Monday Meditations

See you next year--

I watched the Red Sox go under last night, but it's hard to be disappointed when you see the excitement of Tampa Bay, a team who had the worst season in baseball last year come back like they did. I've always been a fan of the underdog. And this will be their first World Series, so it's all good.

Though I'd really like them to change the TB on their hats as I always think "tuberculous."

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Artist Way -

I've traded in my morning pages for morning poems. What I realized that by emptying my emotional vault every morning left me with nothing to withdraw during the day for my writing. Now what I do is write a few brief sentences of what I'm thinking about, what I've dreamed about, how I'm feeling, any challenges or goals, plus a poem. This works better for me and doesn't leave me emotionally depleted in my writing throughout the day.

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The Wishing Year by Noelle Oxenhandler:

I just finished The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire by Noelle Oxenhandler. I connected with it because she is also a worrier and I appreciated the premise of the book that she had 3 wishes-- a new house, to meet a lover who found her because of her writing, and to be spiritually balanced. That's pretty much the premise for the book--can you *create* your desires/wishes and how does spiritually play into our lives.

I interpreted Noelle's upbringing created a belief that she was brought up to believe that to be spiritually full, you must be materially poor. And through the book she tries to change this belief or at least kick it down a bit.

If you're looking for a book with huge plot twists and major life changing events, it's not the book for you. As I said, I'm a huge fan of Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy, so be warned, there is a lot of thinking out loud in here, exploring concepts and ideas, and less with the action.

But for me, it was a book written for something I always think about--how much can we change our reality with our thoughts? How much of life is perception? It was interesting to explore a year of her "wishing," of exploring the many ways we wish in our lives--from rituals to the history of wishing (there are many books similar to The Secret that were written long long ago.)