In her Dangerous Old Woman audio course Clarissa Pinkola Estés says she had a family member who would often say "how things begin is how they end." 

Meaning, if something starts out hard or easy, we can take note and trust that as an indicator. 

Do you have any hellebore (aka lenten rose) blooming by you?

The ones in my yard started blooming a couple weeks ago, and it was such a shock to see their beautiful flowers here toward the end of "The Long Brown Time," as I like to call this season. 

I was listening to Elise Loehnen's podcast Pulling the Thread the other day and she said "Your vibration must be higher than the thing you create, otherwise you cannot manage it." 

I really liked this and it's giving me one more way of processing my work with Ruminate, the literary magazine I dreamed up and led from 2006-2019.  

I am very aware of and sensitive to the sun—it's like I'm heliotropic (when a plant follows the movement of the sun throughout the day). And for awhile I was even thinking of writing an entire book about the sun.

Here in Colorado we average around 300 days of sunshine and the sunshine feels stroooong. My friend who lives here now but grew up in Wisconsin always teases me and her other Colorado-born friends about how quickly we deteriorate (life is terrible!) after just a few days of cloudiness. But it's true. Ha!

I think creativity and mysticism return me to a deeper selfhood. Which might mean that my deeper selfhood is creative and mystical, right? 

My teenagers love it when they find me goofing up and then I tell them I was wrong...and even better if I tell them they were right. Ha! And then we usually laugh about it—there's something about parents being wrong that is innately funny.

But beyond that, I think cultivating a willingness to be wrong is so freeing…

I did another retreat with the lovely Heather Ruce yesterday to honor the threshold of a new year, and I love how she integrates sacred gestures into her work.

Sacred gestures connect us with the body's intelligence through ancient and intuitive movements, which seem to carry their own energetic signatures. These are simple postures or gestures that our collective bodies have done for generations and generations and generations across cultures and traditions.

In honor of winter solstice my friend sent me a link to this poem/children’s book The Shortest Day.

Have you read it?

I was in a class recently and the teacher asked us to draw a picture of attention. I drew a sun with big sunbeams radiating out. I was initially surprised to see how positive my association with attention is (I've historically had a lot of fear of being "too big for my britches" or getting too much attention or taking up too much space). 

When I quit my job as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine I had dreamed up and led for 14 years, I was feeling pretty burnt out and cynical about the whole writing/reading thing.

And actually, I think I took a break from reading anything for awhile. I watched a lot of TV and movies and listened to podcasts.  

But I was also starting to write poetry and thankgod I found Tony Hoagland. 

Awhile ago I was looking in a book for a line I needed to hear again and had forgotten. And in the age of instant internet searches, I find that I am a lot more impatient with slowly flipping and scanning and flipping and scanning. 

I could have sworn I had underlined the line, but I still couldn't find it and I gave up. 

At any given time I have a to-do list. I like to-do lists because it helps me to get things down on paper so that my mind doesn't have to worry about forgetting.

But sometimes my to-do list can feel overwhelming and heavy. 

I was telling a friend this the other day and she said she also keeps an "evidence list"…

Do you ever feel like you're just waiting to step into life? Hoping there will be a specific moment where something clicks, when the pain of remaining the same will be greater than the fear of change?

In my own experience, I have to become very annoyed with myself and all my waiting and repeating, with telling the same story over and over.

When I started coaching in 2021, I thought it would be completely separate from my 15+ years of working in editing/publishing. I thought I was starting over. 

I wanted to continue freelance editing in addition to life coaching, but I thought they would be two very different businesses. 

I've been listening to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes' series The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype. (If you have a library card and use Hoopla, you can also find this series there.)

In it she discusses the archetype of the vampire/predator, which she says can exist in us as a part of our psyche and outside of us in the form of other people, ideas, institutions, etc.

What would it look like for you to practice being what you already are?

This is top of mind for me right now in terms of building my coaching practice (I’m taking new clients!) and accepting the way I want to do things.

I've been thinking about what it means to live in your own power—not power over anyone else or under anyone else, but your own inner power. 

And I like addiction counselor Pia Mellody's idea that power comes from self-control and living in action rather than reaction to other people and circumstances.  

It sounds so obvious!

When my kids and I moved this year, it could have just been a time of stress and exhaustion and to-do lists. But thankfully I also had a house blessing with friends to honor the transition and to honor our family home. We sang and walked through the home and lit candles and laughed. 

When my divorce process was finalized with a 10-minute zoom hearing, if I was looking for some kind of deeper closure from the legal system I would have been really disappointed!