Category Archives: Judy Clement Wall

An Open Love Letter to Judy Clement Wall

9 Replies

This is my adorable and amazing friend Judy Clement Wall. I have never met her in person, face-to-face, but I get to enjoy her writing, her art, her big heart, loving and kind, from a not so far afar. In both moments of celebration and grief, Judy has offered her encouragement, inspiration, and support. I am so lucky, so grateful.

I can’t remember how I first encountered Judy’s work, but I do know the first community project I took part in was her collaborative project with Julia Fehrenbacher, 41 6-word Days. I don’t know anymore which of their blogs I encountered first, but remember seeing Judy’s “Choose Love” icon and feeling compelled to click on it. I immediately adored her gentle, kind, brave and funny spirit, and her ability to connect people.

Everything she writes, (she has two blogs, A Human Thing and Zebra Sounds, because one is not enough to contain her, as well as various other essays and books), invites readers into a conversation, into connection, to community. It might be her superpower, that and love, which is also her religion.

Judy always challenges me to open up a little more, to contemplate, to feel and to think. We have a lot in common: writing, dogs, hiking, and yoga. We also both apparently tend to be a little Lucille Ball-ish, slightly clumsy and adorably goofy from time to time. We both are in love with love. I think it’s the answer to every question, and she wrote a manifesto about it.

a doodle by judy

I admire Judy for many reasons. She’s a mom, (dogs and kids), a wife, a yogini, a warrior of love. She’s a shared project instigator, a master doodler, a practitioner of hiking, a seer of beauty. But most of all, I admire and aspire to her writing success. She’s both self and other published, (I’ve heard a rumor she’s working on a novel, among other things), committed to her work, to engaging with the world and her experience, and sharing that with her readers, inviting them to do the same.

I will be tender with other people’s hearts.
I will be fearless with my own.
~Judy Clement Wall

I wrote and am mailing her a long, loopy love letter today. You should check her out, keep an eye on her, connect with her amazingness, and if you feel so moved, write your own love letter to someone in your life, formalize and verbalize, embody the love you feel for them. You can never go wrong with a thank you, with a love letter.

P.S. Further proof that Judy has the biggest heart, that love is one of her superpowers: Just hours after I hit “publish,” she’s already thanked me in three different ways for this one, single post.

Something Good

2 Replies

This post is late. I had a long, long, hard, busy day yesterday, and by the time I got home at almost 8 pm, I just didn’t have it in me to do it. So, here it is–better late than never?

1. Creative Superheroes Interview: Laurie Wagner on Superhero Journal.

2. Neil Gaiman announced that he’s writing another Sandman. You might not already know this about me, but I love Neil Gaiman’s writing and his voice, and the Sandman series was how I first encountered his work, so I’m very excited that there will be another.

3. This quote: I couldn’t live without dog. ~Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher). Me either.

4. Land Art. I was reminded of this when I found a post on This is Colossal about the work of Andres Amador. There’s also this post and this one and this, and of course there’s Andy Goldsworthy, whose work is the first Land Art I’d ever seen.

5. Maybe. Maybe Not. on Nourishing the Soul. “If we are caught up in defining the events of our lives as positive or negative, we lose our ability to see and to hear the quiet ways in which other opportunities are presenting themselves.”

6. Convalesce on SouleMama. “I don’t know that we currently live in a world in which we can all lay low, painting in the sunshine and spending weeks recovering from illnesses. But I do know for certain that in small but important ways, we can all be a little bit gentler on ourselves – and each other. And that a cure for so many things lives in moving slowly and being still. ”

7. How to Become Open to Life on Zen Habits.

8. Manifesto love: three manifestos for creatives on Zebra Sounds. I love a good manifesto, and I love Judy Clement Wall.

9. How to Be an Explorer of the World on Brain Pickings. 

10. This quote from Raam Dev:

There are times in life when we need to go with what feels right. Ignore all the critics, the naysayers, and those who will judge us by their own definition of truth. Create your own path, forge your own destiny, and make all the mistakes and dead-end turns necessary to arrive alive. Sometimes what we need cannot be put into the context of right or wrong but must be defined and acted upon by the compass of our soul.

11. This quote: What most of us think of as fear is primarily a mental process of imagining situations that do not exist in the moment. ~Cheri Huber

P.S. Tuesday’s Three Truths and One Wish will be a day late this week too, will be written and posted tomorrow. I’m sensing a theme, seeing a pattern to this week…