Tag: enchanted

Snowy Knows All My Secrets

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Daily prompt: Have you ever named an inanimate object? (Your car? Your laptop? The volleyball that kept you company while you were stranded in the ocean?) Share the story of at least one object with which you’re on a first-name basis.

I have struggled with determining the personality of my car so as to properly name it. Her. Him. Three years in its still just a vehicle. I love it, I take care of it, but it remains an it.

I like to name things. Or rather, I like to create stories around things, applying personality traits to everything from critters to the weather; having full conversations with woodland creatures that sit still long enough for me to take their photos. But as I think of it, I have never actually named them, instead referring to them in the familiar as ‘friend.’ I have a particular penchant for turning verbs into nouns by ascribing qualities to places like Distraction and Procrastination. And I am inclined to make up biographies about people I pass on the street; giving them full back stories based solely on how they walk or the expressions on their faces.

Yet naming things that do not move of their own volition eludes me.

Snowy. I have a white teddy bear from my early childhood that has had the fur loved off of him. His name is Snowy. I can’t be certain, though, that I named him.

A previous purple car acquired the name Barney. But it wasn’t I that named it.

Dogs? Yes. Cats? Yes. Children? Of course. Iguanas? Once.

Perhaps, sadly somehow, the answer is no. No, I have not named an inanimate object. But I’ll be okay. I feel no less complete as a result of this shortcoming.

I will chose instead to continue my tete a tete with the rather loquacious Mr. C, our resident cardinal, in my bay tree out back. I will visit Distraction. Again and again, maybe taking a side trip to Productivity once in a while. And I will continue to love my car, whatever its name may be.

Turn Off to Tune In

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Daily Prompt: When was the last time a movie, a book, or a television show left you cold despite all your friends (and/or all the critics) raving about it? What was it that made you go against the critical consensus?

About 10 years ago I began to shift away from mindless television and fictionalized or glamorized violence of any kind. I stopped watching the ‘news’ first. It makes me sound prudish and elitist, I know, but I’m okay with that.

You’re probably expecting me to tell you now that I’m one of those people who doesn’t own a TV. I still do. And I still watch it, but not often.

At some point I woke up. At some point I realized that everything I was allowing in through my senses affected not only my attitude but my physical being. Maybe it was an amazing book I read, a seminar, a comment overheard. I can’t say when it happened or even why, except that I woke up. And once I knew what I was doing to myself, I made different choices.

When I let go of the need for water cooler banter and chose to turn my attention to talking about expansive ideas and working on how I could become a better person in this world, a better steward of the earth and at the very least do no harm, everything shifted.

I went outside.

I looked up.

I found enchantment in the clouds – we have great clouds in Florida. The praying mantis eating a dragonfly or a spider catching a fly provided drama and a little violence. Birds are actually quite comical. And strangers are always in the midst of some love story. Overhearing snippets of conversation became  fodder for my imagination; creating lives and turmoil and surprises for these characters I was free to develop.

As I wandered with my camera, magic appeared in front of me. Every time. Hawks would pose patiently on low branches so I could snap their portrait before they flew off to capture their morning meal. Butterflies and bees slowed down as they worked flowers, it seemed just for me. Deer made sustained eye contact before returning to their foraging or bounding into the forest.

I’m sure this was always the case. The only thing that has changed is the observer. Me.

While I appreciate the opinions of others and on occasion I will take the advice of a friend and watch a show, read a book or go to the movies, I am more likely found squatting next to a tree to get a closer look at a baby frog.

This is the direction in which my preferences run. That’s just me. But then, it’s all a matter of taste.

[Photo: Taken at the Merrit Island Refuge in Merrit Island, Florida. He’s about the size of my thumb nail. Maybe. Photo credit: Me, Allison L Andersen]

Magic Wand Optional

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The Daily Prompt: A literary-minded witch gives you a choice: with a flick of the wand, you can become either an obscure novelist whose work will be admired and studied by a select few for decades, or a popular paperback author whose books give pleasure to millions. Which do you choose?

Does anyone write to become obscure? Certainly not in the I-want-to-be-published kind of way. Obscurity is earned by spending tormented hours hunched over journals made of parchment, struggling to get the thoughts to coalesce on paper. Obscurity is found work, not intentional.

Yet secretly all who journal or write for themselves, have the fantasy of their heart’s pourings being found and made into an art film, I suspect. Or maybe that’s my notion alone.

My mission with my writing and photography is to ‘Share the Magic.’ It’s not that my point of view is so fresh or that my word combinations are unique. It’s not that my photos are technically brilliant. It’s just that I write and that I take pictures and then I share.

At present two books are hovering in fieri; one on finding the magic in the every day and the other my quirky recounting of two trips to India. I am so enjoying the process that it becomes unthinkable at times to finish either one.

I am inspired to drop everything and go look for dragonflies or how the ripples on the lake catch the sun as I tweak and retweak the magic book. Diving back into India is like crawling into crisp cool sheets and leaning back onto a nest of comfy pillows; I am immediately transported to the dreamlike existence of the mother land.

These distractions do not necessarily speak to the eloquence with which I write, but more to the ideas I am choosing to foster and bring forth. I am in love with these projects.

It seems that neither category offered by our literary witch would suit my endeavors. Although paperback does not automatically denote fiction. Perhaps a popular paperback author could fit. After all it’s my intention to share the magic and why not to millions? If millions of people could stop for a moment and consider the beauty and enchantment that surrounds them every day, might they make different choices? I hope one day soon I’ll find out.

Read other’s responses to the prompt here.

Feeling Groovy

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I have not yet fallen into the groove of my life. You know, that comfortable, yet active, relaxed state. Leaning back into life, open and ready but not anxious. Available for the next moment by being present in this one.

I feel it must exist. I have friends who seem to be there, but then that’s my perception. I think I’ve even been there, dipped my toe in on occasion, only I just recognize it as somewhere I’ve been, I don’t catch it in the moment. Perhaps that’s by design. If I notice I’m in it, will that take me out of it? Yearning to recreate it, missing the present once again?

My imagined groove goes a little something like this:

I wake up smiling and refreshed at 5 am. I brew myself a cup of organic free-trade coffee, add a dash of organic cinnamon, raw sugar and organic half and half. I take mug, that I purchased from an extremely talented struggling potter, full of this morning brew, on the deck of my modest ocean front home, or the balcony of my 12th floor upper west side apartment in New York City. Of course I could be traveling, probably I am, so maybe it’s a chai on the rooftop of a 5 story walk up somewhere fabulous in India or a steaming cup of tea in a coffee shop in London. Whatever the case, I am armed with gentle caffeine and settled into a chair, facing east, with my journal and pen, ready to watch the sun rise and let go of thoughts that may be bouncing around creating havoc.

Then I go work out, because I love to, usually dance or some other high energy sweat-making movement. Come home, shower eat a breakfast of organic goat’s milk yogurt with organic granola and a banana from my own tree (why not?).

Refreshed, fed and ready to go, I am at my desk at 9 AM ready and waiting for inspiration to flow through me, which it always does. Sometimes I write, sometimes I edit photos or create photo cards, other times I make jewelry.

I stop for lunch. Something delicious, nutritious and organic, no doubt.

Ok, so this is my groove. The rest of the day just naturally unfolds into a glorious evening of meaningful conversations with great friends back on that deck or balcony. We talk about consciousness and ways to make the world a better place. We share what we’re working on creatively and our processes. We plan to go to gallery openings and take trips together. Maybe we’re drinking naturally decaffeinated organic tea grown since the 6th century, that someone has just brought back from their recent trip to China. Or perhaps a new Malbec from a friend in Argentina. Jazz plays in the background. It’s a band we know personally. Or maybe one of us is sitting quietly plucking the strings of an acoustic guitar, creating on the spot.

The flaw in this scenario? When do I get to eat too much of the wrong thing? Where do I fit in Orange is the New Black? Where’s the struggle that make success sweet?

Truthfully I would be totally okay with this groove. I don’t need to create struggle anymore.  I know enough people who do and they don’t age well. They don’t see that they have a choice. Struggling is a choice. Suffering is truly optional – a state of mind. It’s in their perception. A wise teacher, Yogi Amrit Desai once said something like, “Wanting things to be different than they are is our only problem.”  Acceptance of anything is the key. You cannot change something you refuse to accept, it doesn’t exist.

And so, I accept that I need to move, write, be creative and tromp through wildlife to snap photos. I also accept that I’m in my groove more often than not. I have sipped excellent coffee from ocean front decks, high rise balconies in New York, Chai on rooftops in India and tea in coffee shops in London. I write. I move. I create. I have done all of these things.

It is in those moments that I feel disconnected and outside that I need only remember that this too is part of my groove. It is the recognition of the present moment that is indeed the groove.

[Photo: The magnificent city of Udaipur, India.]

Sniff, Swoon, Repeat

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The sense of smell is our most powerful memory sense.

Coconut suntan oil transports me to hot, lazy summers in Myrtle Beach, SC. Boy crazy, junior high, not a care in the world. I can hear ELO fade as the DJ announces ‘WKZQ, Myrtle Beach,’ followed by the summer ditty, “Time to turn, so you won’t burn.” I can feel my skin, tight with dried salt water and my hair stiff with sand, my lips pregnant with the brine of the ocean.

The smell of burning wood evokes chilly autumn nights in northern Virginia. I can see the curl of smoke coming out of the townhouse chimneys. I am cozy, safe, and warm as I watch the blustery air outside kick up the last of the season’s fallen leaves. Soon, night would fall long before an acceptable hour, causing me to burrow into the warmth of grandma’s crocheted blankets and warm woolen socks. Wool. I love the smell of wool.

If winter were defined by one scent, it would have to be soup. Soups, stews, and pot roasts, all seem to tickle the same memory; walking into the warm house from the cold, shedding my winter coat and gloves and holding my hands over the steam of the simmering pot on the stove; the windows in the kitchen sweating with condensation while the tile floors stayed cold.

But perhaps the fragrance that causes me to swoon the most is honeysuckle in Maryland in the spring. Sitting high on a hill, climbing a fence that separates me from a busy street, vines wrap and tangle in on themselves, full of white flowers. I would pluck one flower at a time, pinch the end and suck the nectar from its center.

Here, in Florida, honeysuckle struggles in the sun, unable to grow. Instead, we have the gift of orange blossoms. In the spring I drive with my windows down, slowing down as I pass by groves, and inhale as deeply as I can hoping to store some of the sweet, light essence. On a windy day this perfume can be carried for miles, and like the tiniest present, it slips just beneath my nose, stopping me in my tracks. Closing my eyes, I inhale gratefully, intoxicated.

It’s hard for me to imagine a world without aromas, so much memory is wrapped up in them. A single sniff of diesel fuel takes me to the Princess couch of my grandparent’s sailboat, just behind the helm, as we motor out to sea. From that unlikely smell, a million pleasant memories flood my awareness.

Without scent, would it all be lost?

Not lost, perhaps, but certainly without that instant, surprise trip down memory lane. Scent is the key that unlocks the door to faded memories, infusing them with fresh color, enchanting us anew.

Daily Prompt:  Nosey Delights. From the yeasty warmth of freshly baked bread to the clean, summery haze of lavender flowers, we all have favorite smells we find particularly comforting. What’s yours?

Losing Myself

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I don’t believe in wrong turns. I don’t believe in coincidences. And I certainly don’t believe in mistakes.

I do believe that everything we have done in the past; each choice we have made has brought us to exactly where we are right now. This gives us a tremendous amount of power. Everything we decide to do now, however we choose to react to our current set of circumstances, is creating our future. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, you can’t blame anyone or anything else for anything. Which is really just more good news. You are empowered, not a victim.

Life is experiential. While we may not be able to control our every move – realistically we’re controlling nothing – we can control our reaction. This makes getting lost and taking wrong turns a part of the adventure of life.

Some of the best experiences come out of wrong turns. I have found secret pockets of wonder inside the woods when I went left instead of right. I found a quaint, mostly unmarked coffee shop when I got lost in Savannah. I made a new friend while sitting at the wrong subway station waiting for the next train.

I have also felt frightened when I found myself in a neighborhood that was known for its active gangs and drug deals. Nothing happened, I drove right through, stopped at stop lights, no one hassled me. I learned something about myself that day, about where I place my power.

Getting lost has become my hobby. I am a wandering explorer. No amount of reading about other’s experiences can replace stumbling upon an elephant outside my hotel in Udaipur, India or finding a fuzzy baby swan in a nearby lake. Yet reading about other’s adventures always uplifts me.

Serendipity is everywhere, we just have to perceive it as such. The most inconvenient event can yield the most life affirming results. Many times I have found myself in a situation that I could never have planned yet everything aligned perfectly as if it was meant to be. Because, I believe it was. This happens with great regularity.

No matter how much I try to schedule and organize my life, it’s all those spaces in between, all the distractions, all the wrong turns, that provide the richest experiences. It is choosing to look for the gifts in everything, the messages, the prompts, that creates the adventure for me.

And so I let go, I follow my inner compass and lose myself in this big, beautiful enchanted world.

From today’s WordPress writing prompt: Wrong Turns. When was the last time you got lost? Was it an enjoyable experience, or a stressful one? Tell us all about it.

21 Day Body Love Challenge – The Whole Enchilada

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Free Happy Woman Enjoying Nature. Beauty Girl Outdoor. Freedom c

“Know then that the body is merely a garment. Go seek the wearer, not the cloak.” – Rumi

It’s time to put it all together. The whole body. It’s all connected. Loving your feet and eyes but not the rest of you is like taking only your feet and eyes on vacation, leaving the rest behind, to what? Fend for itself? Rot? No, it’s a package and not absolutely loving every internal and external inch is no longer acceptable. You can still improve on areas, eat healthy, exercise, but without attaching to the outcome.

Without attaching to the outcome. A healthy lifestyle has more to do with how you FEEL than how you look. How you look is a by-product of the lifestyle.

I was at a farmers’ market recently. I waited at a local honey booth for the person manning it to return. She was a woman about my age – somewhere north of 30, okay 40, whatever – she had no make-up on, her hair was a wild mass of various shades of gray and her skin was glowing. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled. She exuded health. In that moment I thought, I want that. None of the packaging, but what was radiating out from the inside. Life force.

Your body is your vehicle for this journey and it was assigned specifically to you. It is yours to use and maintain. How well you do that will most likely determine the length of its service.

I like to think about new parents and how they are so careful and loving with the new life now entrusted to them. How they attend to her every need, caress her skin, feed her only the best food, use just the safest, most gentle products.  They wouldn’t dream of every harming her or uttering a harsh word in her direction.

Then I like to think about the Buddhist monks who help people die. There are homes staffed by renunciates whose sole (soul?) purpose is to care for those transitioning, who have no one else to care for them. They bathe and feed these patients, listen to them compassionately, rub their backs and tuck them in at night.

What of the intervening years? Scolding, belittling, berating, abusive. To ourselves. We treat ourselves and our bodies worse than we would ever treat another. Maybe it’s because we know they’re scolding, belittling, berating and abusing themselves. So we each act as the other’s support.

It has to stop. You’ve probably seen or heard of Dr. Emoto by now. If not, he is the Japanese doctor who conducted experiments on water. He yelled at it, called it names. He spoke lovingly and positively to it. The results were phenomenal. Mean = disorganized, sharp, ugly water. Love = soft, beautiful, clear water that looked like various snowflakes. His energy directly affected the response of the water. We are mostly water.

Be a snowflake. Speak kindly to yourself. Caress your skin with nourishing lotions and oils. Feed your body with food that’s alive and water that you have spoken sweet nothings to. Tell yourself how worthy and beautiful you are. How unique.

A friend of mine likes to say, “Two the same, one is not necessary.” Why would you want to be like anyone else? Better than and less than only exists in math, not in people. You are perfect. Every single cell is a divine gift. Accept it.

“The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free. – Swami Vivekananda

 

21 Day Body Love Challenge – Heart of the Brain Matter

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Grey zen stone in shape of heart, on sand background

If you are reading this you have a heart. And thank you. Even if someone is reading this to you, you have a heart. It is one tangled mess of a muscle that we cannot live without.

But when you think heart, do you think of that dark red pulsing thing with its aorta and valves and ventricles? Or do you think of the simplified Valentine? Perhaps something in between. Or maybe you think more of energy and emotion. There are no wrong answers.

When I think of my own heart I first listen carefully, trying to notice my heart beat. Sometimes it’s making its presence known, at other times it’s quietly doing its job. But then I begin to attach stories and emotion to it. How many times I’ve had it broken, or put it out there. How it likes to love. Or doesn’t.

The heart knows stuff, but it’s the connection to the brain that helps us understand that stuff.

People who have undergone heart transplant surgery often report liking or disliking something they never did before. They have flashes, like someone else’s memories. There are brain cells in the heart. At the very least there is a connection.

Much research has been done in recent years on the heart-brain connection.  The heart sends more information to the brain than the other way around. According to the Institute of HeartMath, the heart sends signals to the brain that can influence perception, emotional experience and higher mental processes.

They are in cahoots. To fall in love with your own heart would be to also fall in love with your brain and ultimately your mind. This is the mind-body connection. When we are able to fully connect to both in harmony, we begin to find synchronicity in life and are treated to serendipitous moments and magic we like to think of as coincidence. We’re aware and present.  In love with life.

When our heart gets broken we disconnect. We don’t want to feel the icky feelings. Not right now. If we don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist. We’ll come back to it later when we’re feeling better, which is a lot like saying you’ll join the gym as soon as you lose some weight. The disconnect only stalls things, it doesn’t fix them.

Staying connected, even through the pain, maybe especially through the pain, allows us to live more fully. If we begin to disconnect during strong emotional times, we’ll also miss the absolute joy that is available to us.

Feel the feelings. Think the thoughts. Let them find their way to each other, then let them work it out. It’s integration and it brings with it a tremendous feeling of grounded joy.

“Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.” – Paramahansa Yogananda

Romancing the Comma

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Today’s Daily Post asks us to consider punctuation. To do that, I must also consider words. And I love words.  I love to read them, write them, and type them. I love to ingest them, rolling them around on my tongue, feeling their edges, tasting their sweetness, pain or bitterness. Swallowing them, feeling them.

Words have tremendous power, whole laws have been created to protect words and protect against words. But unless a sentence is well crafted, unless it is properly punctuated, words can become listless.

In our technology driven society, we have lost some of the formality of punctuation. Sentences are fragmented, even reduced to a few letters. Emphasis is indicated by a plethora of exclamation marks or all caps.

A part of me likes the shorthand, it’s concise and quick. But the part of me that romanticizes language is already starting to mourn the loss of an art form.

In my own writing, I overuse commas, listing things a lot. I’m still shaky on the use of semi-colons, but brave enough to insert them where it feels right. I favor dashes over parentheses, and I’ve been known to employ the … Exclamation marks rarely make their way onto the page unless it’s in dialog or a really strong point I’m trying to make. But overall I’m a huge fan of proper punctuation.

Punctuation slows the reader down, allowing them to observe their thoughts about what they’re reading; enchanting them with their own imagination. It’s the magic of the written word to evoke so many emotions that keeps me reading and for that, we need good old fashioned punctuation.

21 Day Body Love Challenge – She’s a Brainiac, Brainiac

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Brain Cells and Deep Space

My brain is in love with itself. Yours probably is too. We can have a grand old time making up things to think about. Boredom? Never, we keep each other entertained, but we can also get into trouble.

My brain is brilliant; it tells me so all the time. My elementary school teachers told my parents so too, but they used phrases like, “so much potential,” “if only she’d focus,” “if she applied herself,” “if she’d just stop talking.” They were thinking Mensa, probably.

I am fascinated with the inner workings of the brain. Not enough to become a neurobiologist or some high falutin doctor, but enough to pay attention to how people are. It’s so interesting to me that people make the same decisions over and over again even though they know those choices are harmful to them. Smoking, drugs, over-eating, playing in traffic, watching the news.  Me too. Why do we do it?

What makes some people more successful than others? It’s in the brain, I’m sure of it, I just don’t know where or what it looks like. Maybe it looks like a stern father or a disappointed mother. Maybe it’s just wide open space that the brain can roll around in like a child rolling down a hill on a spring day.

How different must Hitler’s brain look from Einstein’s? Does it even?

There is a place where science and yoga intersect on the topic of the brain. Quantum physics tells us nerves that wire together fire together. Meaning if we repeat the same behavior often enough, we will continue to repeat it. We have created a neuro-pathway that is wired to do that same thing again and again. We’ve taught it.

In yoga they are called samskaras. Deep grooves held in the sub-conscious that prompt us to keep repeating the same behavior. Good or bad. Sometimes we don’t even know why we’re doing that silly thing we always do. This is why.

The good news is we can fix it. We simply have to create new grooves, new pathways with the good habits we’d like to foster. Simple, right? Simple, yes. Easy, no.

My brain has had full arguments with itself over whether or not I should have the oh-so-tiny piece of chocolate. I’m not sure which one is in charge of the mouth, but that’s the one that usually wins. If I want to change that, I need to train my brain to go for water, over and over again. The mouth controlling part of my brain is on the floor snorting with laughter right now. See what I’m up against?!

When I try to meditate, the bratty part of my brain – the one with all that potential – sits behind a table and holds up score cards. Usually they are failing marks. When I try to concentrate on one task, focus, really focus, the other part can be found semi-crumpled whining, “Come ooooonnn.” I usually go.

Full disclosure: As soon as I typed the word ‘go’ in that last paragraph, my head snapped to look outside to see what was going on. Nothing, by the way. Nothing was going on.

Creating a good habit seems more difficult than the bad ones because we usually view it as a corrective behavior. If we reframe it as just something new, the brain is likely to be pleased and pick up the new habit more easily.

So, I think I’ll go grab a big glass of water. Still laughing.  Oh, big beautiful brain, how I love thee.

“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.” – Robert Frost