i am not good at saying goodbye.

chaos

i'm heading to philadephia today to work at a national geographic traveler photo seminar with krista. we're spending the weekend there and i'm excited to see the city and meet some more of our photographers. it's always so inspiring to meet more creative types.

i get back on sunday night and finish packing up for the move on monday. i'm anxious to get everything into the apartment and start making it feel like home. i know i will love living alone. with all of the chaos of guests and deadlines and plans, i have been skimping on my yoga. after a week in mexico and coming back to a new home, i hope to feel even more balanced. it's these crazy times that you really find your equilibrium.

where i've been/where i'm going

listening to:

reading:

playing with:

going to ensenada:

i've been busy as a little bee for these past two months and the ride won't stop for at least another month.

take/it/all/in

just be

when people start to mediate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, the often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. it's a bit like saying, "if i jog, i'll be a much better person." "if i could only get a nicer house, i'd be a better person." if i could meditate and calm down, i'd be a better person."... but loving-kindness--maitri--toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. we can still be angry after all these years. we can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. the point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. it's about befriending who we are already. the ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. that's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

pema chodron

maira kalman

walk slower.

i woke up at four in the morning to lightning and pouring rain. it's the sort of weather that makes you cocoon yourself in blankets and hope you can spend your morning with a mug of tea and your new book. but instead i walked to work, cafe au lait in hand, in the chilly morning that smelled and looked of spring. everything is bright green right now. i stopped to take a couple of photographs of this because it almost seemed too green to be true. ah, i love spring. and fall. and summer. and winter. but i really love spring.

my friend andy sent me a link to this garrison keillor article about walking. it's amazing.

spring.

from one of my favorite writers & artists keri smith:

"it's the first moment of respite in a hectic week filled with deadlines, house renovation, taxes, and company. but i feel strangely rested and purged. i think mainly due to the fact spring has arrived and I can finally let a fresh breeze into the house. is it the spring that begs us to stop for a moment and see that everything is as it should be? at the root of my being i want to clean the winter dust off of everything, and purge my house of anything unnecesary.

how wonderful that our biological urges are still intact in this period of staring at screens all day. somewhere in the depths of our bodies the animal nature breathes and makes us want to go walk on the earth again after the thaw.

how is it that the smell of the earth is like a tonic that calms us into a calm state, even when we are surrounded by concrete and cars? the body knows more about what it needs than we do. it craves flowers and green and air that moves through the trees. it speaks to the trees and the trees speak back, but somewhere along the way we lost the ability to hear the language. but it's there. i know it.

the average child is able to identify hundreds of corporate logos, yet incapable of naming the species of tree in their own backyard. Yet they still communicate with the tree even if they don't know it. it must have something to do with the urge to build a house up in the branches, or build a fort in the roots.

just thinking about forts made me want to build one for myself. out of chairs and blankets. i want to hide a pile of books in there and sitting reading for the rest of the afternoon.

and listen to what the trees have to say."

SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC — AVOID THEM.

An excerpt from a speech by Milton Glaser

There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

d/e/c/o/r

i love, love, love color. i say this as i'm dressed in black skinny jeans and a black and white flowered tunic, but hey, under normal circumstances i'm usually in something bright. my room in the blue rowhouse is red. my favorite toe and lip color is bright pink. my tote is grass green. i'm excited to incorporate even more color into my new apartment. i read in a feng-shui book that you should paint and decorate in muted tones because bright colors drain your energy. to that i say, fire up the bialetti and make me a cappuccino!

beautiful.