Identify those ingredients that make it bliss and put them together in your current circumstance. Put your butt in the sand. Fry bacon on the beach miles away civilization. Stare into the starry sky. Give your soul what it craves.
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All articles filed in Remember
You can make anything!
Sometimes creativity feels like a crushing chore, but when I think about Ruby it feels more an attitude. An irrepressible impulse that played out in the bread she baked, the cows she milked, the clothing she sewed, the baskets she constructed, the beets she hoed, and the rocks she laid. Her mosaics matter enormously and not at all, in the same way that each life matters enormously and not at all.
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Run in the desert under a starry sky
I’m sitting on my couch listening to R do his howling cry of bedtime loneliness interspersed with plunking on the alligator xylophone. It’s 9:32pm. He’s normally in bed an hour earlier but we are coming off of a travel weekend which included strange sleep schedules and a long nap on the car ride home—on top…
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Practice makes practice
When I was first learning to surf, my experienced-surfer friend, Clare, encouraged me to practice my pop-ups. She recommended lying on my stomach on the living room floor and practicing the process of paddling, then pushing up and popping up. The pop up is important in surfing and something most beginner surfers struggle with. It’s…
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Just in case you ever feel ungrateful
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m not thankful. At least, I’m not thankful for probably 95% of my day. I don’t walk around in a cloud of gratitude and satisfied bliss. For all my talk about mindfulness and the positive spin I work to put on my life, I spend…
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The taste of freedom
Since I started learning from Brené Brown, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, Glennon Doyle, Eckhart Tolle, Oprah, and Jody Moore (I could go on…), I feel like I’ve been shown the secret entrance to a club that I never knew existed. A club where people openly acknowledged what I have known in my heart and been…
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Day 6: Can you tell I feel lighter?
I got through my last day of tests today! First thing, I had a third IV placed, this time in my right antecubital space (inside of the elbow). This is radiology’s favorite place to put IVs and my least favorite because every time you bend your elbow it hurts, which is really annoying! I had…
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Light in the kitchen
I’m on my way to DC today. This is the trip that I have normally approached with, at best, resignation, and at worst, dread. It’s always difficult to describe the NIH experience to others. I’ll do my best here. It starts with a cross-country flight. I like flying into Reagan International Airport because I can get…
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I am willing
I’ve done a lot of journaling today exploring my prompt: What is it like to be me in the world today? Honestly, it’s kind of a mess. I just got over the 24-hour stomach flu. It was wicked. I could hardly get out of bed yesterday except to throw up. I had R most of…
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A pretty successful stay in a haunted, former-forensic ward of a psychiatric institution
Tonight I’m feeling strong. It feels like a noticeable shift from just yesterday and dramatically so from the weekend. This is what I keep finding—if I just feel my feelings and let them be what they need to be, then I bounce back. I keep thinking of this quote from Wild by Cheryl Strayed: “Fear,…
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