I’ve also written every day for that many years, as evidenced by the sagging shelves full of journals in my office closet. But this writing a book is new, something I’m trying to figure out– in particular, finding the way I write a book. The 30th day this time just so happens to land the day before my birthday, so I’ll have extra to celebrate.
I’ve been trying to write “the book(s)” for the past few years but life — burnout, retirement, COVID, menopause, losing Sam and Ang, the DT Era, the current rising environmental crisis, #blm, a major surgery, losing Joe and Rita, the falling away of a dear friendship, the loss of not one but three sanghas, Mom’s stroke and Dad’s passing. It’s been a lot. And it will continue to be a lot because being human is hard.
Life is tender and terrible, beautiful and brutal. I’m over here just trying to keep my heart open, stay tender, keep practicing, and not give up. Two days in, I already have 6500+ words. 😉💜
4. Good friends. Lunch with Chelsey, texting with Chloe’, training with Shelby and the gang, writing with my Friday morning Wild-ish group — so good.
5. My tiny family, small home, and little life. It’s everything I ever wanted.
Bonus joy: a massage, a warm shower, a nap, taco salad, texting with Chris and Mom, dark chocolate covered just about anything, getting to go to Red Sage three times in a week, having Jennae’s five year old daughter in my yoga class on Thursday (even though at 45 minutes in to a 60 minute class, she sighed loudly and said, “I’m tired of this already, when will we be done?”), how happy Ringo was when we packed up the car to come back on Sunday morning and I asked him “you ready to go home?” (apparently, he loves it here as much as me), other people’s kids and dogs and gardens, pie, new books, grocery shopping, clean laundry, purple and orange mums from the grocery store, listening to podcasts, watching TV with Eric and night and making each other laugh, hugs in the kitchen, reading in bed at night while Eric and Ringo sleep.
1. Love at First Sightstreaming on Netflix. “After missing her flight from New York to London, Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) meets Oliver (Ben Hardy) in a chance encounter at the airport that sparks an instant connection. A long night on the plane together passes in the blink of an eye but upon landing at Heathrow, the pair are separated and finding each other in the chaos seems impossible. Will fate intervene to transform these seat mates into soul mates? Based on the wildly popular novel, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, by Jennifer E Smith.” Not everyone liked this movie, which is rated 6.9/10 on Rotten Tomatoes. Some reviews said things like the movie was “an absolute stink fest,” “painful to watch,” “booty cheeks” or “absolute buns” (?), and simply a waste of time. I, on the other hand, LOVED it. It was exactly what I needed, easy and sweet.
2. First Aid for The Soul & Ebb and Flowon A Grace Full Life. Kari has been in a sweet and tender place recently and her blog posts reflect that. The Nikita Gill poem she shares was exactly what I needed this morning.
3. 17 Ways To Open Your Heart. “Building an emotional survival kit” from Andrea Gibson on Things That Don’t Suck. This post is restricted to their paid subscriber community, but it is just one of 1000 reasons you should subscribe. And there’s this, “Since early on in my cancer diagnosis I have been writing and speaking about how amazing it feels to have an open heart. By open heart I mean many things: To feel at ease in my being. To be in love with living. To be guided by gratitude for each precious day. To appreciate the lessons learned through challenges. To interact with everyone I encounter knowing they are my teacher. To not be burdened by the weight of grudges or blame. To be present in the moment.” If you know me at all, you know what a fan I am of an open heart. ❤
4. Poetry: Crows by Mary Oliver on The New Yorker and Terce from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.
5. Author Rebecca Solnit Found ‘Half’ Her Books in a Dataset Used to Develop AI, an interview. I don’t know exactly how I feel about AI, am disappointed by the theft of the intellectual property of so many artists, and yet, also this past week I had to send an uncomfortable text that was necessary but because of my emotional connection to it and the potential outcome I didn’t trust myself to effectively communicate my point, so I tried ChatGPT for the first time and it was SUPER helpful.
10. Objects, a documentary. “There are two kinds of people. To some, objects are the root of clutter and materialism. To others, objects are a way to keep a treasured record of their lives. Objects follows three unique people who have held onto something that gained incredible meaning for them over decades.”
12. One Thing at a Time, Lady! My Week of No Multitasking. “I started slow, with a ban on multitasking while talking on the phone or running around the city. No more texting while walking the dog! That went well, so for the final week I decided to tighten the screws and eliminate multitasking entirely. It nearly killed me.”
15. On Turning 40. “As I reach this milestone, there are three things that are on my mind that I want to share with you.”
16. Letters to my homefrom Susannah Conway. “I don’t want to travel the world. I don’t have or need a bucket list. I want to plant the deepest roots I can and finally have a place that’s mine.” #same
17. Kaira Jewel Lingo’s October newsletter, No One is Excluded from My Heart, which includes this difficult but necessary truth: “Not excluding others from our heart does not mean we do not say ‘no’ to injustice and oppression. We must challenge all forms of discrimination and systemic violence, while never forgetting that whatever others do, they are still part of our human family and even perpetrators and the tragic situations they create still have the capacity to transform and be healed.”
20. Eclipse New Moon: Practices for Collective Grief and Grace from Mindy Tsonas Choi, which includes this advice, “Take what concrete actions you have the capacity for, when you can. Reach out to our Jewish and Middle Eastern friends in whatever way you are able. This might look like sending a note, baking a batch of cookies, donating to an organization, sharing critical information, calling your local government officials, or showing up to a rally in solidarity. All of it matters and makes a difference.”
23. LitBuzz Presents | Spill The Tea With The Bees : Amy Marie Turner. “Bee Tanya sits down virtually with author Amy Marie Turner to chat about her book Voyage of The Pleiades, Amy’s personal practices of both research & writing as well as her unique life path to becoming an author of many forms.” P.S. I’m reading and loving Amy’s book. It can be an uncomfortable thing to read the published work of someone you know. There’s always the concern that it won’t be good, or more specifically that you won’t like or enjoy it (which is really the only way we measure if something is “good” or “bad”, as all art is ultimately subjective and our evaluation says more about us than it does the work), and then what do you say to them about it? I don’t have to worry in this case, because instead of not knowing what to say, I keep catching myself as I’m reading thinking, “Amy WROTE this! It’s so good! I can’t wait to finish it and tell her how much I enjoyed it, how impressed I am with the research she did.” 🙂
26. Positive News, “the online and print magazine for rigorous journalism about what’s going right. Our mission: While most of the news overwhelms people with negative narratives, instead Positive News is here to offer a lens on the world that helps give people a fuller picture of reality, supports their wellbeing and empowers them to make a positive difference. In doing so, we’re showing the rest of the media that good news matters.”
27. The 5 secrets to my successfrom Danny Gregory. “I’ve been teaching myself to draw for 25 years. Here’s what I’ve learned matters most.”
30. Life bruises us in ways we cannot seefrom Patti Digh. “It’s not only the big things that bruise us. It’s those little ones, too. And those bruises mean we are alive.”
31. A Bridge Amidst the Hardshipfrom Frederick Joseph. “On the ‘Five For Families’ campaign helping 150 families.”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 