Kelly Rae’s new e-course: Flying Lessons: Tips and Tricks to Help Your Creative Business Soar. This course is a huge to gift to anyone who has dreamed of making a living from their creative work or is in throes of starting a creative business. Kelly Rae is a brilliant and generous teacher… you will be in such good hands!
Joshua Radin: Simple Times (The song he sings with Patty Griffin on this album, You Got Growing up To Do is especially lovely)
When you feel sick as a dog for three months straight, you will read a lot of books. I want to share my favorites that I have devoured in this first trimester:
Get Lucky: A Novel – This book by Katherine Center was pure pleasure! It made me laugh out loud all the way through which is nearly impossible to get me to do. Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow – This is now one of my favorite books of all time. I am intentionally reading it slowly so I can absorb every word. (I’m sure I will read it over and over) Elizabeth Lesser is wise, endearing and a beautiful writer. The Last Song – This is not great literature, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this teen love story. My excuse is that I am VERY hormonal, but I cried through most of it. The Help by Kathryn Stockhert – I am still in the process of reading this fantastic book.
Okay. A little secret to divulge. I have been making a small batch of superhero necklaces for Mother’s day! I have a limited number of the following pieces: Joy, Earth, Chlorine, Pyrex.
I’ve posted them on my Etsy site, so place your order now! Quantities and styles will change as I craft more this week. So excited to be bringing you another little batch!
“Every day, God gives us, as well as the sun, a moment when it is possible to change anything that is causing us unhappiness. The magic moment is the moment when a “yes” or a “no” can change our whole existence. Every day, we try to pretend that we do not see the moment, that it does not exist, that today is the same as yesterday and that tomorrow will be the same too.
However, anyone who pays close attention to his day will discover the magic moment. It might be hidden in the instant that we put the key in the door in the morning, in the moment of silence after supper, in the thousand and one things that appear to us to be the same.
“This moment exists, a moment in which all the strength of the stars flows through us and allows us to perform miracles.”
– Paulo Coelho
So far the rumors are true. After 12 weeks of pregnancy you really do start to feel more human. On Saturday, I was shocked and completely exhilerated by the fact that I didn’t feel like throwing up. Just that simple fact was enough to put me in a good mood. Add to that my dear friend SARK’s birthday party at Ft. Mason, some Bocce and Ben’s maiden voyage with a kite and the day was pretty awesome.
I would have posted photos of this marvelous afternoon, but I accidently erased the whole card in an effort to capture a late night mustache adventure instead. Just picture Ben running buck naked down the street in nothing but a black mustache and you can see why I frantically ran for the camera and formatted it without regard for what was already on it. The photo is crap, but the moment, oh the moment.. totally etched in my memory.
Now that I am feeling human again it’s tempting to make up for lost time, to get everything done I’ve been neglecting, to be all superwoman again. But the truth is something in my drive was lost in the last three months. My ability to work, to make plans, all of it kind of flew out the window. I’ve been struggling to find my way in, to buckle down and get my shit together before this baby comes, and I’m finding it hard.
I think feeling lost is inevitable when we are in transition, when we are traveling from one place to another, one passage to the next. We want everything to stay the same, but that is not the nature of change. It requires discomfort and wobbliness and not knowing what’s next. Lately, I feel like I have to trust I am being carried. My old moves don’t work anymore and I’ve had to surrender to the tide of what’s actually happening. Trust that sometimes it’s okay not to know and have faith that what’s next might even be better than what I could have imagined.
“There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I said. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said & then he pulled his eye patch down & turned and sailed away.”
– Brian Andreas, Storypeople
I have been wanting to cultivate a gratitude ritual for our family for some time now. A simple question we can hold in our hands at the end of the day, perhaps a question that flies around the dinner table. What was the best part of the day? What was a highlight? Pretty soon you start looking for best parts and seeing the day through those eyes.
Although I hadn’t gotten around to instituting this yet, Ben started doing this all on his own… asking us the same question each day. It goes something like this:
Ben: “What was your favorite part of the day?”
Me: “My favorite part was riding that big bicycle along the water.”
Ben: “That was my favorite part!”
Ben: “What was your favorite part daddy?”
Matt: “Let’s see, my favorite part was swimming in the pool with you.”
Ben: “That was my favorite part too!”
As you can probably tell, whatever you say, it will be Ben’s favorite part too.
As I sit in the doctor’s lab waiting to get my blood drawn (standard pregnancy stuff) I am looking for favorite parts. Driving around for twenty minutes looking for parking? Not my favorite part. Getting blood drawn? Probably not gonna be my favorite part. (I get very anxious and often cry or pass out when I get a blood test)
But I imagine seeing the same moment through Ben’s eyes… and while I’m with the technician I imagine how this could be my favorite part. As this question enters my mind, I see the sweetness in the man’s eyes when I tell him I don’t feel well and I see how connected he is when the tears start pouring down my face. I notice how he holds my gaze and says, “You are safe with me. Nothing is going to happen to you. I’ve got you…” and how that made me cry a little more. And I noticed how he tried to talk to me about Alicia Keys, about how she was classically trained and writes her own songs and most artists don’t do that and how she deserved those Grammy’s… and I understood that he was trying to keep my mind on something else… I noticed all of it. And because I asked myself how this could be my favorite part, I could see something of the sacred in it. I could see how the favorite parts aren’t necessarily just the fun ones, but the ones where we see beyond the superficial into the sacred. And that’s what happened today. Thanks Arturo. And thanks Ben.
Always a kindred spirit, SARK is offering an online/phone course called Dream Boogie with SARK! If you want to know more about it, click the video above or simply go to this link. As part of the course, she will be interviewing Jen Lemen and myself as the creators of Mondo Beyondo. We are honored to be in such great company! She will be interviewing Brian Andreas, Kris Carr, Eric Maisel and a bunch of other really amazing people.
In the meantime, I’m off for the weekend for a little family getaway. Happy Easter/Passover weekend everyone!
by Karen Maezen Miller
