Do the Good Work

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Heloise Jones

As I slowed down things became brilliant. Grass growing through a cement crack, a stop sign …suddenly mattered, because I saw them.
~ Natalie Goldberg (from Living Color – A Writer Paints Her World)

On the way to the hair salon, I pass the gourmet creamery that makes small batches of yummy ice cream. It’s impossible not to peek, see what’s on the board. The elevated sidewalk in front of the short row of small businesses is narrow.

This is herb season, so the day’s special flavors are tumeric, black cardamon, and ginger. I chose ginger, surprised cardamon didn’t woo me. I also got a taste of what’s next, but not ready to serve: rose-green tea, and thyme-lemongrass. We can tell a lot about a person by the flavors he creates, I thought.

As I sat eating what seemed too small a taste of sweetness for this heavy heart, I looked at the pristine sky. Listened to the sound of leaves in the trees fluttered and rifled by the wind. I thought about a line I just read in a new book by Sheila Blanchette. How her character described the sound of oak leaves in the wind as like silk rustling. I thought of the morning I believed I heard water running, and looked for the source. Only learned on my way back it was two tall trees shimmering in the breeze. I couldn’t think what the sound resembled that particular day I ate ice cream. Only that it was all around me, that I was surrounded by trees. And how we can go in our minds to where we’re nourished if we let ourselves.

I’ve been very quiet inside for days. Some of the time feeling I’m in a semi-fog. I thought eclipse energy, or the fullness of my new Monday night writer’s group where they show up open, sharing, and bringing their best, even on their bad days. Perhaps it’s me simply needing space inside so I can write stories and poems, I thought. What worked before – writing with others to prompts – hasn’t worked. I was stepping back to a quieter space and it felt like goofing off. My thinking mind wondered what might be falling thru the cracks. And strangely, something else inside me said this pause was completely necessary.

Then Charlottesville. The sounds of division and hate. In counter, the intellectual conversations, points of helpless and hopeless. None of it OK.

I am not neutral on this.

What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love!
~ Louise Erdrich (from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse)

I’ve been here before, sorta. It rolls in like big ocean waves. I talked here about the hard truths of differences. How I’m the liberal my sister despises and my efforts to understand the thinking. I’ve shared here my stance on immigration, refugees, and value of difference. I’ve shared here what I care about as a heart-filled person. And here what I call my shame points that some call badges of honor. I talked about how loving oneself can feel so hard. And my hopes we turn to the better angels of our natures. My belief we all cast ripples, that it’s our choice what ripples we cast. Neale Donald Walsh puts it this way in ‘Conversations with God:’

“Your life is about everyone whose life you touch.

‘It is about how you touch them,’ God told me. ‘How you touch them determines how you experience your Self–and how you experience your Self determines how happy you are.’

In this sense, my life was about me…but in a *reverse English* kind of way.

I was to pay attention to myself by paying attention to others.
I was to help myself evolve by helping others evolve.
The fastest way for me to be happy was for me to make other people happy.”

The first day of my Monday night group was August 7. We introduced ourselves. I told them they could read my website for the regular stuff. I wanted to share what matters to me in the work I do.

My goal, I told them, is to contribute in creating great reading and writing so people are exposed to something beyond themselves, or their experience, or what they think they know. So they can find, see, and hear fresh perspectives. Can experience the both/and of Life. Meaning the good/bad, and the shades of gray of differences that live side by side. For me, this means using my genius to free writers’ Voices, so they can release their stories. Because the power of connection for us humans is in stories.

Sharing those words, I realized this work I do empowering artists’ and writers’ Voices is my Resistance to division and hate in the world. To the two H’s, hopeless and helpless, too. It’s my contribution that stretches beyond my dot on the planet. Because writers and artists can be powerful. Their influence so strong they’re executed in some countries.

Author Barbara Kingslover says it this way:

“A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say in an airplane, or in Israel, or Iraq, have died today. And you would think to yourself, “How very sad,” then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter’s cheek. You could taste that person’s breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine.”

And then Charlottesville.

I am not neutral on this.

Over the past month I created collaborative relationships with two artists in Santa Fe with the intention to co-host workshop & retreat immersions that combine writing and art. One on Sept. 22, a nature immersion. The other March 1-4, 2018 called ‘Madonna: Contemporary Ally,’ an immersion into all aspects of this powerful icon for today’s time. Once solidified, I wondered how the heck this fit my goals. I considered my inexplicable love of nature. The need for something grounded beyond Wonder Woman. And it came to me. . .this is how we go home to Life that sustains our humanity. This is my activism in counter to hate and division in a way that uses my genius. Nature (think, forest bathing in Japan), and the strength of a steadfast teacher centered in principles of nurturing life.

There’s a weekly column called Free Will Astrology. Friday it said I have a cosmic pass to ‘loiter and goof off…to put off making hard decisions.’ That I’m in a time one might call the equivalent of pushing the reset button, re-establishing default settings. Yes, I am.

“Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.

We will march by the millions. . .
We will be courageous with our love. . .”
~ Sherman Alexie (from his poem Hymn)

Many of us won’t march or join rallies, petition representatives, canvas door to door, wait for an audience outside a closed congressional door, lick envelopes, or stand in freezing weather to protect our beautiful planet & its creatures. Many of us can, do, and will use our genius in ways to do the good work beyond loving those who look like us, think like us. Beyond supporting our own comforts or profit. Beyond railing against others with the same hate we don’t want. We do the good work to sustain the expansion of life, not the contraction. The hard conversations, the listening, the advocacy, the feet on the ground. I know. I’ve done it before. And I know we can.

Look to the better angels.

*
”In my dream, the angel shrugged & said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination & then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.”
 ~ Brian Andreas

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Photo by Marc-Antoine Dépelteau

Like what you read? Get updates in your inbox.

How Life Sings Like Poetry

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“In an ideal world, our poets would sing our stories back to us, connecting us through language that’s memorable, moving, often disturbing: our poets would through their poems urge us to awaken and look around us, fall in love again and again with the things of this world.”
~ Kathryn Stripling Byer, poet

I’m a sky watcher. I’m constantly gazing up, marveling at the light & color. Noting when the clouds shift. Marvel when they look like shredded cloth or as if they’re painted on up there. With said, it’s been a while since I spent time with the night sky. This week, 4:45am, opening the blinds without my glasses on, I thought iI saw a reflection of a lightbulb in the window. But I had no lights on inside. I like my day to gently lighten with the dawn. I stepped outside, stood in the cool air, gazed at Venus, big as a streetlight. A comet bright as a low flying jet streaked past. And then, brief and high, another. I thought how I’ll fill my life with more of this sort of love and wonder. Relearn to do it.

Someone said recently I should work with children, that I have a gift with them. I don’t know how she got that except perhaps from blogs I’ve written, such as here & here. It’s true I like talking to kids. Love the art they make. I’ll talk to any kid around me.

My 7-yr. old grandson lives in Taiwan. We see each other every two years. In late 2015, he started sending me postcards. We now write each other. I have his cards stacked close to my desk where I see them. It’s quite magical how his printing’s changed. The last one so perfect, I thought his mother wrote it. A small way to see him grow, and real.

Recently we started Friday night conversations. There’s a 12-hr. difference, so he rises before his parents, signs into Skype. If he can’t get thru, he’ll call on his dad’s cell. ‘Skype is weird,’ he’ll say. We can only do this on weekends, he says, and we’ll do it all summer he’s out of school.

Here’s the thing. I think this little guy’s in my life so I can have something I never had growing up. We were born the same hour & minute, 5:47 am for me, 5:47 pm for him. What’s the chances of that! + A year ago, the last time they were here, he wanted to spend every night with me long before they arrived. Cried when he thought he couldn’t. He brought me so much joy, I cried when he didn’t.

The magic is simple. It’s not about being a grandmother. It’s about being in awe with him. He’s like me in so many ways. An artist, high achiever, dreamer. Full of wonder about the world and loves learning. We give to each other.

My favorite postcard. Look at that happy goat facing the sun. And that happy bluebird & turtle.

I met 24 yr. old Alex weeks ago when I knocked to ask if she was my new neighbor, could she please not leave her lights (plural) on all night. I’d covered a bedroom window with black plastic, which blocked the fresh air. The walls in my whole house stayed lit. I waited 5 nights to ask. It was already 10:30. She was so sweet. She asked what I’d do when new neighbors arrived, which she wasn’t. Same thing, I told her, and invited her outside to look up the street. All but one of the houses were dark. One dim streetlight for every 2 blocks.

When she looked up, saw the stars, she was amazed to see them so close to town. We talked a very long time, there in the dark late at night.

I learned she had a very bad past, had gotten in trouble. And she turned it around. She listens to podcasts of inspirational speakers, is studying Buddhism, adores her fiancee. She has aspirations to study forensic medicine, be a doctor. She supports herself with her business of rental properties.

She was there to clean and fix her grandmother’s house to sell. Her grandmother having passed at 98, right before I moved in. She invited me to pick the pink roses from her grandmother’s bush any time I want.

Another day I stopped by to tell her about the Buddhist center in the neighborhood. She’d just googled the closest meditation center too, too far away. She showed me what she’d done in the house on a small $500 budget. Her grandmother didn’t believe in traditional medicine, she said, and showed me the back room where her grandmother grew plants in pots for medicinal purposes. The yard had them, too, along with veggies, and greenbeans draped on the front chain-linked fence. A woman I would’ve liked.

Days later, asleep on the sofa with a movie playing away, I woke to my name called thru the screened door. It was Alex with a vase of roses.

She was leaving the next morning, and wanted to thank me for being so kind (her words). She said she felt lucky to meet me. I loved her by then, and wished she wasn’t leaving.

I talk about how writing can sing when it comes together just right. As a writer, there’s no greater feeling for me. I talk about how poetry sings. I realize this feeling of connection with my grandson and Alex is the same song. A song of life that’s brought alive, so I sing inside. It’s called Love.

In Santa Fe, Sikhs held a 4 hr event on the plaza. Dressed all in white & turbans, singing and chants with beautiful melodies. Accompanied by tabla drums, viola, guitars, keyboard, mandolin. Incredible musicians. Yoga, East Indian dancing. Free iced Yogi brand tea, and organic popcorn with the fixin’s. They’re all about feeding people. Even walked around, offered bottles of water. Tables with info on living healthy, their guru on a banner. Love, Peace, Kindness their message. No conversion, just Gratitude expressed for being here, thriving since 1971.

Love, giving, gratitude, sharing. Like my grandson and Alex and me together. All of us so different, and yet so alike. Hearts opening. Imagine that.

Another Small Journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Tell me. . .what sparks wonder and love in you?

(I dried the roses Alex gave me. They’re in the picture at the top.)

*
Like what you read? Subscribe for updates in your inbox.

Looking for help with your writing or writing life? Click Here.
Like to Listen? Check out The Creative Life for People Living in the Real World.
Wanna know what’s up next? Events page has all the News.

Extreme Presence is the Key

Posted on June 22, 2017 by Heloise Jones

The past month feels like I’ve slept more than I’ve slept the entire past five years. Slept in a purposeful cut-back on brain and doing with an intent to reclaim time for myself, learn to be forgiving with lazy, and simply rest. To slow down the mind-whirl inside and outside me of m.a.i.n.t.a.i.n.i.n.g. Recovery from the push – create, disassemble, reassemble, create book, home, life.

I set out to get my animal body moving once more, too. To step into the early morning like I once did. Feel blood circulating in my legs and joints. I confess, wanting my ankles and hips back to their only months ago size is also a motivation. What gets me moving, tho, is being present to the sky + everything around me outdoors. I experience space inside that allows a return to creative work where the only function is telling a story and playing in the mind-field of my imagination.

It’s working. I spontaneously wrote three poems in the past two weeks, and something magical happened as I clipped around and across my designated 2 x 3 block square where there’s little or no moving vehicles.

About half the homes are sweetly landscaped. Some I simply love and wish were my own yard. I even play games with myself as I pass. How I’d maintain that yard. How much it would cost to plant. How long to mature garden.

One morning I heard the sound of sprinklers 1/2 block from my home. A gorgeous yard with beds of flowers and swirls of pebbled walkways, an entire row of roses bordering one side. It took me back to Florida where I heard sprinklers every morning as I walked eight blocks thru the fabulous historic neighborhood to the bay. Every morning heard them, even with monsoons.

I stopped to admire the yard and searched for the darkened pebbles, sandy dirt, or thorny trunks of roses that indicate wet. I looked for the glisten of droplets on the yellow, pink, magenta, and lavender flower heads. I listened, looked, and found nothing.

As I passed the yard on the last stretch home after I’d criss-crossed my chosen territory, I was looking up at the sky. And how the breeze riffled the tree canopies. At the back of the gorgeous yard was a tall tree with tightly packed leaves the size of your palm. The entire canopy rippled. The undersides of the leaves caught the early sunlight with the rhythm of the breeze.

From it I heard the sound of the cool nourishment of water I’d searched for 20 min. earlier. It came from leaves rubbing against one another. As I stood, my attention went to the small spade-shaped leaves of the aspen in the front yard, the lower timbre of the sound they made. I thought, aspens don’t quake. It’s us who quakes inside at hearing them.

Everything in the world dropped away except for me, the sound of nourishing water, the sight of the leaves riffling amongst one another on a field of the broad saturated blue flawless sky. My perception of myself completely altered. I was one with it all. I moved on only after a raven called.

Days later I went to a workshop by Brooklyn born Persian poet Haleh Liza. She composes music, writes poetry, and translates Rumi. Has performed and read all over the world, including Carnegie Hall. Throughout the workshop she sang and read in her, and Rumi’s, native language – Persian. Again, my perception completely altered.

What I heard in Rumi’s poems spoken and sung in Persian is they hold the rhythm of his whirling in prayer. The cadence regular and palpable. And the lines rhymed with each rotation. I felt it before she said, listen to this.

I realized how all that magic gets lost in translation to English. For how can you translate rhythm and rhyme when a single word in one language holds sentences of meaning in another.

When I went to Rumi’s resting place in Konya, Turkey, a vast complex of museum and mausoleum that’s a pilgrimage for many, I felt the reverence in the people and place. I also felt something I couldn’t identify. Not until this workshop shifted my perception, and relationship to Rumi’s poetry, could I name it. I’d felt the rhythm and rhyme in the place and people like an extension of his movement in whirling prayer that reached out to exist as air we breathe.

I shifted inside in that moment. I heard our everyday humanness in his words not as being flawed or longing, but as present as the Divine. I felt like I did watching & listening to the leaves that sounded like water. My humanness merging with the Universe.

I shared someone asked what the heart of my teaching is. What is the craft of your teach, the way she put it. How I told her there is more than one way to look at things. I’m adjusting my answer right now to include this: how we perceive ourselves in the world has the power to expand our understanding infinitely, and bring us back to ourselves in a new way. Extreme presence is the key.

When I left the workshop, even the hollyhocks looked different than when I went in.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Tell me. . .have you ever had a transcendent experience where you left yourself, and returned knowing yourself different?

I’ll tell you a secret. . .you really gotta listen to Haleh Liza.

*
Like what you read? Sign up for updates in your inbox.

Looking for help with your writing or writing life? Click Here.
Like to Listen? Check out The Creative Life for People Living in the Real World.
Wanna know what’s up? Events page has all the updates.

Surprises in the Details

Posted on April 12, 2017 by Heloise Jones

I’m in a spin, and it strikes me there’s some magic in the disorder I feel. That perhaps it’s not as bad as it seems. That I’ve gotten caught up in unmet expectations, my daily to-do’s and intentions that don’t get addressed, and the oh-no’s that come with that. And this morning, realizing I’ll be recreating 4 hrs. of work I lost late last night, work due an editing client I’m getting paid for, and the redo will put me behind on other things, it dawned on me what this spin is about. Being present! Letting go of my stories, including what’s next. Including what’s down the road, even steps away. And my real work is what’s the next right thing in front of me. Trust the process. Shock. duh

I write about this in my book – trust the process, observe with awareness, let go of expectations. I know the present is all there is. That life is both/and, good/bad. I’m an empath. I’m present in experience. Don’t put a camera lens between me and an encounter (animal, bird, sky, person, whatever). I know to listen, that my superpower lies in hearing between the lines. And dang. Caught.

Looking at how I got this, kinda mind boggling how extraordinary the ordinary when we’re present.

On the morning Mercury turned retrograde on a full moon, the string on the blinds covering the huge picture window in my living room snapped. My shelter from the world sagged open on one side. The hot sun streamed in, instantly toasted the room and everything in it. The landlady took the blinds for restringing. But we couldn’t get them to snap off, so she unscrewed the brackets. Left me with nothing to hang a sheet or blanket on. And told me it’d be a week or two because she’s having a medical procedure, is unavailable. I offered to pick them up when ready, but she didn’t respond.

It’s a really big window. My soul depends on the sky I see thru it. It’s a challenge I could spend time on to meet everything I think matters to me. But I didn’t. I taped ugly black plastic yard bags to the window in my beautiful room. Anyone who knows me knows this is not my style. But, they were what I had on hand, offer privacy, block the hot sun, leave me the sky. And I can manage them with tape. Only a week, maybe two, I thought as I gazed across the street at the neighbors. ugh.

But the next day, pulling into the driveway, I noticed they don’t look as bad from the outside as they do inside. The reflection on the glass softens them. My spirits lifted. Not as bad as I thought. It’s not forever. Another layer I didn’t know I held let go.

Friday my sister arrives with her 9-yr. old granddaughter I’ve never met. Here’s the thing. We’re extremely different – politics, language, worldview, lifestyle. We have history. I’ve only seen her once since 1993, when our father died. It was a short visit in a lobby at the Houston airport, on a short-but-long layover I had. I remember her toes most from that visit (another story). We do talk on occasion, tho. And I held space for her grief the morning her best friend of a husband died. We chatted up plans for her visit Friday, too.

But it feels like a time warp, this visit of hers. Like I’ve jumped to a loop on Life’s spiral that’s been spinning upward without me. I don’t know her. And it’s only one day. I’ll simply be present with open heart and mind. What we can do with everyone we meet. And yet, it’s not random. Not her. Not this visit.

Last week someone I haven’t talked to in 30 yrs. called, too. Our leaving was complicated, and hurtful. I lost one of my longtime best friends, her then husband, in the event. Our conversation was a wonderful catch-up filled with remembrances of how much we liked each other. She’s coming to visit, too. Boom. Two at once. I’m paying attention.

What I know, it’s time to allow myself to be bigger. And tho every thing that’s happened to me makes me who I am – every single thing I didn’t want to share, every relationship I let go, every gift given and received – each moment holds a choice. Like ugly black plastic bags to solve the problem for now or darn, I don’t have blinds or a pretty room. Where do I put my energy and how do I value my time. Like darn, I lost because I didn’t get done what I planned, or yea, own the moment because this here in front of me is what’s up and it moves me forward. Or like what details do I pay attention to.

The jumble in the picture above is a section of the dining room table that’s my desk. My past and relationships are in those items. The monkey on the tape dispenser, an Easter gift from my husband. The slab I use as a trivet, from a stop in some obscure rock shop in the desert on some road trip I once made. The little shells, found on a morning my sparkly grandson slept in the spare bedroom of our rented condo in Florida. I love their delicate and seemingly indestructible perfection. The Disney mug, from another time when he was with us. Drinking my morning tea from a “cup of magic’ vs. my current fav beautiful handmade mug what I need some days. The tiny fuzzy bear, from my son’s house after he left for China ten years ago. I don’t know it’s history, but it reminds me of his tender heart, and sometimes breaks my heart. The angel with the book, a gift I gave his first wife long before I wrote a word as a writer. She was a voracious reader. She left the angel when she took off, and when I found it, I realized it’s really mine. The flag with the bird, sent me by someone in my writing community I left in Asheville when I moved to Florida. I never saw her again, because she died.

I love the bird and its message ‘Believe.’ That bird reminds me who I am. Like the bamboo watercolor paint brush from Taiwan in the pen holder. And the purple glittered star with a furry feather collar on a glitter pen that wobbles, catches the gaze often. And what you can’t see, a painted ceramic dish that reminds me of my mother-in-law. Who she was, home & person. She and I were so different from one another, and we loved one another bigtime. Sometimes I think part of her love was that I fascinated her. Inexplicable to her. I know my love for her is inexplicable, and it runs deep.

Every one of these things on my desk hold could hold pain. And in this moment, I realize I subconsciously made choices, that the pain was the part of the stories I’d let go. That I’d embrace the true good heart of each relationship with others and to myself. I could’ve chose differently. And Yes, these things wouldn’t be on my desk if I had. But the point is I got ‘it’ without thinking. And these things and what they represent support me. And I can make conscious choices the same way. That’s the spiral I’m on now.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Tell me. . .what parts of your stories do you hold on to?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .the challenges are still there for me, even knowing I got the message.

Like what you read? Sign up for updates in your inbox.

The Writer’s Block Myth

A Guide to Get Past Stuck & Experience Lasting Creative Freedom.
#1 Bestseller
Get it here

Celebrate the Triumphs

Posted on March 14, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“We are stars, all of us. Radiant. Brilliant. Shimmering. Each one a sun. Huge. Yet, small. Yet, huge. Tucked into a little pocket of the universe, with a beating heart. Stellar from the inside out.”
~ Lea Redmond, (from Teacup Constellation, a video)

I love that my sister-in-law always sends occasional & holiday cards thru the mail. Something wonderful about personal mail in an envelope. Love that my birthday card arrived 2 days after The Day, what I call perfect time. Because we should celebrate our birthdays until we forget we had one. Celebrating is important. As are breaks. Something I haven’t done with ease in ages.

One afternoon this week I took off for hours, tho. I’d given the iron to my husband Art since he irons and I haven’t ironed a thing in yeeeears. It was in NC and I wanted a very cute jacket for a photo shoot that had suitcase-pressed wrinkles stream from the shower wouldn’t loosen. I called my textile artist friend. Her iron was space-age. Looked like a high-end running shoe. Her studio was sunny. The window with the lush geranium and cobalt glass in the mobile that matched the paint on the sills and fence outside captivated me. I took pictures. Then we walked around her yard in the sunshine. It was beyond zero zero-scaped, but had wonderful treasures.

Like a raven at a stone circle around a tree,

and buddha in a spiral labyrinth,

and a statue I made that I gave her when I left Santa Fe in 1998.

I’m urged to take breaks by someone who’s helping me take my work to the world in a bigger way. A day I felt rotten with allergies, she said step away from the computer, take care of your health. I welcomed permission. It worked in restoring my silver-lining self. The next morning I appreciated being dressed immediately upon rising. Having jumped into the shower because the steam helps the sinuses. I appreciated not being at the computer in jammies with bedhead & sleep in my eyes ’til late morning. I appreciated tasting my tea, which I don’t fully do when I’m at the computer. I called the shift a triumph. Something I write about in my book: celebrate the triumphs.

But the day I had a photo shoot, was told to go for lunch afterward, celebrate, I didn’t do it. I walked in the sunshine. Got a favorite sandwich I called a treat to eat at home. Bought juice from the juice bar, another treat. I enjoyed myself, didn’t return to the computer for several hours. But it wasn’t celebrating. It was a pause, something else I write about in the book: the value of pauses. I felt good about the shoot and it was a triumph. It needed more than a pause.

Every day I discover another (new to me) brilliantly creative person. Doing work that brings people together. That changes lives ’cause it empowers, inspires hope, adds something lovely to life in the real world. Exactly what I want my book to do. Exactly what I hope for my own work with others. This past week my discovery was Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

I’ve missed these people & their work because I didn’t take enough initiative to expand my community far enough beyond what I know. It’s thru others that we find others, become aware of darned good work getting done. Others can mirror ourselves, too. The good and not so good.

I read last night Amy Krouse Rosenthal passed from this earth. Something I learned was imminent at the same time I learned she existed. Artist Lea Redmond created a video called Teacup Constellation as a gift for her. Amy shared it with the world on facebook, and I believe she would love it passed on because it carries the heart of her message within her work.

Watch Teacup Constellation here. It’s magical.

We must celebrate triumphs and take pauses. Because we need to. We must care for ourselves as we connect with others. As we put our good work into the world. And always, always welcome the reminders.

On the third day of my soft launch for The Writer’s Block Myth, I woke to this in my inbox:
“In addition to hitting #1 in the charts for Authorship and Writing Skills, the book has hit #1 for Publishing & Books, as well as #2 for Writing, Research and Publishing Guides. At the moment, The Writer’s Block Myth is sitting at #584 on the Amazon platform of all free eBooks, which is really amazing.” That deserved a celebration. And today, the day my book launches does, too.

I’m relearning what I once knew well, grateful for the triumph.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Tell me. . .how do you celebrate triumphs? How do you take pauses?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .I’m a fast learner.