1. Feast, “an intensive 3-month program for women who want to come home to themselves, make peace with food, and feast on their lives.” I submitted my application about 20 minutes after Rachel opened, that’s how ready I am for this. She’s taking applications now, but just for this week and there are only 30 spots in this session. Other good stuff from Rachel: Go closer and Doing your best.
2. ZenPen ecourse, “Body-Based Writing for Healing, Transformation, and Personal Growth.” It starts today, so there’s still time to sign up for the latest session.
3. The lists I look at every week for inspiration:
Something for the Weekend from Susannah Conway, (hey, the Self-Compassion eBook is on there this week!)
[W}e all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.
6. Wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”
18. My wish for your 2015, a poem from Cynthia Morris, who also has a gorgeous new website design.
19. A Note from the Universe, “I know this may come as somewhat of a shock, Jill, but of your innumerable and extraordinary gifts, one day you’ll consider your present day challenges as the greatest of them all. Trust me.”
23. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club, “life is much too short to ever stick around a person who makes you feel like you are difficult to love.” (Unless of course the person is you, and then you’ve got to figure that shit out).
4. Wisdom from Mary Oliver, because every once in a while I need the reminder,
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
We constantly limit ourselves with our emotions and our desires and our stories. When we identify with that stuff, we don’t experience what’s underneath it. The only way to move deeper into your own heart is by doing some kind of spiritual practice, regularly, over time. That’s what helps us experience real love and gives us the strength to manifest changes in our lives.
6. Fiercely Being from Jonathan Fields. This one is important. If you don’t click any other link on this week’s list, please follow and read this one. And just in case you are going to ignore my plea, here’s the line where I tear up and put my hand over my heart each time I read it because the beauty and truth are so clear it almost breaks my heart, “What if your metric was…’Do things that light you up with people who light you up for people you love to serve.‘”
9. Alone in the Wilderness, a documentary that “tells the story of Dick Proenneke who, in the late 1960s, built his own cabin in the wilderness at the base of the Aleutian Peninsula, in what is now Lake Clark National Park…covers his first year in-country, showing his day-to-day activities and the passing of the seasons as he sought to scratch out a living alone in the wilderness.” We got this from the library a few times and loved it. Someone has now made the full film available on YouTube.
12. I love Lisa Congdon’s Words for the Day. These are some of recent my favorites: No. 22, No. 23, and No. 30. And also from Lisa, a beautiful post about marriage, On Marriage :: A Year Later.
21. Wisdom from “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers),” shared by Sandi Amorim,
This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
Bodhichitta exists on two levels. First there is unconditional bodhichitta, an immediate experience that is refreshingly free of concept, opinion, and our usual all-caught-upness. It’s something hugely good that we are not able to pin down even slightly, like knowing at gut level that there’s absolutely nothing to lose. Second there is relative bodhichitta, our ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down.
Those who train wholeheartedly in awakening unconditional and relative bodhichitta are called bodhisattvas or warriors — not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world. These are men and women who are willing to train in the middle of the fire. Training in the middle of the fire can mean that warrior-bodhisattvas enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering. It also refers to their willingness to cut through personal reactivity and self-deception, to their dedication to uncovering the basic undistorted energy of bodhichitta. We have many examples of master warriors — people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King — who recognized that the greatest harm comes from our own aggressive minds. They devoted their lives to helping others understand this truth. There are also many ordinary people who spend their lives training in opening their hearts and minds in order to help others do the same. Like them, we could learn to relate to ourselves and our world as warriors. We could train in awakening our courage and love.
Jung identified this archetype in many goddesses and female role models throughout history. You’re the mother figure: the selfless caregiver and helper. Everyone comes to you for advice. You truly love others as yourself and your greatest fear is selfishness and ingratitude. You manifest compassion and generosity. A Jungian psychologist would tell you to be careful not to be taken advantage of and never let yourself play the martyr.
35. Doing everything wrong: Shame, truth-telling, and writing it out on Visible and Real. This line especially, “And if I am not Worthy, I move in one of two directions: Complete Shutdown or Overperforming. {Either end of this pendulum is exhausting.}” Word.
36. One of my favorite projects is Humans of New York. Brandon has a new book coming out. He says about it,
Little Humans is coming out in almost two months, and the first hardcopy has just arrived! It is awesome. Your child is guaranteed to giggle, point, and cheer. And if test readings are any indication, there is a 38.53% chance you will cry. It comes out October 7th — very excited about it.
The absolute, most sure-fire way of physically moving in the direction of your dreams, Jill, on a day-to-day basis, without messing with the “cursed hows,” is living them, now, to any degree that you can.
38. Really good stuff from Medium:After (one of the best things I’ve ever read about the loss of a pet), and My Cousin is Not a Hero.
When you have questions, look to love. When you have doubts, turn toward love. When you wonder about next steps, let love be the deciding factor. And when you fear how it will all work out, trust in love.
I know it feels fearful to risk (and love) in these ways. I know you long for the certainty that the love you give will offer you the same in return. And I know that without guarantees, without promises, and without thought for your own safety, you will love anyway. It’s who you are. It’s what you do. And it’s the story for which you are known and named.
1. You don’t have to pander from Seth Godin’s blog, in which he says, “The reason you don’t have to pander is that you’re not in a hurry and you don’t need everyone to embrace you and your work. When you focus on the weird, passionate, interesting segment of the audience, you can do extraordinary work for a few (and watch it spread) instead of starting from a place of average.”
Always, this energy smoulders inside,
when it remains unlit,
the body fills with dense smoke.
5. New video from Danielle of one of my favorite songs, The Have Nots.
6. one hundred journeys from Sas Petherick, “The disturbing ugliness and the profound love, the sheer bloody hilarity of being human.”
7. From Geneen Roth, “Peace and contentment are feelings that take practice to achieve. They are not a consequence of being successful or being in love or being thin. They are, among other things, a consequence of stopping in the present moment and looking around.”
21. I have a crush on Jeff Oak’s writing. I found his blog through another of my writing crushes, Guinevere Gets Sober. The fact that they both understand grief and addiction, and have beautiful black dogs doesn’t hurt one bit.
It’s funny because the old-school approach to getting work done–the entrepreneurial, management-style approach–says that if we start clearing our spaces or wanting to read in bed, we’re just avoiding our work. That we should “push through” and keep in motion.
But that approach has never worked for me in the realm of creative work. Clearing space and resting are as essential to my productivity as the sun and water parts are for growing plants.
40. Expiration Date by Lisa Bonchek Adams. Lisa’s story, her telling of it keeps breaking my heart, and sometimes I think it would be better to look away, to stop following her, to stop watching and reading, checking in and waiting, that it would somehow be a healthier choice, a saner option to disengage. But then I realize “Lisa is dying.” Someone’s mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend is dying. She may not be literally mine, and yet she IS mine, and for that reason, I won’t look away, won’t unsubscribe or ignore or wish it away. I will be a loving and kind witness to her reality, which in the end is the same for all of us.
In a Doing culture, it’s easy to forget the value of Being. But your soul is not here on this earth to DO anything. It’s here to BE something. When you’re so busy Doing, sometimes you forget to just BE. So please – do me a favor – take some time. Get quiet. Retreat. Pull back. Do less. BE more.
And,
Oh honey. Why the punching bag? Why must you beat yourself up so
fiercely when all I see is this precious being I only want to hug? If only you could see what I see, you would realize that, when you let your Gremlins go bananas in your mind, you hurt not just yourself but everyone you love. Instead, let me give you a heaping helping of just what the doctor ordered. (((((((((((((((((Jill Salahub))))))))))))))))))) Love is all you need.
15. 99 Life Hacks to make your life easier! Give yourself some time to look at these. They will make you laugh, and I guarantee you’ll want to try some of them.
(50 pages + 27, 682 words + one outline) x (tears + hard work) – a bit of confidence = completely confused but moving. This is where I find myself after two Saturdays committed to working on my book. A lot of what’s been happening is moodling, “imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering,” (Brenda Ueland). Add to that lots of avoidance, at least one distinct crisis of faith and one meltdown, and you have a good sense of what I’ve been doing.
Writing a book is hard. I know, “d’uh.” No shit, Sherlock. Thank you, Captain Obvious. I’ve heard it a million times, that it’s not for the faint of heart, and that you really have to want it, that it’s hard and it’s going to hurt. I get it, but it’s the tiniest bit different when you are alone in a room staring right into the dark eyes of the thing with teeth, close enough to smell the stink of its breath, knowing full well it has every intention of devouring you–way more terrifying when it’s finally real. I want to walk into the center of my heart, reach that raw and tender place where the story lives, and make a map for anyone who wants to do the same, but it’s going to be rough.
Last week, I began by working through some exercises from Cynthia Morris. I used two posts from her Claim Your Authority series: One Powerful Practice That Makes Writers Happy and Target the Heart of Your Book to Write More Easily. I got clear about my own values, the themes I want to focus on, and made an outline. After all that work, that diving in deep, I was happy to find that my initial instincts where exactly right, spot on–so after all that, nothing had really changed. I’m still writing the same exact book I originally imagined.
Today, I collected all the writing I’d already done. I spent most of my time trying to organize what’s already typed up into a single file, which is where the 50 pages + 27, 682 words number comes from. That is, I did that after I had a tiny meltdown. Yup, I flopped down in my dark bedroom and cried, convinced I couldn’t do it, that I was going to chicken out and quit, give up, FAIL. When I was done, I got up, came into my office and started writing.
If you’ve been reading my blog for long, you know how much I adore Susannah Conway. I am so inspired by her classes, her photography, and her writing, her way of being in the world, that I would follow her just about anywhere, take on any prompt or project she suggested.
susannah and I at her book event this summer in portland
Susannah is hosting August Break, as she’s done for the past two years, and I’m joining in. The goal is to share a picture on your blog every day of August. Other bloggers use this time to take a break from regular blogging, to look closer at their world through the camera lens as a way to be more present and relaxed, to sink into the joys of the month and savor the end of summer. I am having so much fun blogging right now, I’m not going to take a break from that, but rather add daily August Break posts, sharing with you, kind and gentle reader, “the view from here.”
The View from Here: August 1st
This is how I start every morning, at my writing desk in front of my HappyLight, window open so I can hear the birds sing once the sky gets light, with a 1/2 cup of coffee, Kashi Bar, and a banana that I’ll share later with Sam, the boy sleeping on the bed under my feet. This morning, I was a few minutes late, was in the kitchen talking to Eric, and Sam cam out to find me, let me know that he’d been waiting and I was now officially “late for work.”
I love getting up so early (most mornings), before the sun is even up, to sit in the mostly quiet and write. Sometimes what I write is total crap, a garbage dump of complaints, whining and moaning and bitching about dumb stuff, but more often it’s the bones of a blog post, or pages of a book or essay being born.
This picture shows close up what my view is like when I’m writing. The other day, I bought myself flowers to encourage myself to clean off my desk (it worked). I currently have a “thing” for owls, feel like along with dogs, they are the animal guides for my writing. The blue container holds some of Obi‘s ashes, and is next to Guanyin, also known as White Tara in Tibetan Buddhism, the goddess of mercy, compassion and action, (this particular one found at the Waldport Flea Market for one dollar, she holds a lotus blossom in her hands). At her feet are various rocks I’ve collected, one of which is roze quartz, the love stone.
Guanyin stands in front of a post card of Susannah’s and a picture I originally framed for my grandma (she’s since passed, so I have it again) which includes a bible verse about rejoicing and being glad in this day, and there is my World Domination Summit (WDS) temporary tattoo, my message from the universe by way of Andrea Scher, a take-way from Cynthia Morris‘s WDS workshop which reads “claim your AUTHORity now” and postcard from Patti Digh where she holds a rock that says “I dare you.” Behind that, where you almost can’t see it, is a jar of sand from Waldport Beach. There are other things you can’t see in this particular image, like the picture of Obi or the one of my nieces on the beach, or the piece of art from my first heART exchange swap partner. All of these things inspire me, remind me of my intention to write.
After I write, I turn on my computer and do a quick check of my email, facebook, and my blog. After that, I either walk the dogs or go to yoga. This morning, it was yoga, and this was the sky outside my gym. It’s getting light later already, so I got to see some of the sunrise before I went inside.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~Mary Oliver
This morning, walking the dogs with Eric, I saw: a huge tree that’s been dead for a long time finally fell down (and it was big enough that it certainly went “boom” when it did), a dead beaver carcass, two white tailed deer, one whose tail wasn’t quite working so it might be hurt, one massive turtle still looking for a spot to lay her eggs walking like a tiny dinosaur through the grass by the creek between Wood Duck Pond and the McMurray Ponds (same exact date we saw her last year, so May 31st is now officially Turtle Day), two mini Herons, one of which looked more like a Penguin as he stood on a log fishing (turns out they are actually called a Black Crowned Night Heron), one large Blue Heron in flight over the river that later was heard squawking and flying in the other direction, and finally, a bicycle parade.
I paid attention and was astonished, and I wanted to tell you about it.
Black Crowned Night Heron
I received gifts: access to workshops with amazing women at the World Domination Summit in July (yoga with Marianne Elliott, Writing with Susannah Conway, Book Content Mapping with Cynthia Morris, and Identifying Superpowers with Andrea Scher…holy wow, such amazing women that I so adore, my head/heart might explode), my Kickstarter reward from Danielle Ate the Sandwich arrived, along with her new album, which is every bit as good as I knew it would be, and I found a heart-shaped rock on our walk.
I paid attention and was astonished, and I wanted to tell you about it.
I gave gifts: some were shared words of wisdom and kindness, others were scholarships for Susan Piver’s Open Heart Project Practitioner level, and finally there was my heART exchange project, which I finally finished and mailed to Australia today. I plan to write a post about the process (I didn’t just make something, I learned stuff) once my swap partner receives it.
I paid attention and was astonished, and I wanted to tell you about it.
heART exchange project sneak peek
Tribe: it’s Tribe week in my Unravelling ecourse with Susannah Conway, so I’ve been thinking a lot about that, how we can be a tribe of one even. I spent a little bit of time being a tribe of one, writing and eating lunch while waiting for a friend to arrive so we could be a tribe of two and have a long talk about perfection, art, boundaries, dogs and trust. Then, I spent part of the afternoon having another long talk with another good friend, drinking mango lemonade and eating a blue flower cookie as big as my head. I have amazing women in my life, in my tribe.
I paid attention and was astonished, and I wanted to tell you about it.
Yay Turkey, Split Pea Soup, Root Beer, and a notebook at Red Table.
I’ve had moments of being wholehearted, with myself and others in my tribe. These two quotes from Anne Lamott remind me how wonderful and difficult that is: “The love and good and the wild and the peace and creation that are you will reveal themselves, but it is harder when they have to catch up to you in roadrunner mode” and “We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.” I am reminded to slow down, stop doing so much and be.
I paid attention and was astonished, and I wanted to tell you about it.
1. Feast, “an intensive 3-month program for women who want to come home to themselves, make peace with food, and feast on their lives.” I submitted my application about 20 minutes after Rachel opened, that’s how ready I am for this. She’s taking applications now, but just for this week and there are only 30 spots in this session. Other good stuff from Rachel: Go closer and Doing your best.
