Committing to the Messy Middle
When I was a kid, I made up my own language. I wanted to speak in a foreign tongue, but, of course, I didn’t know any, so I just strung some sounds together and pretended. I mostly spoke it to my stuffed animals and sometimes to my little brother, probably to bug him. And occasionally...
Color Me Here
As we stepped outside the other day, I suggested my husband and I do a “color walk,” where you look for a specific color as you stroll along. He chose red, of course. It’s his favorite color. So, we started naming red things immediately: red front door, red car, red trim on house, red wagon....
What is Your Shower Song?
Lately, I’ve been musing on my choice of shower songs and worrying a bit about what they might say about me. I’ve found lists of the most popular shower songs on the internet and none of them make it into my repertoire. Mine seem to be dredged up from the far reaches of my mind...
The Wisdom of the Gummy Bears
Recently, I had two dreams back-to-back that both featured me eating gummy bears. This struck me as odd. I like gummy bears, but they’re not something I usually seek out. Being more the organic dark chocolate type, they’re not a candy that typically crosses my mind. I’ve always meant to get better at interpreting and...
Reclaiming the Aha Moment
Since I was young, the F-word has been what I called my “reserve word.” If you heard me say it you knew one of two things: I was either royally pissed or I’d had too much to drink, and either way, you should probably take me home. In the past few years of living in...
A Good Kind of Rejection
A friend and I are going chapter by chapter through the book It’s Not Your Money by Tosha Silver. We had both read it before, but not one chapter a week as the author suggests. There’s a very important section in the book where the author talks about getting rid of clutter. Casting out the...
How to Be Lost in a Good Way
A couple of days ago, my instructor explained how we’d be doing things differently “because of Covid.” “Ah, ‘because of Covid’,” I said. “The crappiest words in the English language.” “Are they really, though?” another student asked. “I could think of worst things we could say.” She was right, of course. Words are just words...
Read This with No Expectations
I’ve started off this year enrolled in an eight-week creativity class. Me, a 30-year veteran of the creative life. You’d think I’d know it all by now, but I sometimes need to sharpen my creative tools or be reminded why this work matters. As part of our homework for this week, the instructor suggested we...