Lockdown Again

I am making hard choices with a focus on the long game, as we all are. Staying home for the holidays, organizing the studio with the help of my quarantine cohort daughter, creating more online classes, more deep dives into learning and growing so that I can bring that wisdom to my beloveds. I’m learning to live without the structure of corporate deciding the direction of my life and relaxing into being a creator as well as a doer. It can be surprisingly challenging. I am reading more poetry and adding creative space to my home so that, no matter where I am, I have what I need to feed the creative urge. I recently sat in on a conversation with Shiloh Sophia, my mentor, teacher, and muse, where we discussed the importance of having easy access to creativity in the home. Easy access changes our perspective on creativity and elevates it from a messy hobby to a basic need. Imagine if your children and grandchildren turned to paper and paint to solve problems. What if color and brushes fed their creativity and took them on adventures into their imaginations? What a gift! On a very happy note, I began the Legendary Girls online Smashbook workshop this week and met the best bunch of students! Legendary Girls is a shared class for 8 to 12 year old girls and a beloved adult (Mom, Aunt, Nana, or friend). Their excitement is palpable and reignites my heart for this work. We’ll be exploring the attributes of the girls and women we admire and how they mesh with our legendary traits.

In our first zoom call, we sat in sacred, Red Thread circle together and I asked each student to share one of their superpowers with us. Their superpowers included nurturing, loving, sharing, mercy, compassion, passion, mothering, kindness, and “I’m just me, no matter what.” I’m so excited to help them recognize and celebrate all of their superpowers, their ability to overcome challenges and choose exactly how they want to live this precious life. Recognizing our superpowers can be very challenging. We have terrific memory for our mistakes and failures, or the chances we didn’t take, but not so much for our achievements. I encourage you to sit down with a cup of tea and look deeply at your life to this point. What have you survived and overcome? What have you loved, created, dreamed, sang, danced, painted into existence? What gentle kindness have you poured upon your loved ones? We are a beautiful amalgam of light and shadows, success and failure, happiness and sorrow, love and loss. Who would you be without your shadows? Who are you because of them? What wouldn’t you have learned? I would love to read your comments and thoughts on this subject and to hear your superpowers. If you feel so inspired, please share them with me in the comments below.