Inspirations and Illuminations

I love it when inspiration strikes first thing in the morning.  A little disclaimer for this post:  I've been reading what I discovered is a pirated edition of The Anti-Planner  by Dani Donovan, and one of the tips for getting things done is to set a timer, and just work until the timer goes off.  Let go of perfectionism, and what is done at the end of the allotted time is just done.  So, I have to leave for work in 40 minutes, so 40 minutes is all I get.  If the ending is abrupt, or if certain sentences don't seem to go anywhere, it's because I ran out of my usual editing time.  I really just want to get my thoughts down on "paper" before I forget. Starting over.  I love it when inspiration strikes first thing in the morning.  I was playing a game on my tablet while drinking my morning coffee, and thinking about my Joy Journal.  I started this on November 2, writing down at least one thing each day that brings me joy.  What brought...

Today has been hard.  I woke up this morning, and was immediately confronted by extremely disappointing news.  I thought of my daughters, one of whom was three days too young to vote.  I thought of all women, the battles won and lost, the rights obtained and those withheld.  I thought of the marginalized, the poor, the refugee, the minority--those Jesus commanded us to love and care for.  I thought of my friends in the LGBTQ community, and the children of my friends, who are either part of that community or allies to them.  I thought of the earth, the environment we as humans are making ever more inhospitable for ourselves.  And I thought of higher education, such an important institution that is becoming less accessible thanks to policy and funding cuts.  It seems that everything I care about is being gutted in the name of power and privilege. So, what now?  What do we do in the face of such bitter disappointment?  We do have options....

What is your dream?  When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?  A doctor, teacher, or fireman?  A rockstar, artist, or professional athlete?  Wealthy?  Powerful?  Influential? What qualities or characteristics did you dream of having?  That's a little harder to answer.  It's not a question adults asked your eight-year-old self, is it?  You may have dreamed of being a lawyer, but why?  To make a lot of money and be respected, or to help people in difficult situations?  If you wanted to be a business executive, was it to be important and have a lot of people to boss around, or to guide a business and its personnel into a positive way of being in the world, recognizing human value, environmental and financial impact, and service? I wanted to be a teacher.  I had a chalkboard in my room, and picked up textbooks at garage sales.  I made answer keys for the books, and taught my dolls and stuffed animals....

In 2023, I had weekly appointments with an eating habit coach who changed my life. Let me back up a little.   Since college, I’ve steadily put on weight every year.   My caloric intake has been high, and my activity level has been low.   I was active in my 20s, doing as many as six musical theater shows a year, but once I got married in my late 20s, and then had kids in my mid-30s and early 40s, my lifestyle became more sedentary.   I had a management job for almost 20 years that was increasingly stressful and draining of my energy, so my motivation to keep active and eat well decreased to almost nothing.   By the late 2010s, I weighed 250 pounds. In September of 2022, I discovered Kate M. Johnston, an eating habit coach for professional women.   I subscribed to her weekly email, and finally it clicked—my problem was not my weight or my lack of activity, but my eating habits, and more importantly, my self-image.   Kate sent out a free worksheet, an...

I'm losing count of things I've heard or read about Sabbath in the last few years.  While Sabbath is far from a new concept, it seems the recent resurgence of talk about Sabbath has coincided with the rise of the minimalism movement.  Marie Kondo talks about ridding oneself of things that are not useful, or don't "spark joy."  Margareta Magnusson brought awareness to the practice of "Swedish Death Cleaning," or decluttering so that your heirs don't have so much to deal with upon your demise.  The Minimalists,  Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, operate from the thesis that the less stuff we have, the more meaning we can find in our lives.  This is a spiritual concept--the more stuff we keep for ourselves, the less we have to share with others, the greater our carbon footprint, the further we find ourselves from God/our spirituality (" it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kin...

This September, I entered a challenge I found on Facebook--300,000 steps to raise funds for To Write Love on Her Arms.  That's an average of 10,000 steps per day for the month, or for me, about 150 miles.  As someone who generally averages about half that, this was a pretty daunting challenge, but since I'm trying to lose weight, and September is Suicide Awareness Month, I thought it would be a good way to combine two things I care about.  I had no idea when the month began how much I would learn through taking on this challenge. To keep me motivated, I decided to walk each day in memory or in honor of a person or group.  I had a few people in mind:  a cousin who took his own life a few years ago; a friend who struggles with alternating anxiety and depression; celebrities whose suicides are well-known.  Some were people I'd never met:  in 1992 I traveled with Continental Singers for the first time.  The night of our first concert, I stayed with a ...