DON'T POSTPONE JOY

Photo credit: Eylon Israely, 2007 (From Flickr's Creative Commons)

I was talking to my good friend Ahava Shira the other day. She is in the process of organizing an incredible retreat called Opening to Joy on Salt Spring Island, British Colombia, at the end of this month. Ahava is doing some incredible work with men and women -- empowering them to take the entrepreneurial leap creatively, confidently, and with the support and encouragement to ensure that they succeed. This is the first retreat that she is organizing, and as such is both very exciting and a little bit overwhelming at the same time. Ahava mentioned that so far registration has been low, and that as she was driving home from hosting her weekly Radio Show, Love in the Afternoon, she had started thinking about postponing the retreat until the Fall. As she was driving and thinking about this, she looked up and noticed a truck driving down the road in front of her decorated with a bumper sticker that read: "Don't postpone Joy." Ahava is one of the most intuitive people I know, and like me, she is a strong believer in signs, so receiving such a blatantly clear response to her deliberations made her decide to use the weekend to reconsider her idea of postponing, using the time to instead try to come up with a creative way of overcoming the barriers that are preventing those who have expressed an interest in participating in her retreat from registering for it.

I have been thinking a lot about her story this weekend myself, and reflecting on the deceptively simple message on that bumper sticker. It is so easy, with the stresses and challenges of everyday life, to keep putting joy off until later. Until I have a job. Until I have a better salary. Until I have a place to call home. Until I have met a man to share my life with. Until I have a family.....There are so many excuses for putting joy off, and yet when it comes down to it, being joyful is an art form that really has nothing to do with what you have or do not have, who is in your life or not, or whether you have achieved your version of success. It is an art form that can be mastered at any given moment simply by practicing making the choice at every turn to recognize and celebrate joy. In reality, if you cannot be joyful when things are tough, how can you be sure that you will be any better at it when your circumstances change?

For my part I am not at all sure that I would be any better at it in different circumstances, so I have decided that DON'T POSTPONE JOY is going to be my mantra for the new year. There will be no more putting joy off til later. Laundry, taxes, shopping and bills--yes. Joy--no.

What about you, friends? How do you practice the art of joy in the now?

Counter-migration

Photograph is property of Ariana Salvo. May not be reproduced without permission.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will not have it.

    It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” 

-Martha Graham  

This morning I did a writing exercise with my dear friend Ahava Shira, who lives on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. Ahava is a creativity mentor, writer, performer and loving inquirer whose work brings together creative expression, entrepreneurial business skills (which she calls Heartrepreneurs) and personal development to help women find success and fulfillment in work that is joy-filled and life-giving, and in their relationships with friends and family. She leads courses, workshops and retreats, and conducts one-on-one sessions. I highly recommend you visit her website and learn more. She also hosts a radio show on which she reads poetry, plays music and talks about the practice of Loving Inquiry called Love in the Afternoon on Mondays at 1pm PST (it is best enjoyed with a hot cup of tea ;-)). 

Ahava and I have been writing together once a week for about a year now. We do so via Skype, which is such a blessing, because it means she can be right in front of me as we write, and I can see her facial expressions as she shares what she has written and vice-versa. The last few weeks she was waiting for a new computer to arrive, so we could not write, but today she was all set up again and rearing to go, so at 10am we were both seated in our respective creative spaces ready to write. 

I rarely share my more creative/journal writing on my blog, but Ahava was convinced that what I wrote and shared with her this morning needed to be on my blog, so I thought I would give it a try and see what you think since I did say that I was going to be incorporating more of my creative writing into my blog posts. So here you have my creative journal writing piece from this morning. It does not (yet) have a title. I think it may end up being "Counter-migration," but I am not quite sure yet. Reading it again now I am quite certain that is is a sliver of a larger piece in the making. Perhaps I will write the rest of it in the new year, looking back. 

Counter-migration 

Morning sunlight on my sheer cream curtains makes me wonder into another day and what it holds. I think my life is shifting, but I have thought that too many times to be sure. The land of snow is pulling my heart north. Soon my body will be island-bound, returning to its natural habitat, bound by water and community. Its wildness reflecting and amplifying my own.

They say when you leave land you love it misses you as much as you it. That there is always a gap there waiting for you to return—slip back into, belong. The way you can sometimes slip back into a relationship with a dear friend with complete ease even after years apart.

If I were a landscape, I would be an island – a small one at that. I don’t really know why that is, in case you are wondering. It just is.

A week ago I watched hundreds of birds migrate overhead, their dark bodies fluid v-shaped streams, one after the other, dark waves against the blue vault above. It reminded me of a fall evening after picking up a load of turnips for market at the end of a long day. Limbs tired, contentment warm in my chest. We heard them before we saw them, pulled over at the side of the road on our way back to the farm, leaned up against the van, our necks craned up, eyes squinting against the last radiance of light stretched out long across the coastline and the inky darkness of the Atlantic. Above, wave after wave of geese determinedly pressed forward on their arduous journey south. Sunlight the colour of honey gave the left over stubble of the hay fields a grainy, dreamlike appearance. A cold wind blew steady. The sensation inside my body was one of contented yearning—for what I am not sure. The seasonal migration perhaps? The biological urge to give in to the pull of the land and sky? There was, back then, a daily conversation between my body and the land. The moon pulled my tides with her full pale face. At the most basic, biological level I was in synch with the universe.

But this is not about the past or discontent. This is my life. I am finding my way home. I am getting on a plane headed north in two weeks--my migration counter-intuitive. Am I fighting the inevitable, or giving in to some inner truth? It is hard to know. I pray daily. Morning, evening, and often in-between. Will something come of this trip north? Will I remain, the return portion of my ticket unused? Will the land, I wonder, still have me? Will it have held my spot open for me to reinhabit?   

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Do you keep a journal to record your thoughts? If you do, how long have you been journalling, and what do you enjoy most about having a journal? I invite you to and write an entry entitled "Migration." If you feel like it, post a sentence or two from your entry in the comments section below.

Have a beautiful Wednesday night, and an inspiring day tomorrow, friends!  

Ode to playfulness

The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.
Buddha  

One of the virtues I am celebrating this new year is playfulness. I have mentioned, in previous blog entries, that I am taking part in an online women's group, called Loving Inquiry: Finding our way to work, which is being facilitated by Dr. Ahava Shira. Every few weeks, Ahava invites us to walk through another "gate" with her by paying attention to, and nurturing a specific virtue or practice in our every day lives. To live more poetically. Right now we are walking through the gate of play, so I have been reflecting over the past few days on how I play in my daily life.

I am a playful person, once you get to know me, however I am also someone who is very attentive, and sometimes come across as being rather serious. So consciously seeking out those parts of myself that are naturally playful and nurturing those babies is reminding me to stay lighthearted, and to make sure to incorporate moments of pure, untethered, silly and joyful play into every day.

This is a picture of one of my best girlfriends back in Cyprus and I. I love how well it captures the playful nature of our friendship!

Everyone has their own unique ways of expressing playfulness. My mother, for example, whistles. She is a spectacular whistler. She also sings, but her whistling seems to hold a certain joy that she has managed to carry with her since childhood that is sheer bliss. I have a good friend and former colleague for whom work and play were one and the same thing. He took his work seriously, but while he was out harvesting berries for the farmer's market, he would listen for birds nesting close by to determine what kind they were, and in the fall he would stop to count geese as they flew overhead. After work on clear nights he would sometimes grab his telescope and a bunch of us would go out in a field to watch the stars before heading home. And while we were harvesting wood in the forest, he would look for coyote dens. One of his all-time favourite forms of play was to give unsuspecting visitors to the farm a generous handful of freshly picked blackcurrants, telling them that they had to try them, because they were delicious. He would not tell them what it was that he was giving them to try, however, and blackcurrants look very similar to blueberries to the unsuspecting eye. The expression of pure, joyful amusement, that would spread across his face when the poor visitors tasted their first mouthful of exceptionally bitter blackcurrants was something that I never got tired of watching, no matter how many times he repeated the stunt.

When I was out on the farm, playfulness was an integral part of every day -- running down the clearing between rows of vegetables to grab tools before I left the fields; running over and down the hill of a hay field, building up speed so that it felt like I was flying, and trying to jump on top of the hay stacks at the end of the day; throwing rotten fruit or potatoes high up in the air every now and then in the direction of colleagues just to keep them on their toes, or just singing while I worked, were some of my forms of play! Now that my work is mainly writing, I find moments of play in dancing in the kitchen while I wait for the kettle to boil; making funny faces at myself in a mirror when nobody is watching; cooking colourful, flavourful meals with fresh, organic ingredients; doing a handstand in my yoga practice, or engaging in fun, creative dialogues or projects with friends.

Because we just started a new year, I have been reflecting over the last few days on some kind of playful, fun, and creative project that I could start working on that would be a collaborative effort with some of the amazing women that are constantly encouraging me in my own work and inspiring me with their creative endeavours. What I came up with is a year-long journal, divided into twelve months, and shared with eleven other women scattered across the world, each of whom fills a month's worth of pages with inspiring, colourful, fragrant poems, stories, free-writes, drawings, sketches, photographs, and anything else that we feel like including. The topic of the entries is: "what inspires you, gives you passion, energy, courage, grace, and any and all other positive vibes that fuel your creative process?" I sent out an invitation to some of my closest friends around the world to see if they would join me on this collective creation of beauty and inspiration. The resounding "YES" of their response has made me laugh out loud. Their creative juices are already churning, and I cannot wait to see what we create!

My initial idea was that once the book has traveled around the world gathering all of the amazing inspiration that these incredible women are certain to fill it with, we may digitize its contents and share it with other women around the world to inspire them on their journeys. Once we have done this, we will probably auction off our original book, to raise money for a organization that empowers young women. Sound like fun? I am telling you, I am excited. And so are my friends, it would seem. The playing began this afternoon, when, while listening to my friend Ahava's radio show (Mondays, 1-2pm, Pacific time), Love in the Afternoon, I had the pleasant surprise to hear her share the story of our year-long creative journal project with her listeners. Sometimes just sharing creative ideas generates dialogue that is playful! I promise to share more on the journey of our book in future entries!

My idea for the journal came as a result of a number of different inspiring ideas and projects that I have come across lately. One was The Diary of Frida Kahlo, which I actually read a couple of years ago. Another was a recent blog entry by Karen Walrond on journal writing, which reminded me how inspired I had been by The Diary of Frida Kahlo (thank you, Karen!!), and was just so colourful and upbeat, that it made me think about how important journal writing has been to my own process. Karen has also written a book, which I unfortunately do not yet have a copy of, but am hoping to get my hands on soon, that sounds exceptionally playful as well. It is called The Beauty of Different: Observations of a Confident Misfit.  Another project that inspired me is one that an incredible artist, and dear friend of mine, Louise Mould, shared with me (because she is one of the artists taking part in it), and which I wrote about in my blog entry Sparks of inspiration at 2a.m., called the Sketchbook Project. I have also been greatly inspired over the years by an amazing woman living in northern Italy who has this truly unique passion: she lends books out to people all over the world for free (for 6 weeks at a time), with the only condition being that the reader returns the book they are reading to her with something added to it that tells her a little bit about the experience that the reader had while they were reading the book (a dried flower pressed between the pages, notes in the margin, a poem in the margin, etc). So in other words, the book becomes two stories -- the one on the pages, and the story of the many people who have read the story in the book. If you are thinking this sounds incredible (and I assure you, it is), and feel like contributing, she offers this amazing service for free, and is always looking for sponsors. Her website (in Italian), is Libri in Prestito. One of the interesting things about being playful is that you never know how your playfulness will inspire others!

I went to a poetry reading tonight with my mother. One of the poets read a poem about a woman who "everyone said" was not quite right in the head because she went outside to check the furnace, noticed the moon playing on the frozen surface of the lake, and was so transfixed that she stayed out too long, caught pneumonia, and ended up dying. In the poem, which of course was far better than my description of it, the woman's family tell her that she allowed the moon's playfulness to take away her life. The woman's response, on the contrary, was that she could think of no better way to die than feeling as completely alive as she felt witnessing the reflection of playfulness in the moon's face against the pearly ice.

There are so many creative ways to play in our daily lives. What are some of the ways that you plan to play in your life in 2011? 

Forging a path

It has been a long time since I have written a blog entry. The leaves are still falling, but fall is finally giving way to winter, and the temperature has finally dropped low enough to actually justify wearing a light jacket when I go out.

A lot had happened over the past few weeks. One big thing was creating a Tischen site for myself. Tischen is a site that offers free web pages on which businesses or individuals can advertise their services or skills and be contacted by potential clients. Although I do not have my own domain name, I found the exercise of describing my skills and services clearly to be empowering and illuminating. Creating a Tischen page helped me to begin to clarify for myself what it is that I am doing with my writing and how I can bring together some of my own interests and passions with a practical service that could be of value to someone else. If you are interested in checking out what this looks like, visit my Tischen site at http://www.tischen.com/ArianaSalvo

Another exciting thing that I have been engaged in over the last few weeks is a process called Loving Inquiry. Loving Inquiry is a creative and contemplative practice that uses the creative arts as a means of developing gentler, more loving and compassionate relationships with other people and with the natural world. It was developed by Ahava Shira, an inspiring poet, performer and educator who recently finished her Doctoral degree at the University of British Columbia. I met Ahava at a conference on poetics in Charlottetown, back on Prince Edward Island last year. Although I met many inspiring people at the conference, she and I clicked immediately because I was working in the organic farming industry and love poetry, and she lives on a 23 acre organic farm nestled into the flanks of Mount Maxwell on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. She also comes from a Jewish background (her name in Hebrew means “love poetry”), and I have been learning a lot about Judaism over the last couple of years and am always excited to learn more. We have managed to keep in touch since the conference, and when I heard that she was starting to work facilitating workshops (both on the farm and online) for women who are trying to find their calling in life, I immediately asked her to sign me up. Over the past few weeks, a group of ten women and myself have come together on a tranquil little island floating somewhere in the vast sea of the world wide web, and have been receiving inspiring quotes, questions that are intended (and do!) stimulate directed writing practices, and activities that we carry out in our own time and share with the rest of the group through poetry, narrative, photography, painting, drawing, and any other form of creative expression we choose to use.

I am on Facebook. I email. I chat. But Ahava created a web site that is so tranquil that when I sign in I can practically hear my entire body let out a sigh of relief to be stepping over the threshold between the constant motion of my life and the silent space for reflection, contemplation and sharing that I find inside the site. The colours are soft, poetry floats down the side of the page, and images shared by all of the women of our collective landscapes and community appear and fade in the middle of the page. It feels like home.

This past week Ahava asked if I would write an article about her work that she can use to reach out to a larger group of women. Although I have only been taking part in this workshop for three weeks I was very excited to be able to share with others what Ahava is doing and the very tangible benefits that come from participating in her workshops. I started the article yesterday. It is my first official article, which made me slightly nervous. I want to do a good job. But it also is sort of thrilling. I am doing what I love, and I am helping a friend to do what she loves. I imagine she feels the same way! If you are interested in hearing more about Ahava’s work with Loving Inquiry, check out her blog: http://www.ahavashira.com/

I began thinking about the theme that Ahava asked the group to reflect on this next week tonight: compassion. It is a virtue that I am nowhere near being a master of, and going on eleven months of not having a full time job, my compassion for myself is probably at it absolute lowest point right about now. But thinking about compassion made me reflect back over the last week, and what came to me is this:

Last week I was at a thanksgiving supper with nineteen other amazing folks, some of whom I had never met before. It was an amazing meal, the fire was crackling, and the conversation was stimulating. One conversation that especially struck me was one I had with a man from Haiti named Pierre. He and his wife and their three kids have been living in the US for a number of years now, but he recently resigned from his high paying job with the State to move back to Haiti and establish an NGO that focuses on establishing sustainable small-scale agriculture initiatives in rural communities. He asked me what I am doing right now, and I explained that I had done my Master’s degree in Island Studies, my love was organic agriculture and writing, and that I was trying to find what I should be doing with my life right now. The man leaned back in his chair and told me: “This is wonderful. We were meant to come to this supper and sit next to each other. Your skills are exactly what we need in our project in Haiti. You are perfect. Could you please send me your resume?”

After ten months of no fruitful connections, I have to say that shock is a mild description for how I felt being told by this man that I had skills that were extremely valuable to the people of Haiti. I also felt fear. Fear of even the possibility of moving to a country that graces the newspaper daily because of cholera epidemics and rampant violence, poverty and natural disasters. I told Pierre that the work sounded amazing, but shared my fears of going to such a place as a single white woman. He nodded. His wife had already told me how terrible the conditions in Haiti were. I expected him to drop the idea. Instead he said to me: “Yes. Haiti is in a terrible state. But we cannot pretend that we are insulated from the suffering of Haiti. We cannot live in such immense comfort and ignore such deep suffering just because we are afraid or separated by geography.” He went on to tell me that if everyone with skills that could benefit Haiti stays away out of fear, the country will never be able to dig itself out of its current misery. His words are still echoing through my mind and heart now, almost a week later. After some reflection, I realized he is right. I am afraid, but if I let my fear outweigh my compassion, what kind of world am I accepting to live in? What kind of future exists if I allow fear to prevent positive change? I sent him my resume yesterday morning. I am not sure where it will lead, but I keep praying that I will have the courage for whatever comes of this encounter, and that I will be able to use my skills to contribute to his effort.

I feel like I am coming down with something tonight, so in the spirit of compassion (and because I feel lousy), I made myself rosebud tea with honey, relaxed in a hot bath, and brought a hot water bottle to bed with me. All acts of compassion. There is a lot to learn about this virtue, but it seems the universe is bringing me plenty of opportunities to practice!