Buttons Are Stories

Here is what I love:

Ever since I was a kid, my mom kept a big jar of buttons. I used to take them out and sort through them. There were shiny brass buttons off military uniforms worn by my grandfather. There were large hand made clay buttons that my mom and aunt created in a college art class. There were plain buttons and fancy buttons. There were even some buttons that I remembered as having once been on a dress belonging to me.

I love that every button has a story. Some of the stories aren’t known, but the button carries the story all the same. And what I like to do- collect a whole pocket full of stories and take out the right story when the moment calls for it. Its a comfort that my mom took care of all those stories for so many years. Lately, I have begun to collect bits of cloth, old pieces of jewelry, tiny shells and colored rocks. Each of these pieces has a story too. They might not be practical to keep, but they are magic.

Three cheers for stories we can carry in our pockets! They are the memory of who we are.

 

Vegetables!

Here is what I love.

Vegetables! Do vegetables really ever get the credit they deserve? They come in every color of the rainbow, they can be eaten in limitless combinations of salad, soups, and main dishes, and no animals need be harmed in the making of dinner.  And did I mention they are loaded with nutrients? What’s not to like? Okay, maybe some bossy grown up used to force you to eat copious amounts of questionable, limp spinach, and if that’s the case, I’m truly sorry. But its no reason to write vegetables off for good.  Farmers markets carry fresh, seasonal, local vegetables in more and more urban locations, so we have more opportunity to eat our vegetables, and more choices than ever before.

Here’s the thing: Last week I was reintroduced to my already innate love of vegetables by my good friend Sarah. Sarah operates a health program out of her home called Pure Life Retreat*. One of the main missions of Sarah’s program is to remind her participants of the health benefits of eating a plant based diet. Let me tell you, they are many. And, after living on plants alone for my week with Sarah’s program, I just felt better. Cleaner. Thank you dear Sarah!

* Pure Life and HeartStory are not affiliated, and do not share all the same views. Two things we do share: friendship, and a love of vegetables!

Just as I am

Here is what I love:

Today I looked in the mirror and was surprised to realize that after spending most of my life disliking my body for one flaw or another, I actually liked what I saw! It isn’t that I’ve suddenly gotten more disciplined or more beautiful. Quite to the contrary aging keeps on happening with all the changes that implies. What I notice has changed is that here I am feeling comfortable in the skin I’m in. Here I am being 40 years old and okay with that. I see my reflection with smile wrinkles around the eyes and recognize myself kindly as a human being instead of a project to be improved upon. I see my post-baby-birthing form today as just me, rather than some natural disaster that has got to be cleaned up. When did this happen? Is it a permanent leap in perspective, or just a blessed contentment of the day? I don’t know for sure. What I can tell you is that loving myself as I am where I am in this moment feels good.

Courage is Making a Leap of Faith

Here is what I love.

I love that moment when I stop listening to the chorus of fears within me, and take action in the direction of my dreams. I love how even when my heart is pounding in my chest I still have the power to choose. I love the moment when I know my courage has won out and I am in free fall in the leap of faith towards my wildest dreams.

Today I took a tiny leap of faith and went to my first ever Toastmasters meeting. I have always wanted to give presentations with confidence, and too often anxiety has stopped me. I was amazed how just sitting in the Toastmasters audience activated anxious feelings. I was inspired by the people there who got up and spoke. They demonstrate that it is possible to make leaps of courage, and that getting up again and again and taking action on heartfelt courage makes a powerful difference. I haven’t leaped quite that far yet, but I want to acknowledge and express my gratitude for those who do!

Our Wildest Dreams Are Stalking Us!

Our Dreams are Stalking Us!

“We like to pretend it is hard to follow our heart’s dreams. The truth is, it is difficult to avoid walking through the many doors that will open. Turn aside your dream and it will come back to you again. Get willing to follow it again and a second mysterious door will swing open.” -Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, 66.

The other day I treated myself to a solo trip to the Folsom Zoo Sanctuary. I spotted a peacock with vivid blue green feathers strolling along about a hundred feet from where I was. I crouched down and was silent; curious to see how close the peacock might come to me if I just kept still. To my delight, he continued to meander in my direction until he was quite close. Just as the peacock turned and passed me by, I became eerily aware of another energetic presence that was as close to me as the peacock had been. The attention of a couple nearby was riveted on something directly behind me. “He’s stalking!” I heard the woman say. Slowly I stood up and looked behind me. There, not ten feet from me was a full-grown tiger staring intently and postured as if ready to pounce! Here I had been thinking I was so observant and aware, but was completely oblivious that a tiger had been stalking me even as I stalked the peacock! It was unsettling to realize that had we been in the wild I would very likely have become food. And even so there is a way in which I recognize that tiger as a kindred soul.

My random choice book for this week is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The usual practice I follow is to blog about a chapter that I open to at random. I tried to do that with The Artist’s Way, but I found that it was calling me to dig a little deeper. (The chapter that I opened to by the way was “Week 5, Recovering a Sense of Possibility”) Juia Cameron is reminding me that my creative dreams are always looking for me, and will find me if I remain open to them even if sometimes it feels like I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.
I chose the quote from Julia Cameron above because its something I believe and yet find hard to believe at the same time. It’s the kind of thing that I tell other people, and yet harbor doubts about when it comes to applying it to my own life. If we believe this quote, the truth is that our dreams are stalking us! We don’t have to chase them so much as we need to just be still and stop resisting them. (If my being-stalked-by-a-tiger metaphor breaks down for you here, just let it go and see Julia’s lovely metaphor of doors opening to support our dreams featured above. )

Those of you who are familiar with The Artist’s Way will know that at the core of this work is the invitation to begin each day with The Morning Pages. Morning Pages are when you get up at the crack of dawn and do simple stream of consciousness writing in your journal for three pages. That’s it. You start writing whatever comes into your mind or out your pen, and you don’t stop no matter what. It isn’t important what you write so much as that you make it a practice to do it everyday. The goal isn’t to write something brilliant so much as it is to get in the habit of sifting through and past all that stuff that collects in our heads. I’ve been doing Morning Pages for the past week, and I am loving it. A wise woman I know, Karen Ely, has been urging me to do Morning Pages for the past six months! If you are reading Karen, thank you! I am finally listening to your advice!

Resources in this Article:

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
The Folsom Zoo Sanctuary, Folsom, CA
A Woman’s Way, Workshops and Retreats with Karen Ely

The Fullness of Our Beauty

Here is what I love.

This quote by Jon Kabat-Zinn about flowers! I adore the idea that we are all different kinds of flowers, and that our “job” is simply to bloom!

“It is our job to find out one by one and collectively what kind of flowers we are, and to share our unique beauty with the world in the precious time that we have, and to leave the children and grandchildren a legacy of wisdom and compassion embodied in the way we live, in our institutions, and in our honoring of our interconnectedness, at home and around the world.” ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness (New York: Hyperion, 2005), 16

My Shelf of Much Loved Books

It may be when we no longer know what to do,
We have come to our real work,
And that when we no longer know which way to go.
We have begun our real journey.

Wendell Berry

Here is what I love.

I love my books.

Today I took every book I have that nourishes my soul and set them up in a prominent bookshelf in my living room. Here, with this shelf full of wonderful titles, how could I possibly lack for anything book knowledge can bring? Certainly there is a wide range of topics and factoids my best loved books just don’t cover. Still, it is unlikely that obsessive continued trips to the library or the bookstore would harvest anything better or truer than I could glean just by settling into my favorite chair with a book I already own. In a spirit of spontaneous curiosity, I closed my eyes and pulled from the shelf the first book my fingers touched. It was Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Coming to Our Senses.

I opened the book to the Introduction chapter and saw the quote from Wendell Berry featured above. When we no longer know what to do or which way to go, our real work, our real journey has begun. How many times I find myself in that place- unsure of where to go next, unsure of what action would serve! Maybe you are like that too. This quote by Wendell Berry reminded me that not knowing can be as important, and often far more soulful, than knowing. New possibilities arise when we are emptied of the endless chatter of our own ideas.

And so, it is in this spirit of not-knowingness that I greet you. I have tried so many times to think up brilliant ideas for blogs and newsletters, only to have them come to nothing when my mind ran short of brilliant blips. But I don’t have to come up with inspiration all on my own. I have two whole shelves of inspiring friends to help me! I submit to you that like me you probably already have a shelf of best-loved things. Maybe not a shelf, maybe a shoebox, or a photo album, or a computer file. Maybe for you it’s a treasured box of family recipes, or a precious group of friends. Maybe it’s a pair of dancing shoes. Whatever you have that you truly love, I invite you to consider that it is enough. Seeking for more, or better, or newer things probably won’t be as valuable as delving deeper into those long loved things you already have.

And so, as much as possible, I’m going to ask myself not to buy any new books for a while. As a confirmed bibliophile I am giving myself permission to be imperfect on this one, because sometimes something new comes along that just has to be read! But revisiting those books on my shelf is like having tea with a wise and familiar friend. I invite you to join us!

Every so often, I’ll be posting thoughts and inspirations from my shelf of favorite books on the HeartStory blog. Since I get a kick out of spontaneous curiosity and hold a not-so-secret passion for the synchronous, I’ll be pulling books with my eyes closed and then opening them to any-chapter in an act of blind faith. I’ll share with you what I’m reading, and invite discussion when I figure out how to do that on a blog.

Next time I post, I will tell you a little more about what Jon Kabat-Zinn has to say in his wonderful (and thick!) book, Coming to Our Senses.

Until then,
Katie

The Five Things We Cannot Change

Here is what I love.

I absolutely love this book by David Richo.

The book is called, “The Five Things We Cannot Change… and the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them”

Here’s why I love it. Of all the transformative and juicy books I keep on my shelf, this is hands down the book I have found myself recommending more than any other. If you’ve never read David Richo’s enthralling manifesto to personal freedom, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Why do I recommend this book so often? Maybe because its message applies to everyone.

Richo’s premise is that there are 5 things that impact every life, no matter who you are. He calls these 5 things “The Givens of Life”. They are:

1. Everything changes and ends
2. Things do not always go according to plan
3. Life is not always fair
4. Pain is a part of life
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time

Richo explains that in his 30 years as a psychotherapist, it was these 5 things that his clients struggled with again and again. He proposes that it is not the 5 unavoidable givens that are the real source of our suffering. Instead says Richo, it is our own fear of and struggle against the givens that really causes suffering. Richo goes so far as to suggest that the givens actually teach courage, compassion and wisdom, and that happiness can be found in embracing them.

This book includes a chapter on each of the givens, drawing a more specific picture of how they manifest themselves in our lives. Richo shows that learning to say an “unconditional yes” to life in spite of the givens can open up channels for grace and unexpected beauty to occur. And thankfully, he devotes a good deal of the book to offering strategies for learning to say the full “yes!” to life.

As I try to write this review, I find myself stumped because every chapter is a gem. I have literally underlined passages in my copy on almost every page. It’s a book I want to read over and over. Perhaps one of the most important ideas contained in this book is on calling. Says Richo,

“Our universal calling as humans is to be the most loving people we can be. This commitment makes us less likely to be at the mercy of others’ reactions to us or opinions of us. We appreciate acceptance but do not crave or cling to it. We are hurt by rejection but  not devastated by it. Our focus is on how we love, not on how we are loved, on how we can give, not on what we can get…. Our calling is also about other capacities, gifts that are givens of who we are… Each of us is here to discover and share marvelously unique inner gifts. That is what the world is waiting for and why we were given a lifetime. Our appreciation of our gifts is itself the antidote to the self-loathing and self-diminution that we sometimes suffer.”

The secret within these pages is that we don’t have to get stuck when bad things happen. We have the human capacity to choose love over fear. When we choose love in the face of disaster, something amazing happens. All of a sudden, we open ourselves to the divine graces of being human- the other equally true givens. Richo names some of them:

 Irrepressible playfulness and sense of humor
 Our ability to go on loving no matter how we are treated by others and no matter what happened to us in the past
 Our capacity to forgive and let go
 Our unflappable hope
 Our skill at finding order in chaos and meaning in disaster
 Our intuition, which reveals more than we logically know
 Our tendency to be honest even when no one is looking
 Our striving for what lies beyond our grasp, our inclination to stretch ourselves
 Our power to say, do, or be something that leads to healing ourselves and others

Wow, now that I’ve reviewed this book for you, I just want to go back and read it again! Thats all for now, thanks for reading!

Katie