OBSERVATIONS IN TRANSITION, TEXAS

Creativity and intention. Yep, it's all that. What's the New Now, really? It's being surprised at every turn in the trail. It starts with saying "yes, we can do that".

The New Now brings us to Texas. Not whitewashed Texas, not Austin, the Texas city that everyone where I come from calls cool and liberal. But Dallas. We are in the middle, up and dropped. A place most Easterners don't consider because we don't have the slightest - we can't even picture it - we have no expectations.

What is more appropriate, in a new world, seeing from new lenses, than to be lifted and dropped in a place we can't even pass judgment on? Passive and real, acceptance.

Creativity in transition is a stiff challenge. It's hard to be introspective when there's so little stillness of mind. ADD, too much to manage. But so many of us are in motion now, there is no rest. Rest was a state enjoyed earlier this decade. But transition equals observation. We notice and note, we fold down the corners, people, places and things.

What better application for my very favorite exercise, Three Beautiful Things?

1 - You watch late summer rain in Texas change by altitude, starting with long ribbons, then it's thick droplets, and by the time it reaches ground it's just mist, which for the cross country girls we pass on our way to school every morning, is like running through a sprinkler.

2 - I meet the stunning octogenarian from the 16th floor ordering a Grande Misto at Starbucks every day, then watch her meet her caretaker in the lobby with a hand shake and a kiss before they ascend to their day.

3 - Our furnished apartment came with industrial lighting, hotel linens and an uncomfortable pull-out couch. But the painting in the living room is a pastel of the Prinsengracht. Amsterdam meets Dallas, in a high rise.

MAKING TIME TO CREATE

It's the challenge, one that even the most celebrated authors and artists have made clear when in conversation with dreamers (like me) -- the creative life is work, hard work. It's not just making the art, it's making the time to make the art. Herding ideas. Capturing them to keep them when time is not at hand.

Who has the time, that elusive, crystal time? I have the time that ticks toward an end, ticks like an egg timer with a single, awkward "ding", saying it's all over. I always pictured the creative life as the writer possessed by idea and time, in the room designated "own". Artists in their barns. Gardeners, morning til night, coaxing flowers to bloom, boundless time to ward off weed and rot.

Summer Night, Winslow Homer, 1890

I just read a piece on Winslow Homer in Downeast Magazine, a study of the artist's studio, aloof (and precious) in its Maine Coast grit and ruggedness. Turns out there was nothing pristine about the spot, not in Homer's day. The Homers were loud and numerous when he worked in Prouts Neck; picnics were events, peopled with waving arms and flying retort. All this shatters my image of quiet productivity. And yet, Winslow Homer's paintings were tightly constructed, perfect, and no one but Homer lives in that iconic crash of Maine waves.

Surely, creativity must thrive in wide, empty space. I know empty space is an elusive thing. Here are some prompts, structure that could give permission to be fractured in these fractious and fraught times.

Keep Track of Yourself

Write it down. Different notebooks for different outings is my approach. Consulting clients in development have their own Moleskin paperback. When I travel, it's a Moleskin hardback, palm-sized. I keep my every day brainstorms in a series of orange elastic-banded notebooks. Journals come in every shape and size to reflect the chapter you're in. I just ordered my latest journal from Etsy. A genius creation by a Toronto artist, each hand-bound diary is inspired by a vintage publication, depicting the first edition cover on its hard and colorful binding, and including the first chapter of the book you choose. I chose The Luckiest Girl.

Create in Groups

Last week's Sunday Styles featured Dream Groups, gatherings often led by experts and sometimes operated autonomously to explore members' nocturnal activity of the mind. While the article posited the groups a bit scarily as channels for seeking intimacy, I like the idea of using dreams as writing prompts.

My dearest Maggie told me of her Journaling Group in Galveston. They meet weekly in the morning, artists and writers, non-artists and "never wrote a things". One particular member is plugged in, does research on journaling prompts, has a book or two and leads her group with 10-to-20 minute writing sessions. Journalers then "share" (if they want to) as part of the exposition and development of their art.

The Diarist Workshop is a resource for writing in groups, and has some great links for writing prompts and inspiration.

Creating the Space

Writing it down, no matter your medium, is where to start. Dani Shapiro wrote in her recent blog entry called "On Talking" that capturing an idea or thought or story, instead of talking about it, is what makes or breaks momentum as an artist. It's a spontaneity thing, and for sociable people, discussion is tantamount to life.

Good pen, right setting, best paper. An elastic band to snap shut around it. Capturing the moment. Maybe that's the art, itself.

Even the Icons struggled to Capture It

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were literary friends in the early part of the last century; they were prolific writers, artists, diarists. In 1918, Virginia Woolf published Katherine Mansfield's great book "Prelude" from her own Hogarth Press. She and Leonard printed and bound the first 300 copies of her friend's creation, by hand. About this time, Virginia wrote Katherine about dealing with her own challenge with elusive ideas in a letter I found in archive at Smith College. These are truly journaling words:

Virginia Woolf writes:

“What is your ultimate desire—to what do you so passionately aspire?"

Then answers, for her friend Katherine, for herself.

"To write books and stories and sketches and poems.”

FOUND TIME

The screens we overlay before us can get thick with number. Screens of school (getting children through it), screens of marriage (getting life partners through it), screens of work (layered upon layer) with expectation for production and creativity and, work, seemingly the answer to survival. The thing about screens is that they are flimsy and they inevitably drop, one by one, they fall away - in answer to our call to survive. We're looking for Found Time, but in reality the falling away often reveals a crisis beyond proportion.

Found time. Illicits such a gorgeous soft landing. Found time to take pulse, to catch up, to read, to write. To sip slowly and to talk meaningfully. Or, Found time = now what?

Can you give yourself permission to not know? Can we hide here in the time we find, not just taking pulse but taking stock, and letting a day pass, surviving the passage, and just... breathing?
In my found time this afternoon, I reached out a little, to try and find myself. This is what was given back.


Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander

A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.


"Painting" by Maggie Taylor created with Adobe Photoshop

IN MOTION

The times bring change whether we are ourselves in motion or just watching the flow.

Seasonal motion. Moving through time as our fundamentals have taught us. With early summer comes places to go, change to routine. Life's school thinks the calendar year nonsensical.

For us, it's simple sense. Our orbit has come full circle, school closes and progress is reported. There has been no real movement. 18 months ago I defined the New Now as painful rebirth, transitional to another plain. Thought I'd become good at it, given time. New Now seemed a momentary step to New Me.

Once at this time, the orbit ended and with it came the end of a contract. Now, I see change confront others, and into the winds they go.

And the news is - Get used to New Now, for it is the state of learning to spin on ones axis. It's the knack of spinning and not getting dizzy. Not new, the fouette turn is head stable, gaze on a fixed spot, body in motion, turning.

And then, Universal motion. High on our axis, not even a top whirls and twists quite like what our world is doing. The tides and channels are as intemperate as always, but sea birds in rainbow garb are in the spin with it, having not asked for it, having never expected it.

BP's assault, the spill, from space

"If only we might build an Ark." The Errant Aesthete, "where meaningful discourse, thoughtful utterance, amusing anecdote and enlightened chatter flourish and thrive". My model of all things close to the bone of style, Errant Aesthete writes of the assault on our blue jewel sea. Perhaps style arbiters are louche, perhaps they find meaning in satire. The Errant Aesthete has as her leading quote, this from Agatha Christie: "They tried to be too clever - and that was their undoing."

There has never been a time without suffering. It's where we meet our ingenuity, our God, call it what you like. For suffering we find antidote. Poetry in Motion is back on New York City buses and subways. Here is verse, which made me feel like someone, all along, will be watching.

Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing
- Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.

I SMELL IT!

Life has overtaken me and I have fallen away, like a piece of fruit off its branch. Falling away hasn't been for distraction. Truth told, it's been an effort born of resentment. I haven't written a thing, for the place in line that writing has been relegated to. If I can't prioritize writing, I won't write.

Until this moment, when I cut into a nectarine and the scent overcame me. Better than the stunning scented candle, Beach House by LAFCO. Better than my new perfume, Infusion d'Iris by Prada. This nectarine actually said something, recited itself in poetic form. It said: we're almost there. Summer.

With summer, everything else stops and the real thing can start again - and I mean that figuratively. When it stops for me, I return to Maine and to the writings of Mary McCarthy and EB White, the poetry of Philip Booth and, maybe this summer, Rachel Carson. To drives along miles that only stop at the water. I will think about what I'm reading in the New York Times and tell you about finds and favorites. All of this will be in an effort to rise above the concerted distraction and reach up to that highest shelf, the one where we stick our journals once we write in them (no matter how long ago that was). That shelf's where the good ideas are stacked.

CRYSTAL BALL

Apparently, life is about continuing to breath while living in limbo.

Because despite having access to every invention in the world to tell us which way to go (GPS, iPhone, apps galore), it turns out we have to cope and decide and dedicate ourselves to stepping in one direction vs another with no promises at all.

I sometimes think I hear the collective crinkle of a smile from the generations who went before us. It must contain a bit of relief that even with the coming-true of the Jetsons, life is still life, and no one is exempt from the ambiguity that comes with it.

Michelle Slatella asked yesterday in her New York Times column "Life's Journeys, a Lot Less Mysterious": "How does it change the way we experience the world, to know that nothing is unknown?" She's referring to the way we rely on our devices. The ones we buy to "make life easier" as well as the internal ones - our sense that we know everything there is to know, that we can get the information we need in a Google minute. Even the certainty that every corner of every vast forest and empty ocean has been plotted, mapped, committed to some service or other.

An old boyfriend once commented that in my infinite and earnest college-aged wisdom it was a shame that I was never surprised, by anything. Did I really know it all back then? When I know so little now?

GPS can't get us where we really need to go, not even close. A dear friend is trying to decide whether to choose a radical mastectomy because she's predisposed to breast cancer. Another grapples with a relationship that reflects her hopes for the future some days, but not others. John and I live on in our beloved home, gambling like Columbus would have that the gulf between us and financial terra firma is only a month's sail away.

It's the gamble. The GPS would say "Remove the breasts. Pack your bags. Sell the house." But for what?

Michelle Slatella consulted a professor from U.C. Irvine who specializes in maps and early explorers, asking her that question, about how living on the assumption that nothing is unknown is effecting our generation. The Professor responded that in the olden days, explorers "know where they are starting from. And they know that there is something beyond what they know."

She said: "When you are lost, there are possibilities."

MORE ON FEBRUARY FROM VALENTINE'S MORNING

Sunday Styles in today's New York Times gave us more than one piece about love, today being Valentine's Day. What works and what doesn't in matters where "working" is an apt action word. Modern Love (always provocative), and something about Valentine's Day when you're alone, when you're wistful, when you're spending too much time on Facebook, when you're a gay or lesbian couple living in a State that tells them they're exempt from loving. Each story is short with a quippy "happy" ending, seemingly improbable for its too sensitive and personal voice. Like watching the wedding of strangers, the couple sharing their love in front of an audience of acquaintances throwing rice and clutching hankies-- and you & me watching from across the street, a vantage point that makes it seems a little put-on. That was my take on the New York Times vignettes. Call me a cynic. I'm happier doing my thing at home with my own cast of characters, listening to the ultimate in cynics, Rickie Lee Jones, sing about sad things on Valentines Day.



I've read so mcuh of late, about dreary February, and I just don't share the opinion. There's a certain recovery thing going on in February. Recovery, like coming up for air, or the day you know a flu is behind you. Snow comes, but it melts faster and is followed by incongruous flashes of a red bird or a round green patch. In North Carolina where I grew up there is a real and dependable February thaw. I remember dry and bright college mornings breathing Carolina lighter than air.

I love February, not because I have a beloved with whom I exchange a valentine, nor for the quick follow-up 6 days later of the day of my birth. It's that I believe in recovery, like forgiveness. February is over almost as soon as it starts, then March, and March is Spring. When color comes in longer flashes and the weight of dark begins to lift.

COMING TOGETHER

Time has come to bring it all together again. It has been a year of making and manufacturing, of building creativity in places it didn't exist. You can feel it, see it. There's new momentum for so many of us.

The Daily Now is moving home. May this archive of cool and creative prompts live on for you. Go deep in, find the writing and art, photos and songs that made you move, every day this past year. The archive will always be here. Remember it. Click here to save it in your favorites.

And from here on, you'll find it back on the New Now. We're picking up our own pieces, and when we come up to look around, holy cow, it's us - it's our turn to take the reins and lead this place out of the mess it's in!

If creativity and responsibility work at once, we'll make this the better world.

Crisis and change makes us new, makes us something we haven't been. The New Now is about finding it where it is, it's the juice to create. We're turning crisis into momentum.

The painting of the bus is by Morgan Blair, "freelance illustrator, fine artist, and desperado. Recent graduate of RISD, now living in Brooklyn and continuing to advance her interest in trees, legos and excellent music."

3 Beautiful Things, for February 1st

February brings a newness you feel but shouldn't believe. Rounding the corner, it's happening beneath our feet. Rebirth, growth, the tiny signs of thaw.

3 Beautiful Things for February 1st

1 - Waiting for the bus at 8 something this morning, we see a family come to their curb about 500 feet before our stop. Mom waiting with child, she walks out to the middle of our country road and dances a funny dance, legs akimbo. Child doubles over for her craziness.

2 - Reading Kathryn Stockett's "The Help", an eerily real novel about black maids and the white women they work for. Stockett's voice, she was sprung from the latter, is an innate memory, she knows the dialect, the love tinged with deep, faraway regret, the voice of a black woman raising white children. This novel is my chance to imagine what could have been, freedom and individuality for Dowdell, the black woman who "raised me". I salute you, Dowdell.

3 - At basketball practice for 7th and 8th grade girls, a perfect snapshot of 'before' and 'after'. Girls and women, arms entwined, jumping for the same balls. Before: the gangly beautiful pre-adolescents; childlike, blossom, unopened. After: full and free, an unnameable knowing. On one court.

WHAT MAKES ME OPTIMISTIC

I got my hope back.

I heard it last night, the call to collaborate. It was the creative spark ignited on a grander scale. We have been living a mired existence of late. So much static, agendas and misunderstanding, and obtuse misuse of power - these are things that have been alive in our Universe, it has made me worry. I don't know the people who fight, who scream profanity. I didn't elect the people who wouldn't listen to all sides of such deeply complex issues, when so much is at stake. We seem to be at a nearly Biblical crossroads, where forces of good and progress meet competition and selfishness. I may be the only one who awoke this morning having heard, but I was energized by the message: clarity, someone taking hold, saying we must "DROP OUR WEAPONS". If we, our generation (because, folks, it is our turn) can learn from this, if we can disarm each other, we may do something heroic. I think we can be heroes.

Here are some of the indicators that have crossed my windshield today. For these too, I am optimistic:

3 Beautiful Things, written by a blogger in England, this short, 3-bulleted list is posted every single day. 3 things that open her eyes, 3 trivial things that together made a day to remember. I have followed 3 Beautiful Things for over a year and marvel at the writer's focus. It is more zen than meditation.

Pret a Voyager, a travel blog that picks you up and takes you there. Like Gourmet did. Not wistful, just hopeful. Every destination is just a decision away.




The Home section of the New York Times published a telling 3-page spread today, Best Sellers and Bombs. It is a beautiful, creative collage about what people like (and didn't like), what appeals to us, what we have actually bought through the final cycle of this windstorm recession. I love beautiful things. I collect ephemera and treasures, things that remind me of lighter times. This spread, which used to be published every year, hasn't been written since September 2007. It feels like we're raising our shades a little and letting some light shine in.



Buddhi Mat Yoga opened in our town. It is new and clean, and buzzing rather than funereal. It opened in what was only months ago a bank branch. It seems every new business that opened in the recent past were a tendril of yet another bank. Now it's yoga. Specialty food stores. Places of character and warmth.

Miss Whistle is a blog about life and culture and movies and poetry. This week she quotes Aldous Huxley, who said "it's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and to find at the end one has no more to offer by way of advice than: 'Try to be a bit kinder'". If we can all just embrace kindness. Sibling to sibling, Democrat to Republican, Boss to Employee just let go. If we can channel compassion, we will commit GREATNESS.


Photo art from 20x200 a Project by Jen Bekman offers limited edition prints, photographs, posters to people like me, seeking images to inspire. The small ones may cost $50. The larger ones, $500. First come, first served. This poster hangs in my kitchen and has been a catalyst for conversation between John and me, also between our children. We range from bad days when we "don't even get it" to better days when it elicits the inspiration for making pancakes. That's creativity. You first have to get excited, then you make things.

INSPIRATION AND FINDING IT

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way." - Virginia Woolf

The new year has happened, and I'm afraid it's receding fast in January's wake. New Years was when things were going to be put back in balance and I'd finish what I'd started, in a state of mind to set priorities and move forward with what is right for now. Leave the rest in good spirit.

My book, "The New Now", was supposed to have been started. The Artist's Way sits next to my bed. I initiated the Morning Pages back in the Fall, having identified the Artist's Way as my guide for this project. Yet somehow, everyhow, I've gone too many directions, and -- well, the Artist's Way sits there by my bed.

Inspiration is elusive, so say those who live their life in search for it. "The New Now" is meant to be written, for you, for me, to fill the widening void of support for how to get through a day once life has shown us it isn't what we thought it was.

I want to write like Virginia Woolf. Michael Cunningham wanted to write like Virginia Woolf too, he's the one who came up with The Hours which, in my mind, is so worthy of her they might have been in the same room when he wrote it.

I have emulated Virginia Woolf. I've followed her every breath, from Bloomsbury to Firle. I have camped out in the gardens of Charleston House and sketched the gatherings, so alive it's as if I sat amongst them. I've read Woolf's biography, I've speculated about her life, analyzed the essays and watched her story dissected on stage.

And now, I have a confession. Despite my dedication, or maybe because of it - I never, not ever got Virginia Woolf. Her words, they're so beautiful and perfectly pitched, but what they mean seem just out of my reach. Like a hanger-on at the cocktail party, nodding and laughing, I've been faking it. As if the language being spoken was one I boasted of, but in fact, only had through high school (a long time ago...)

This confession comes by way of closure, many thanks to Michael Cunningham's essay in Mentors, Muses & Monsters. Cunningham, who sits at Virginia Woolf's right hand, says:

"I was ready... or maybe I should say I was ready to be
ready - for Woolf's sentences. I had not only never seen language like that;
nothing I'd read had prepared me for the fact that a human being could do what
she had done, line by line, using the same ink and paper available to anybody. I
had neither read nor conceived of sentences that complex and muscular and
precise and beautiful. It may, perversely, have helped that I didn't quite
understand what the sentences actually meant. It may have helped free me to
better appreciate their tones and variations, the sheer virtuosity of their
structures and sounds. I remember thinking, Hey, she was doing with language
something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. Riffing, that
is, as only a genius can; finding over and over again an exquisite balance
between recklessness and control, between chaos and pattern."

So now I see. Virginia Woolf wrote not to be gotten. She is the true conduit, she provides life and truth, fulfillment and disappointment, bypainting them into a picture we cock our heads one way then the other to view. Long ago, she gave us the OK to leave the picture with our own interpretation, to apply it as our kind of beautiful to whatever we choose.

This is what I am trying to do in "The New Now". Provide the words for you to take and interpret. Onward, inspiration.

THE WISTFUL THAW

Front page and center, where for over a year our journals have told the plaintive story of plants shutting down and long and winding dole lines, the New York Times features this: "Fresh Arrival in Cul-de-Sac is Optimism". It's true, the thaw is finally reaching those who sat around the table with tears and fears, and the houses that were dark for foreclosure are lighting up again, albeit (I assume) with new families taking the place of those who were forced to move along.

These have been rigid and icy months, and we too feel the thaw. John has made it back into the workforce, in a new capacity, but utilizing the skills and experience he held fast to during the months when the phone didn't ring. He didn't have to take a hard left to avoid disaster, he stayed his course. I worried, wished for someone in the know to tell him what he had to do and how he had to do it; but his determination won the day. Karma, confidence, whatever. Incredibly, even on our particular cul-de-sac, spring has come.

Trickling back to work, fathers hand their stand-in duties back to Mom, or to the neighbor, or in some cases, to the kids themselves. Dads have been everywhere. They've served behind the wheel of carpools and as Orthodontics Negotiator. The Great Recession may have been what was needed to begin a shift toward shared home duties.

At our house, pizza from scratch was in the oven 10 minutes before the bus arrived home. On American Idol night, family-minus-me sat four abreast on the sofa, taking in what John billed as "an Evening of Performing Arts". New traditions. Already outlived.

And they miss their father. Recovery is now about re-redefining home life, responsibilities, the order of things. The next phase of the process is absorbing how we've grown.


Translated:

He: "Now it’s scientifically proven: If Fathers educate children, they become more intelligent!"

She: "Who — Fathers or children?"

WIND ON THE WATER: HAPPY NEW YEAR

The wind whirled and threw snow up like the flour flung so liberally by my family's women in their Christmas bread making.

The winds blew hard this year, winds of time. And we buttoned our coats to it with some assurance that a) it's getting better and b) if it's not, we can survive it. Because we did, because this time last year we weren't so sure.

I've never before experienced this new year's synchronicity: Our resolutions match each others, almost word for word. We each vow to do what it takes to ensure better times. "Good riddance 2009". The headlines proclaim it, and when the ball dropped at 12:01, those were the words exchanged with handshake and cheek kiss. These exact words, almost to a person.

We share the deep relief that time has passed. Even in the age of the Search for Enduring Youth, we're a year older and happy for it. Good riddance 2009.

I hear the whispers of older generations. Saying that it was a lesson a time in the coming. Hardship is life, and we are strong for our hardships. We have lived blessedly, with little hardship on a global scale. We did not know the determination of generations before, who likely celebrated many such New Years, bidding adieu in the very real sense, to a period of time that required such dogged, gritty compromise. We hear these whispers and with some humility, step into the year that promises better things.

A dear friend and mainstay in the New Now sent me a road map for achieving our universal New Years Resoultion, a resolution for recovery. The best is when you come upon powerful words that share their heft with a little sense of humor. I couldn't renounce email chain letters more vehemently, yet I have to pass this one along, for I can think of no better way to say it.

Happy New Year, dear readers.

HANDBOOK 2010

Health:

1. Drink plenty of water.
2. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar.
3. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.. 4. Live with the 3 E's -- Energy, Enthusiasm and Empathy
5. Make time to pray.
6. Play more games
7. Read more books than you did in 2009 .
8. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day
9. Sleep for 7 hours
10. Take a 10-30 minutes walk daily. And while you walk, smile.

Personality:

11. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
12. Don't have negative thoughts on things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.
13. Don't over do. Keep your limits.
14. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
15. Don't waste your precious energy on gossip.
16. Dream more while you are awake
17. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need…
18. Forget issues of the past. Don't remind your partner or friend of His/her mistakes of the past. That will ruin your present happiness.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Don't hate others.
20. Make peace with your past so it won't spoil the present.
21. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
22. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
23. Smile and laugh more.
24. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree...

Society:

25. Call your family often.
26. Each day give something good to others.
27. Forgive everyone for everything..
28. Spend time w/ people over the age of 70 & under the age of 6.
29. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
30. What other people think of you is none of your business.
31. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.

Life:

32. Do the right thing!
33. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
34. God heals everything.
35. However good or bad a situation is, it will change..
36. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
37. The best is yet to come..
38. When you awake alive in the morning, thank God for it.
39. Your Inner most is always happy. So, be happy.

May the new year bring us the courage to ensure that the wind on the water will, indeed, carry us home. Listen.

TAIL LIGHTS JUST AHEAD

December 22, 2009 and Daily Om sent its regular missive. Some days, I hold onto my Daily Om, ride on its beautiful back; some days the words are what take me from dawn until I get to sleep again to see what daybreak will bring.

May this one bring you clarity. Or at least encouragement. It will lift.

Fog
Coming out of a Haze

When we feel muddled and unfocused, unsure of which way to turn, we say we are in a fog. Similar to when we are in a fog in nature, we may feel like we can’t see where we’re going or where we’ve come from, and we’re afraid if we move too quickly we might run into something hidden in the mists that seem to surround us. Being in a fog necessarily slows us down by limiting our visibility. The best choice may be to pull over and wait for the murkiness to clear. If we move at all, we must go slowly, feeling our way and keeping our eyes open for shapes emerging from the haze, perhaps relying on the taillights of someone in front of us as we make our way along the road.

By and large, most of us prefer to be able to see where we are going and move steadfastly in that direction, but there are gifts that come from being in a fog. Sometimes it takes an obstacle like fog to get us to stop and be still in the moment, doing nothing. In this moment of involuntary inactivity, we may look within and find that the source of our fogginess is inside us; it could be some emotional issue that needs tending before we can safely go full steam ahead. Being in a fog reminds us that when we cannot see outside ourselves, we can always make progress by looking within. Then again, the fog may simply be teaching us important lessons about how to continue moving forward with extreme caution, harnessing our attention, watching closely for new information, and being ready to stop on a dime.

We cannot predict when a fog will come, nor can we know for certain when it will lift, but we can center ourselves in the haze and wait for guidance. We may find it inside ourselves or in a pair of barely visible taillights just ahead. Whether we follow the lights out of the fog, wait for a gentle breeze to lift it, or allow the sun to burn it away, we can rest certain that one way or another, we will move forward with clarity once again.

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HOLIDAY RECALL

Holiday's here and a year has past. Last year, only weeks after we fell into the swirling current of our national crisis, we staged a Christmas for the record books. With all the fear of a new, upside-down life situation, we made a daily decision to keep stepping forward, to remember what was important. This time last year, that was to fulfill the annual obligation to our family and friends. Christmas, Come Hell or High Water.


And it was a great Christmas. I can still feel the relief of December 26th 2008, knowing what we accomplished working with a daily (recession) recipe of nausea and resentment. We managed through the holidays with even a bit of cheer and festivity, by inviting people around and sharing a laugh. Community helped us come face to face with the pound of flesh we were about to donate, and despite the anxiety, propelled us forward.


Oh, those days, how I wished for a crystal ball. I remember thinking that if I could just pace myself, I'd make it the weeks or months of joblessness, wondering, waiting. If I'd had a crystal ball would I have believed that another Christmas would come, replete with fear and wondering, and we'd still be breathing? Indeed, if Santa had given me that crystal ball and I'd been seen a vision of the longevity of this limbo state, I think I'd have gone down in a puff of smelling salts.


We're still here. We're facing into Christmas with the same gritted teeth as last year. Committed to making the season light for our passengers, the three who didn't sign on for a year like we've had, much less another to come. The task is, again, daunting, but since I know I've done it up to now (still breathing), I can go a bit further.

Here's what worked last year:

• Scented Candles, always. Pomegranite or fir from K Hall
• Cocktail gatherings - manchego cheese, fig bread, music, someone else bring the wine
• Easy dinners - roasted chickens from the butcher, arugula, dates & parmesan
• Good and constant playlists from Pandora: type in "holiday"
• Setting up a team gift for the extended family with Heifer
  

What I'll add this year:

• Themed reading, historical novels about Tudor England like The Other Boleyn Girl and the Virgin's Lover
• Painting gestures of people and dogs in wild colors
• A card table set up to do a laser-cut puzzle from Liberty

There's a great deal of relief knowing we've made it this far. John goes off every day to a tentative workplace, intent on making it permanent. I throw creative balls in the air and hope they don't drop - but if they do?????

There have been so much inspiration and resources gained during this year of unpredictable tides. The threads are here, now we move to tie them together.

IT'S THE COLOR OF YOUR CARRIAGE

So I think we all agree, it's not a matter of how we got here, it's what color carriage we'll ride out on.

Before we arrived in the New Now - this age of "who the hell are we?" in the face of there being no free lunch after all - we didn't think much about the way out. Delivery? From what?

And yet, even with full time and satisfying employment, folks have changed their orientation. Target and Walmart are flourishing as go-to sources for fashionistas and freestylers. Dry cleaners and tailors are reporting record numbers as we continue to shop our closets. Contractors' phones are ringing off the hook, yet design magazines are falling like dominos. Even homeowners with a budget for renovation are finding the wherewithal to do it on the inside. (An arbiter of style, a friend who has always done things just so, had her children splash Benjamin Moore on a wall-sized canvas as anchor for her new dining room - isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder?)

I'd argue that this wave of homespun creativity should have rolled in a long time ago. We'd be a nation with a lot more style and character if we were more DIY.

In the New Now, the sane option is lifting your head to hear the stories. Creativity is individual, but I have a developing theory that nothing is NEW. I have a great idea which spurs one in you. You ask for advice from an acquaintance and he discovers his gift for giving it. Creativity is a knock-on effect. You've got to be creative, and you'll come up with the color of your carriage.

The blogs out there are legion, and each of them is based on a great idea carried to fruition. I suggested a reading list in Cyber Beauty. They're all sources of inspiration, but also these blogs are just great ideas.

Read blogs! Pass blogs along! Support those who wrote them with your time and attention, and that support will come back to you in chain-letter fashion. And in them, I'll wager the bet that you'll find a calling, something that leads you forward.

Are you looking for a great idea? Do you need creative inspiration? Is it a new job, the first line of a story? Is it a subject for your next oil painting or a Partner to brainstorm with? Look up and look around, the answer is there.

CYBER-BEAUTY

There is a certain combination that in this new day - this new age - I find myself seeking in just about every medium, every day. That is the combination that makes BEAUTY.

Beauty is different in the New Now. Or I am different in the New Now, don't know which. But in this time of deep austerity, of questioning what's important and finding what matters, beauty is not just the single dimensional kind of pretty it once was. It involves the 5 senses. Now, it involves a 6th. The new 6th sense is how we bring beauty alive from our computer screen when we don't have the options we once had to go out and seek it. Not only is it possible, it is dynamic, and very real. And free.

You read my daily blog, The Daily Now. Everyday I go looking for something that inspires. It's research, beauty research. The presiding principle for The Daily Now is that beauty lives in the eye of the beholder. That may worry you, for what I find gorgeous may not even rate for you. All I ask of you is to come and visit, and see for yourself. Some days you'll look, say Hmmm (in that I-guess-I-get-it, kind of mystified, whatever sort of way) and you leave me and get on with your day. But I'll wager you go on with something different having visited. I do the research, you make your choice about how it effects you.

Roasted Radicchio with Blackberry Vinaigrette, Eating is Art

Beauty changes us, in a second. The newsstand is lined with magazines advertising the 1001 best gifts of 2009. Rarely do the gifts themselves merit such hyperbole, you may not even pick up the issue (on that "beholder of beauty" premise), but without fail, these glossy pages deliver on color and creativity, they're styled to delight.

It's that - it's the color, pattern and texture. I go even further in my beauty combination. It's music and voice. It's taste and temptation. That's beauty. Beauty itself is a performing art. Here's a list of my current 6th sense source for beauty, where the 5 real senses mingle. (Whether you buy it or not is your choice. It's free.)

BEAUTY IN TASTES

The Jewels of New York

101 Cookbooks

BEAUTY IN STYLE

The Errant Aesthete

Three Beautiful Things

BEAUTY IN THE REAL THING

Laura McPhee, Photographer

BEAUTY IN HUMOR

The Pursuit of Happiness, History and Illustrations by Maira Kalman

BEAUTY IN ART

Emerging art every day at Artist-a-day

Art and prose at the Blue Lantern

BEAUTY IN THE GOING

Pret a Voyager

BEAUTY IN SOUND

WFUV, Fordham University's unique radio station

and finally,

BEAUTY IN FLOWERS AND CUPCAKES

Bart Boehlert's Beautiful Things

GONNA SHAKE IT, BABY

Last year, Thanksgiving launched this blog. We were a few days into the New Now and it was sinking in, fast, as we felt like we were sinking even faster.

Our whole life has been a walk on the balance of control. Growing up was about taking control. Twenties were about being out of control. Thirties were realizing that control was hovering just outside our reach. The forties, I used to say, are the point on the trajectory when you are experienced enough to do it all and mature enough to handle it.

And then mid-way through, that crashed too. Control - no such thing!

So Thanksgiving again, we're in the same spot with the same concerns and yet, just a little less fear. We've gone one time 'round the seasons and I'll be damned if the sun hasn't kept coming up!

I'm facing into Thanksgiving having a little less control than ever. The place in me that used to contain that urge is filled with something different this year. It's this tiny temptation to just let it fly. With that, behold an image of doing just that. And Katie Couric has handled a lot more stress than I ever will.

Moliere said: “All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.”

CENTER PLACE

If you don't ask yourself where the center is, you won't find it.

The New Now is like a stallion turned out on a windy day. He gallops, flings himself through his Universe. Then stops fast, shakes, shudders; 2,000 pounds of momentum takes flight from the beast's body and dissipates like a ghost.

Here, has the pace stopped or is it still in motion, somewhere else, outside our realm? I wager, the latter. Nothing about the New Now is rational - or rationality, like the Now itself, is in the process of redefinition.

We say with a smirk, a shrug of complicity, "it's hurry up and wait". But that is because we are desperate to measure the pace ourselves, to have a hand in every beat of it, we want to mold its passing in order to divine its outcome.

It's when the stallion stops so fast you're liable to be tossed over its hock, that's when you need to get off, go find your center. You think I'm talking about a spiritual retreat, that sutra spot -- fingers lightly touching, your eyes closed... No, that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm not that calm, are you? I can count sheep faster than they can jump. I'm talking about a physical place, your space, where you stand, where you sit. Your center.

The New Now is a time, it is a state of being, and it is a place. Build it around you and go there to wait. Stallions stop short, they absorb the air and the sound and the sense, then they start moving again. They hurry up, and wait.

I Ask You
Billy Collins, Poet Laureate

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

HEAVY TOLLS

Feature article in today's New York Times: "Job Woes Exacting Heavy Toll on Family Life". For those who have experienced job loss, the reality of these words is like a glass of cold water in the face. Our home life is described in mirror shards of detail on the national front page. The rational iota of our brains knows that grown up stresses trickle down and reside with our young ones. But in order to survive the New Now, we want desperately to believe the running refrain from those who aren't walking in our shoes. "A blessing", they often call it. They say: Being home offers the gift of time to enjoy and tend to our loved ones.

But Michael Luo's article refutes this rather useless mantra. Quantity time does not equate to quality time. Think about your last 10-hour drive kids 3-abreast across the back seat to visit the in-laws. I don't care how good your integrated car entertainment system is...

Now overlay the worry, the fear. The disorientation of losing your "space" by being given infinite amounts of it.

The "Heavy Tolls" article is read days after being popped with the latest unemployment report: 10.2% jobless. It's a one-two punch which throws the panorama of our national family circumstance into black + white. The job loss happens to us, but the effects are suffered by others. The others I'm talking about are those who didn't do anything to deserve this. Accident of birth, shared address.

It's the truth of parenting. Once we were owner-operators. We spent money, we owned the debt. We got drunk, we felt like shit. We spewed and fought, we kissed and made up. With a spouse, a family, these consequences are divided equally regardless of culpability. You feel like you have no control? Go inside your 10-year old.

No one is exempt from the pain and anger, the frustration and helplessness. It's been said that these kinds of experiences are character building, they teach lessons about what's important, about the moral rectitude of frugality. Those benefits are like pension monies, you realize them in your sixties. That is, if you haven't paid them out to survive along the way.

Resist. Relax. None of this is a blessing. But survive it intact, we must. The pay-now is to teach our children that we have what it takes to navigate the ship. A small ship, for a long journey.

Resource for survival: Heather T. Forbes Beyond Consequences Institute. Subscribe for a daily reflection aimed at the heart of resistance as it applies to parenting.