Where Do You Live?

Everything is changing – and fast. Our money, our climate, our connections. I find myself longing for the good old days – bygone days remembered through rose-coloured glasses when everyone could afford to buy a house, when cities valued green spaces and parks over condo developments and when people talked on rotary phones that hung on the walls of their kitchens.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. ~ C. S. Lewis, author

I feel at odds with the pace of the modern world – like I need to slow down, take a breath and get clear on where I’m headed – where we’re all headed as we heave like a runaway train towards progress, wealth, success.

The two main characters in my novel grew up without iphones, the internet or reality TV. They grew up when I did. We know what a typewriter sounds like, how to search the periodicals section of a library, how many sweet tarts a penny can buy. I’ve carefully planted my characters, like helpless Barbies, into this world because I know this time and place, better than the one I live in today.

The world of my novel is where I grew up, where I lost my first tooth, had my first kiss, got my first job and became who I am. It is where my imagination was born. And so now, as I find myself straggling behind, a child of a different time, wandering in the creative direction of my past, I know am not lost. This is my home. It’s where I live.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou, poet

When I try to punch the time clock of today I am not content. I was a frenzied blogger and now I blog slowly. I was overwhelmed with a busy life and now I live a more calm existence. I am changing, growing, loving and creating at this pace and from this place. But I will not rush, destroy, überconnect, bombard, sell out, burn out or take for granted this home, this planet, this gift.

I am sure-footed and I am moving towards my own kind of progress on this peaceful, open road. This is where I write. This is my garden. This is my home.

Where do you live?

Dazed & Inspired

I’ve been in a bit of a daze lately. The novel is going great — I’ve only missed one day of writing in a thirty-five day string. But I’m off a little.

Maybe part of my sense of fogginess comes from half living in the real world and half in the imagined world of my characters. I often feel as though I’m walking around in their ill-fitting shoes. They are very troubled and I am not. They are trapped and I am not. And yet their troubled circumstances coat my psyche with a sense of unease.

My dreams are vivid and epic. My body feels plodding.

It could also be something to do with the cupcakes I’ve become obsessively addicted to.

Damn Three Bakers and A Bike.

Why do they have to make the best vanilla cupcakes on the planet?

And why did they choose to locate their bakery within walking distance of my home?

But I digress.

I woke this morning in need of inspiration – something to snap me out of my daze. I opened my email to find a note from a lovely blogger named Jodi Chapman. She’s the writer over at Soul Speak. Her blog was the cure for my sugar-brain.

Jodi writes a lot about gratitude and has created a terrific gratitude book that she gives away for free if you sign up for her daily inspirational emails. It’s the perfect tool for creating positive and gentle momentum in one’s life. I can’t wait to begin using it.

She also has something she calls Shared Wisdom in which she shares a blog post from another blogger. In fact, that’s why she was contacting me. She wanted to share one of my posts with her readers. I am following her lead and sharing her blog with you. Here’s what she says about herself and her blog, Soul Speak.

Going from being a skeptical, left-brained gal to a spiritual woman, who lets her intuition and messages from the other side guide her, has been quite the journey.

I am a big believer in going within, being grateful, and living positively. Your soul always has the answers, and I truly believe that all it takes to get to those answers is the commitment to slow down, dig a little bit, and reawaken your inner voice – your higher self. It’s always been there waiting for you.

I believe that our thoughts become our reality, and our actions lead us to our dreams. I believe that my higher self helps me write each day. I am learning right along with all of you, and I am so glad that we are helping each other on this wonderful journey. Here’s to each of us following our inner voice.

Visit Jodi at Soul Speak if you’re feeling a little dazed and in need of some lovely inspiration. I’m glad I did.

The View From Here

Looking out over my life I see patterns. I tend to rush into things without thinking them through fully. I have a stubborn stick-to-itiveness when it comes to problem solving. I’m continually bumping up against the lesson that it’s not all about me, and yet, I can be very generous and would do anything for those I love. I can bask in great stretches of laziness, but also sustain long sessions of productivity with intense focus. My patterns are chock-full of ebbs and flows in enthusiasm, energy and ego. They etch the landscape of my past, my present and will likely form the contours and colours of my future.

We all have patterns in our lives.

Viewing them from a distance can help us understand their beauty, their shape and the direction these patterns are taking us. Not only can we see where we are and how we got here, but we can also figure out how to get somewhere new, if that’s what we want.

Our patterns can fuel personal growth, creativity and life change.

Simply by creating new habits in our lives we can breathe new life into old patterns, we can forge new grooves by reshaping old routines and rerouting our patterns.

Here are some simple daily habits I am hoping to cultivate over the next few years. I’ll nurture them, one at a time, and when the first is solid I’ll move on to the next, then the next. I might add new ones, change some of them, but this list is a starting point. It’s a way to encourage my soul to seek out new patterns, textures and colours that my life can embody. Click on each habit for more good stuff on why I’ve chosen that habit.

• Wake up before the sun

• Drink 10 glasses of water

• Write three morning pages

• Meditate for 5-10 minutes
  

• Do 10 sun salutations

• Swing kettlebells 25 to 50 times
  

• Go for a long walk or run

• Train and play with the dog

• Write my novel

• Record my expenses

• Keep a food journal

• Plan my meals

• Read fiction

• Learn Italian

• Write my blog

Maybe you can start your own list. Start by looking first at the view from here – at the patterns that currently flow through your life – then look to where you’d like to be – look up ahead, off in the distance and see that beautiful place. Create your own list of simple daily habits that can slowly and lovingly get you to that place of joy, change and renewal.

I hope to look out over my life in a year or so and see a whole new vista – a whole new series of patterns, some constant, some new, some unexpected. I have the same hope for you. What habits or patterns would you like to cultivate in your life?

P.S. This is my 100th post on Momentum Gathering. Now that’s a lovely pattern.

The Power & The Glory

Mornings are darker now and my dreams more vivid because I’m somehow closer to sleep when I wake. This morning I woke from a strange dream.

In it some of my neighbours were drawing power from my hydro panel and in doing so they mistakenly fried the walls off my house. Just the contents, frame and foundation were left with me standing in the middle wondering what the hell I was going to do. I felt a wave of grief. I wept. I felt exposed in my house with no walls.

I’m sure there’s a million ways to interpret this dream. I like to see my dreams less as symbolic messages from the universe and more as little notes to self.

My inner knowing is alive these days. Alive with the knowledge that I’m coming into my own power. The more I write, the more I surge forward and catch hold of the fiery tale of momentum, and the more it carries me into its wild and wonderful possibilities.

My dream was about my need for a foundation — my desire for a safe haven – an easy way through this thing called life. It was also about my terrible fears of being exposed as someone not worthy. It signals that I need to let go everything and become completely vulnerable. That’s the only way to get deep inside this novel I’m trying to write. I must let the walls of my house fall away so I can stand there in my own power and glory.

I want you to come with me. I want you to write that novel or screenplay or book you were meant to write. I want you to forge that business, create that dream, whatever it may be. Maybe you even started working at it, but then put it aside for another time. I know I did.

November is a great time to begin. The air carries your breath on its chilly wake and enlivens your senses. It’s a time to pull blankets around toes and cozy up to November’s wintry revelation – time to sink deeply into the pages of a novel – and not just any novel — your novel — your book, your blog, your business, your creation.

And if it is a novel you’ve got hidden up your sleeve, then you’re lucky because it’s National Novel Writing Month — 30 days and nights of literary abandon. You could join the NaNoWrMo’ers and dash off a first draft in no time.

If you can’t muster a marathon then maybe you can still do it in short sprints. This is how I got rolling on mine. I simply began by writing five minutes a day. It was so easy I couldn’t find an excuse not to write for that five minutes. The beauty of short sprints is that they add up to that marathon eventually. You might get there a little slower, but if you don’t start, you won’t get there at all. Imagine next spring as the sun stays up later and the air smells like – well, manure – imagine yourself finishing your novel.

I urge you to join me, whatever your creation might be. I urge you to let November coax words, woo images and lure stories and characters from your soul. Hesitation has no place amidst the red and auburn leaves tumbling across your path today. Kick them out of your way with joyous feet and make progress – move towards something big, something new, something powerful and glorious. Let’s burn down the walls of our houses and stand in the wreckage weeping. And if that sounds too freaky – just start writing for five minutes and see what happens. Are you with me?

When You’re Weary

I’m a little lackluster today. I’m finding motivation hard to muster and perspective tough to glean. Maybe it’s the northern chill that descended upon my park and cut my morning walk short. Maybe it’s the yellowing of all the leaves or the quiet of this small town after the bustle of a trip to New York City. Maybe it’s the fact that my daughter is away and with her my sense of place in the world. Maybe it’s just a simple ebb in my momentum – an eddy in the river of my soul.

All I can do when I’m weary is to begin – to write one sentence after another. I breathe and I write, I breathe and I write some more, and then I begin to flow. I begin to warm up. I can see the swaying gold inside those yellow leaves. The tides of my imagination begin to swell. My soul wakes. Words and images lift my shoulders and pull me into another head space. One sentence at a time.

Can I do this with everything? Can I pull my weary bones towards fitness, towards eating more healthy foods, towards simplifying my life, towards creating an entire novel? Yes.

When you’re weary, dip deeply into the ebb, feel it, let the eddy pull you around and around — and then start moving your arms and legs – suddenly you’ll be swimming.

The Path With No Markers

Natalie Goldberg begins her book, Thunder and Lightening, with a warning.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you. Bareboned you are on the path with no markers, only the skulls of those who never made it back … Now that you have been warned, let me also say this: if you want to know what you’re made of, if you want to stand on death’s dark face and leave behind the weary yellow coat of yourself, then just now – I hear it – the heavy wooden doors of the cloister of no return creaking open. Please enter.

Do I really have to be this brave to commit to a life as a writer – this naked, this scary, this breathtakingly dramatic? Do I have to give up everything?

I mean let’s get real. Surely I can keep saying yes to those little contracts that pay the bills and still stand on death’s dark face. Can’t I spend a few measly hours on Facebook and Twitter every day whilst also finding time to enter those big doors of the cloister of no return?

Okay maybe not, but how about this? What if I leave everything behind except my favourite TV show, my latest brilliant web idea and my daily soy vanilla lattes? And I don’t like the sound of that weary yellow coat so I’d be willing to give that up. Can I still head down the path with no markers, sort of bareboned?

I didn’t think so.

Natalie might be talking about writing, but her warning could just as easily apply to any great life change. If you are going to make that big dream happen – the one you’ve been harvesting for years – then it might be time to embrace wholeheartedly the commitment, the focus, the trust, the pace and the attention your dream needs and deserves.

I’ve been moving in new ways for a while now – taking small steps towards writing, exercising, working and decluttering. I’ve been pacing myself for change, learning how to be more creative than reactive, more resilient than inconsistent. My steps are more surefooted and deliberate. I can see more clearly what it is I want. I’m ready to walk this path bareboned and leave everything behind.

No, I’m not talking about leaving my husband and moving to Bali to study yoga at a nudist colony. I’m talking about narrowing life down, committing to a more focused path, leaving everything behind that I need to and grabbing hold of my potential. Why?

• Because narrowing life down guides me more directly towards my dream.
  
• Because committing to a more focused path helps me do a few things very well.
• Because leaving everything behind that no longer jibes with my dream clears the path.
• Because grabbing hold of my potential is what this big journey is all about.

I’m still fleshing out the details, rolling them around in my hands and tossing them in the air, but I’m ready to walk the path towards a healthful, creative and simplified writer’s life. My novel, my blog, my health and my work will become interwoven – each informing the other, threads of the same creative and momentum-soaked fabric. Every day, I will trim the loose ends and take small, emphatic steps — writing, walking, exercising and simplifying. I will walk bareboned towards who I am meant to be and I won’t look back.

Come with me. What have you got to lose? Everything – including that weary yellow coat.

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