Musings at 50

Fears - unspoken they are allowed to run amuck in my head. I am inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Big Magic - she talks about fear and creativity and writes a letter inviting fear to come along on a road trip with her and creativity but she sets some boundaries. Inspired by this excerpt from her book - I made some lists of fears. This was written in September of 2020 and some of these fears may still stand true - and some of them may not. In September, when I originally wrote this I came across this fort built in the sand and thought a lot about how we can build these walls around ourselves but something can easily come along and wipe the walls away - but we may think the walls are solid - and that may keep us stuck. Fears @ Spokane Parks Book I will pay too much to create it Not enough pictures that are free/open source Re-use too many that have been seen before City of Spokane will not return my emails  Partnerships seem impossible and not probable Not able to do th...

22 minutes - Experience of the divine/magic Yesterday I walked in the Hall of Mosses. The shades of green so many - dark, light, bright vibrant and muted like a painters palette where the painter has mixed every shade and then added in bits of brown, yellow, gold, white and red. I always stop on the bridge to watch the green grasses and plants gently swaying in the stream - a little fuller due to the rain. It is a rainforest after all - but it hasn’t always rained when I have come to visit. The first time - my husband showing me WA - as if he’d need to convince me to leave OH - I’d wanted to leave OH as soon as I knew there was a world beyond my small midwestern town. Of course, there was indecision about leaving. I had just landed my dream job - a librarian at a big library system in Cincinnati. I had only been there 6 months when my husband needed to look for work - his contract position early over. So he said, do I limit my search to OH and IN? Or expand the circle? I told him to lo...

  COVID has been hard on all of us - and it has been so hard for me to decide exactly where I land with COVID. I know people who have family and friends who have died from COVID - I know people with family and friends who have gotten really sick from COVID and survived. In the beginning I was one of those people - who thought, well this is a disease like any other disease. The best you can do is make sure you are doing your best - the cards will fall as they may. Which for those who have lost someone may seem rather callous and detached.  I definitely suffered mentally from the isolation in the beginning during our shut down - the combination of having to work from home and spending a lot more time with my husband - that was hard. It strained our marriage, it strained my relationships with others and most of all it strained my relationship with myself. I turned 50 this year - and I had plans. I was planning to meet my mom in Iowa and work on our genealogy. I had plans to atten...

 I went to the woods - as Henry David Thoreau so states - "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately..." I recommend you read the rest. I would argue there is nothing more deliberate than dressing for rain. Knowing it is cold and rainy and you wish to be warm and dry. The lengths you will go to to make sure that is the case. So, I donned my base layer - a silky t-shirt followed by a thermal turtle neck, and a fuzzy sweater/fleece thing. Below I had my fleece lined weather proof pants with wool socks, my hiking boots, my raincoat, my rain pants, and my hat. Is anyone else warm yet? I put these things on so I could walk SLOWLY through the Hoh Rain Forest - the trail - The Hall of Mosses. I wanted to listen to a friend's Marco Polo message - the one where she is practicing a piece of her final for a course she was taking at Kripalu - I believe Mindful Outdoor Leadership. All I could think was - crap I have a lot of layers and the rain is coming down so hard, ...

A month of gratitude starts today with an absolutely beautiful fall day spending time with my sweetie. We primed pieces for the bunny hutch, went to the Farmer's Market, and made food together. It is in these moments I find that I am grateful for living in a place where I can buy vegetables from the farmer who grew them, grateful to have found a partner who enjoys cooking as much as I do, and grateful for the crisp cold autumn day that allows some outside activity. What are you grateful for? Will you join me this month in expressing gratitude for those things, those moments, those people or whatever you happen to be thankful/grateful for? I may not be posting daily - but I will be doing this practice daily with Tim Rebstock - conferring at the end of the day about what we are most grateful for. I encourage you to do the same. I am also journalling about it and may post here on occasion. I have always wanted to have a daily gratitude practice - and with fits and starts I have done ...

 I make mistakes - I make mistakes - I make mistakes. Today my work is to come to terms with making mistakes. In the past couple of weeks I have made some really big and really small mistakes. I feel like life is slowly slipping out of my control. The funny part is that it was never in my control. That is hard to admit to a recovering control freak. I often believe that I can get life to do what I will it to do, and that all happens without mistakes or stumbles. To see those words typed in front of me, I have to laugh. I have spent nearly 50 years trying to make sure I do everything right - to not do it right is to fail. I have to say there is something exhausting about this pattern and I think I am really ready to let it go. As a human on a learning journey, I do not know how I can really avoid making mistakes. How else will I learn? On an intellectual level, this makes sense. But, I often believe these things do not apply to ME. I am always telling people in my life - so you mess...

Do I choose to walk the hard road? I asked what I needed to know in this moment and here we are - the 10 of wands - do I feel burdened or blocked? - YES! Difficulties - absolutely - I guess I get to explore my whiteness this is definitely NOT what I wanted to write about today - can I get a break from thinking about it - me - my whiteness, my white fragility, my white centering, my whiteness - thinking about these things - social justice - unpacking my white privilege and my white supremacy. I just finished leading a book circle on Layla F Saad’s Me and White Supremacy - it was an incredible journey - peeling back the layers of myself week by week it was often hard as I had always thought of myself as one of the good ones - an ally but in all honesty I’m not, I’m not one of the good ones - I’m a white person who does not yet get my privilege - I certainly never asked for it - I think back on my life and I’ve struggled. Have I struggled as much as a person of color? No way - not even c...