A Week of Bears, Finger Puppets, and Love

Truthfully I don’t know where to begin – what a week it’s been.  But in deference to my weekly practice of inviting you in for a peek as I review, let me simply start…

internal landscape:

It hasn’t been a week of a lot of activity.  On the contrary, it’s been a week of pausing, of holding, of waiting. I’ve followed my guidance about this and tried not to push, but I can’t say it’s been easy.  Everyone around me seems filled with the momentum of the new year, flinging open new doors and moving on with things, and I felt a bit disappointed, a bit left out, a bit sad because it all seemed so EXCITING.  And most of all I was worried – what if my mojo left, my muses gave up on me, and all I had to show for it all were grains of sand slipping away in the hourglass of my life?

Oh my mind can be quite the drama queen can’t it?  I thought about that as I woke up today.  And I remembered what I apparently was working so hard to forget.  I remembered one of my super powers is listening to my rhythms and honoring them.  And my body is full out in winter mode.   I wake up slower in the morning – not at 6AM but closer to 7AM and then it’s a more gradual gathering of myself into my day, as opposed to the bouncing out of bed fully energized that comes with Spring.  I laughed last night when a friend said “just feed me Thanksgiving dinner and let me sleep until the Spring Equinox.”   Amen sister – and especially on these days where the low last night was 7 below, the winds were howling, and the snow was blowing.  Move over bear, your cave of hibernation is calling me.

My inspiration hasn’t abandoned me.  I’m playing in Lori-Lyn Hurley’s 3-month journey Write Your Passion and I’m busy gathering endless bits of things I want to write about.  My latest Idea Reliquary journal is bulging in a delightfully satisfactory manner.  I have piles of books tempting me to dig in, and I’m choosing to consider these as delicious invitations and not disapproving reminders of things not done.

epicurean adventure:  Fettuccine with Mushroom Alfredo feels like the perfect winter comfort food to kick off a bit of celebration I’m feeling that there-is-hope-despite-a-slow-start-to-my-new-year-and-in-truth-all-is-well.

good things:

• January 8-14 is dedicated to Universal Letter Writing week and so I’ve been sending out a daily letter.  I also have a stash of fabulous postcards I’ve collected over the years and have been sending some of those as well.  A little squib of love.

• I love singing the praises of Amy Palko and participating in her Goddess Guidance program is one of the delights of my life.  This month I’m dancing with the Norse goddess Erda, who lived in a cave deep within the Earth next to the roots of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life.   It was Erda’s ever-flowing fountain of wisdom that kept the tree watered.  It amused me that I was caught off-guard by another reference to caves (hibernating bear was apparently not enough).  But Erda also appeared in a dream to me and was pointing out all the treasures hidden in the roots of the Tree of Life.  So much goodness there for me to unravel.

• Dream sharing of the nocturnal variety.  To know me is to know I love my dreams in all their Theatre of the Night fabulosity.  And that I believe we are all our own best interpreters of the messages.  But I do love when someone else shares a fabulous dream image or a cryptic message, and my husband loves to delight me with his.  This week’s winner:  someone in his dream told him “people used to worry that Chinese noodles were poisoned, but nowadays it doesn’t get a dread mention.”   I have no idea what I’m going to do with that, but now that it’s planted in my brain I’m not going to let it go.

• I won a giveaway over at The Paper Chronicles – a fabulous print from the J Faulkner line!  Thank you!  It’s a Jack Kerouac quote that reads “Be in love with your life.  Every minute of it.”  Isn’t that a fabulous touchstone for the year?

turning the pages:

Whew, I finished SoulSpace:  Transform your Home, Transform your Life – Creating a Home that is Free of Clutter, Full of Beauty, and Inspired by You which will be the object of discussion for the online book club being hosted by Amy Putkonen.  Also making it to my pile is another book that feels related and seems to be getting a lot of online attention lately:  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing  by Marie Kondo.  I’ve only cracked it open, so more about it later.

on the playlist:

I really love Zoe Keating’s Into the Trees album, and I’ve been inexplicably drawn to playing it over and over again this week.  At first I thought perhaps it was one of those energy strings connecting me with Erda my beloved goddess with the tree connection, but I think perhaps it’s a bit more than that as well.  Poking around on Zoe’s website I discovered her husband has stage IV lung cancer.  We have a family member dealing with that as well.  And so I’m sending love and light and blessings to everyone navigating this path.

on the screen:

I was introduced to the work of outsider artist Judith Scott many years ago and instantly fell in love – her cocoons of wrapped treasures speak to me so deeply.  She had an extraordinarily challenging life and yet left us with such magic.  This short clip is about a retrospective of her work that was presented in 2011.

favorite word of the week:

• Well no doubt “dread mention” from my husband’s dream is my hands-down favorite.
•  But if we’re going with an actual in-the-dictionary word, this week I learned a new non-citrusy meaning for Mandarin.  Mandarin:  adj.: marked by refined or ornate language.

what I’m loving to support:

I love Katherine Dunn – she’s a fabulous artist AND she and her husband live on Apifera Farm where they support “Misfits of Love” – elderly, crippled or special needs goats, donkeys, ducks, geese, pig, blind ponies and old llama.  She’s got a current gofundme campaign going to raise funds to help support the care of these precious creatures.  Donate at a certain level and you can receive a set of postcards when they’re ready.  I’m thinking this is a perfect way to keep our love-letters-in-the-post project going all year long.

fabulosities, curiosities, and brain igniters:

• Jude Hill is always up to something wonderful at Spirit Cloth and I’m swooning over her Across Stars piece.  And this feels like a little hedz up – stars feel like an important motif to me this year.  I’ll be keeping my eyes (and heart) open to see how this unfolds.

• One of my beautiful friends, a kindergarten teacher in CA, has appropriated a giant empty cardboard box and is working with her kids to construct a puppet theater.  My heart leaps with joy at the very idea.  And so, too, with this fun project from the Finnish artist Maija Ukko on her blog Ukkonooa.  Don’t you want some finger puppets?!

• In the spirit of letter writing week here’s an easy way to write a letter to your future you.  I kind of like writing physical letters to my future self and mailing them to be opened at a later date, but I think this would be fun as well.

• I’m pretty sure I need to be creating some manifestos this year.  I think we all do.  The world needs more heart-felt passionate manifestos!  But in the meantime, here’s one by Andrea Balt that rocks and feels like a good one to carry with us into 2015.

• While I don’t really condone gutting perfectly good books, sometimes a volume actually has moved beyond its original purpose.  And then perhaps it’s time to make it into a purse!

And there we have it – a peek into my week.  Now what about yours?  What’s been up for you?  Feeling more like hibernating or are you entering your new year with passion blazing?  Written any letters this week?  Had any fabulous dream messages?  What book would you like to be carrying?  Do tell – you know I love to hear.