When I checked the prompt for today, I knew exactly which picture I wanted to share. Last week, when I was visiting my aunt at Gleneden Beach on the Oregon Coast, we walked down to the ocean from her house and next to the beach access path, someone had left their bikes. The people were obviously somewhere down on the sand, and the bikes waited for them to return, resting on a splash of yellow flowers. Something about that scene stopped me, made me want a picture of it, captured so perfectly for me what summer is like.
Then this morning, as I was sitting at my desk writing, I paused and looked up, noticing all the yellow around me — the Sharpie highlighter I use to mark the date of each entry in my journal (it makes it easier to find a specific one when I’m searching for something), the yellow edge on the plastic bag containing the shells and agates I collected on that same walk on the beach last week, the gold of the inside of the cover of the Pema Chödrön book I’m reading, and the yellow sun my pen pal Kerilyn Russo doodled on the back of the letter she just sent me.
1. This description of a good writer, from Isaac Asimov, “You are my idea of a good writer because you have an unmannered style, and when I read what you write, I hear you talking.”
4. On being copied from Andrea Schroeder, in which she says “people aren’t buying your product or service on its own – they’re buying your product or service animated by your creative essence.”
Beautiful, true, important things almost always take a long time to come to fruition. There are often very long stretches that are tedious, thankless, difficult and hard to measure. We get tired and that makes us weak and vulnerable to things that hurt our feelings or make us want to stop trying. There are often points in the journey when we feel absolutely alone, misunderstood and even cast out. There are sometimes points in our journey when we just want to be alone…and that is hard to explain to people we love. Making progress is not easy, is it?
With all of that in mind, however…think even more seriously about how miserable it is to stay stagnant. Think of how awful it feels to know in our hearts that we are meant for something, but to continue to ignore it, run away from it….or stay stuck just looking at it in fear.
12. The Well-Fed Woman: Tara Sophia Mohr on Rachel Cole’s blog, in which Tara describes something I know all too well, in a way I hadn’t quite figured out how to say it yet:
I grew up making art of all kinds – but when I went to college I couldn’t find a way to create comfortably in the highly competitive, hierarchical environment there. My center drifted over to my more intellectual, left-brain side, and that became my comfort zone. The more I was centered there, the harder it was to create. I became very, very afraid making art – so frozen in my creativity, afraid of failure, afraid of “not being good.”
13. Also on Rachel Cole’s blog, a brilliant reframing of perfection, The New (Im)perfection.
21. Rachel Cole linked to a song in her Midsummer’s Joy post, and I was so happy, not realizing that Mary Lambert, the gorgeous female voice on Macklemore’s “Same Love,” had her own full song, She Keeps Me Warm. I bought her EP Letters Don’t Talk and have been listening to it on repeat (it’s only five songs).
Dreams come true, Jill, that’s what they do. The only variable is when. For the slow approach: Resist. Attach. Insist. Deny. Stop. Second guess. Whine. Argue. Defend. Protest. Cry. Struggle. And ask others, when you know the answer yourself. For the quick approach: Visualize. Pretend. Prepare. Dodge. Roll. Serpentine. Do not waiver over intentions, but over methods. Show up, even when nothing happens. And give thanks in advance. You knew that.
I am gradually learning that the call to gratitude asks us to say, “Everything is grace.” As long as we remain resentful about things we wish had not happened, about relationships that we wish had turned out differently, mistakes we wish we had not made, part of our heart remains isolated, unable to bear fruit in the new life ahead of us. It is a way we hold part of ourselves apart from God.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 