Breathing In Smoke
How are you? This past week has been a tough one for those of us in California. Wildfires are getting worse. It’s been tough to breathe.
Friends and acquaintances are loading up their cars, kids in the back, to evacuate. With every breath, we’re being reminded how absolutely sacred, precious and temporary life is.
I feel like we keep being reminded of the same things over and over again. Life matters. Love matters. Home matters. Family matters. Nature matters.
When I focus on data and numbers like Covid cases and air quality indexes, I get lost. But when I focus on unexpected blessings, like slowing down and more family time, I feel a little more grounded.
In my last newsletter, I shared Anne Lamott’s idea that our creative projects already know what they want to become. What if we looked at the wildfires, storms and coronavirus in this way, as separate entities with wisdom they wanted to share?
What might their message be? Hold those you love close? Life is precious? Slow down?
I’m not sure. But in these last few days, I’ve been noticing a common thread running within everything happening.
What’s Been Helping Me
Something that has been really helping me during these challenging times has been writing for a few minutes everyday. My writing has become my therapy, my escape, my way back to love and reconnecting with all that I know to be true. Connecting with that creative vein that runs just beneath the surface of life, for me, has been a game changer.
Writing a little bit everyday originally started as an 28-day experiment after I had done a lot of research about the power of flow, that inner state we all know when we are so immersed in an activity that we lose a sense of ourselves and the outer world. I called it my 28-Day Flow Challenge.
The idea is choosing a favorite activity that gets you easily into a state of flow that is simple to do (little set-up and clean-up), doing it for 5-10 minutes a day for 28 days and seeing what happens. The only goal of the challenge is how we feel–getting into flow. As a result of letting go of the product, the process by which we do our thing seems to become deeper, richer and more healing by default.
I’ll be starting up another 28-Day Flow Challenge on September 7. If you want to join, let me know. I’ll send out a weekly email so we can connect and support each other.
New Articles & Poems
Here a few new things I recently posted on my website.
Stealing in The Night is a poem about how we sometimes deceive ourselves when it comes to things we don’t want to face, and how creativity can help.
How Are You, Really? is about being woken up in the middle of the night by smoke pouring through our bedroom window from the recent wildfires, and three ways I’ve been coping.
Plums and Apricots is a simple, little poem I wrote as we were being inundated with fruit from a neighbor’s garden. It’s all about enjoying life’s bounty when we have it.
Stay Safe
Wishing you peace, health, safety, deep breaths of clean, fresh air, and many miraculous moments
(P.S. I snapped this photo on Sunday night. The smoke was thick, and neighbors were calling to each other that they saw a rainbow in the clouds. The colors were so intense (no filters or editing!) It was a reminder to me that even when things seem to be the darkest, life offers us gifts.)
Here are a few more things you might enjoy:
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