Rain showers, tea, and back yard chickens

The air has started hinting at a season change. I say hint because the forecast for the next few days is more of the 90s. But yesterday we actually had slightly cooler weather. Cool enough that a very light rain shower fell for not more than 15 minutes. I was sitting in a coffee shop downtown with one of my girlfriends sipping our "bowls of soul" (steamed soy milk with chamomile tea and honey) and catching up when she interrupted me to point at unusual amount of moisture falling from the sky outside. We sat and stared. It was more of a sprinkle than a rain shower, but I am learning to take whatever I can get in the way of precipitation out here. It felt like such a gift even though it was over before we made it back outside in our tank tops and sandals to drive home.

But seriously, it does feel like the season is shifting, and I am really looking forward to the Fall. For some rain showers, and days when I can get away with getting bundled up without looking utterly ridiculous. I never thought I would hear myself say that I looked forward to getting bundled up after dressing like Michelin Man in Canada for almost six years, but there you go. I have been finding myself missing snow lately also. Fortunately one of my best friends and her husband just moved to Newfoundland and bought a house there, so in the future, whenever I need a snow fix I can hop on a plane and go get enough of it to last me the rest of my life.

I went on a date this week with a man who has chickens in his back yard. I painted my toe nails specially for the occasion. He told me that I should watch my toes because his chickens would mistaken my crimson nails for berries and peck at them. New note to self: don't paint nails on first dates with men who raise poultry. Just when you think you've experienced it all....(side note: In case you are curious, I still have all of my toes, for which I am incredibly grateful!)

I am having some health issues right now that the doctors have not been able to figure out. They are stumped. The result is that I've had awful stomach aches for the last two weeks. This evening my mom came home and heated up some plain rice for supper. I am investigating with trying to find foods that I can eat without getting a stomach ache until we figure out what is happening. There is something about having one's mother prepare any kind of food for you when you are not feeling well that just makes the world feel SO much better. When I feel fine I would rather do the cooking, but when I am under the weather having my mom close is such a blessing. I made a mental note to include her in my gratitude Monday post. I am deeply grateful for my mother's tenderness when she has had a long and stressful day at the office and is feeling tired herself.

I have been taking Karen Walrond's Chookooloonks Pathfinder course, and am finding it is really helpful. I had fallen a bit behind the last few days so today was my catch up day. I made lists of things I love to do, and wrote out practical steps to take towards achieving my goals. I used colourful markers and drew inspiration maps. It is amazing to me how ideas are emerging out of the void -- some of which I have had before, but some of which I had never considered. Even better is her telling me to write out the small steps to get me where I want to be. Having deadlines is a BIG help! I am really excited to start taking the steps I have outlined over the next few weeks. Some of them I am already working on -- like attending poetry readings by well-known poets (I am going to hear Mary Oliver read in a couple of weeks....SO excited!), and working on a manuscript of poetry that I am going to start sending off to publishers to see if I can get a collection of poetry published. It is all really scary, but exciting at the same time. So much foreign territory -- so much unknown. I feel completely out of my comfort zone, and the fact that I am still moving forward despite this fact is really, really empowering! I am feeling grateful for Karen Walrond, her incredible photography and blog posts, and her courage to leave her high-paying corporate job to follow her heart and become so successful at highlighting all the beauty that exists in the world. This course rocks!

I am also feeling grateful for my girlfriends here in California -- the ones that go out for hot drinks with me to share our fears, hopes, dreams and moments of humour with each other. The ones who are incredible mothers (I am learning SO much from them all!). The ones who are training for half-marathons (Dionne, Julia, and Meredith, I'm talking to you!) and inspiring me to want to strive to be even fitter and stronger over the next year. The ones who go to totally girly movies with me. The ones who invite me out to breakfasts and dinners, who join me for Italian film festivals on the grass under the starry sky, who remind me to laugh at myself and not take life so seriously, and who take the time to sit and listen to all the details of first dates, and reflect my experiences back to me in a new light.

Tonight I should be chairing a meeting. I had the agenda all ready, and had studied all the documents that I was planning on having people read and discuss. I was really looking forward to it, but my stomach was not, so I am home resting instead, and my dear mother is very kindly filling in for me. Gratitude once again that she is close by to help out when I am under the weather.

Tomorrow morning, if I am up to it, I am having tea with another friend before I start the work day. I am looking forward to catching up with her, and to starting my day by sipping tea with a friend. I used to meet one of my closest friends from Canada for mid-morning tea at a tiny German bakery on Prince Edward Island, and it always made the day so much better. I have a good feeling about tomorrow already!

As the weather cools off, and you start enjoying hot cups of tea and coffee, and getting bundled up when you leave the house, what are you feeling grateful for? Try jotting down at least one thing before you fall asleep at night that you feel grateful for. Or at least think it. Thoughts of gratitude have such incredible power to transform the experience of this life I am finding. Have a great Monday night, and a superb Tuesday, friends! See you here Wednesday.

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?