A Week in Intentional Joy

What’s something you’ve done purely for your own happiness?

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I do my best to be intentional about doing happy things for myself on a daily basis. Someday that means just giving myself a gold star for showing up and putting in some effort towards one of my goals. This week I’m killing it in the joy department. I’ve been very nice to myself.

On Saturday, I danced in a show and I have been surfing on the wake of that joy all week. Every bit of the artistry that goes into dance makes me happy – experimenting with movement, listening to music, story-telling, creating characters, playing dress-up with friends – it’s ridiculously fun and pure joy. Here’s a video of one of the dances we performed:

As Gene Kelly said:

You dance love, you dance joy, and you dance dreams.

Sunday I had lunch with friends.

Monday I had lunch with a friend. I picked zinnias, gomphrena, and flowering basil from the garden and made little fragrant flower arrangements to put on the table and in my kitchen window.

Tuesday I taught two yoga classes.

Wednesday I went to a museum and listened to an art historian give a lecture about memory and Renaissance portraits.

Thursday I treated myself to a Spanish latte at my favorite coffee shop and I took a walk at my favorite park.

Today I went to a pet store just to spend some time petting a puppy. I picked more flowers and a cucumber from the garden. I planted 50 tulip bulbs for future happiness.

All week long I’ve been listening to the audiobook Howl’s Moving Castle in my car – it’s delightful.

A Conversation among Dancers

She: Hey, I have your cat ears. Remind me…

Me: What? No. I have all my cat ears.

She: They are your cat ears.

Me: No, those most be your cat ears. I just looked in my box of cat ears today and I have all five pair.

She: You left them behind the other day.

Me: Those must be your cat ears. I gave you some a million years ago. Remember?

She: Hm…No…

Me: I bought a whole bunch of cat ears at that place when all the cat stuff started….

(She eyes me dubiously.)

Me: …what color are these ears?

She: They have silver sequins.

Me: Oh. Those are my cat ears.

Haunted by Her Glamour Shots

What’s a small moment from your past that you still think about years later?

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Once upon a time there was this place called the mall and it was like totally rad, for sure. The cool kids hung there, all neon and stoked, sporting towers of teased and poofed hair. These kids walked together in groups and they talked to each other with sounds that came out of their faces. That is to say they were unencumbered by phones and untethered to computers and satellites mediating exchanges across time and place. The youth roamed free-range in these places.

Inside the mall was a photography studio called Glamour Shots, where makeup artists and photographers conspired to turn the average woman into an image of glamour and beauty using makeup, Aquanet, press-on nails, faux leather and other tools of artistry and witchcraft.

Also, once upon a time, I hired someone for a position. She was quite an odd person, so naturally we became friends. We worked together for years and at some point she gave me two physical photographed portraits of herself from a sitting at Glamour Shots.

Life went on, as it does. Things happened, as things do. Our friendship ended and we went separate ways. Decades passed.

While she is gone from my life, her Glamour Shots remain. The pair of pictures rove around my home, seemingly of their own accord. Like a Roomba, they occasionally show up in strange places, unbidden. Once I found them tucked inside an upstairs cabinet. Another time they were in a downstairs closet. This week I found them inexplicably under the nightstand next to my bed.

Whenever they show up, it’s a little shock to my system: How did you get there? I wonder.

The young woman in the Glamour Shots photograph has an abundance of fluffy barrel curls framing her face. One side of her hair is pinned up to show off a bold, dangly earring of two black hearts separated by a round crystal. She is giving the viewer a jaunty side-eye smile that shows just a little teeth. Her long red fingernails grasp the lapel of the black leather jacket she is wearing over a crystal-studded black bustier that exposes an expanse of décolletage. She could use a necklace, but that’s just my opinion.

In the second photograph, with chin resting on fisted hand, she is giving the side-eye smile again, but this time, lips closed, demure. She wears a modest burnout green velvet jacket sewn with silver sequin sparkles.

I wonder where she’ll turn up next.

Just about Anywhere.

If you had a free round-trip ticket to anywhere, where would you go?

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A trip I didn’t have to pay for? I’m in, probably for anywhere you’d like to go.  It’s a long standing dream to be paid to travel….or at least have someone else foot the bill. My personal travel wish list is very long.  

Paris, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Edinburgh, Peru, Madagascar, Timbuktu, Egypt, London, Sweden, Turkey, Austria, Maine, Rochester, NYC, Minneapolis, Tulsa, Seattle….

Tree Magic

What’s one thing you own that holds deep sentimental value?

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Once, out of reach, the golden leaf shone in the afternoon sun. Once, rooted in place, tree magic kept her secrets. Once, at the threshold of the forbidden room, the little girl stood with fingers aching to trace the veins and jagged edges of the enchanted leaf. There was music inside the wood, Grandmother had shown her once.

Now, a conjuring, with a gesture of careful winding. Now, the haunting melody is coaxed out of the hidden music box. Now, a presence, as memories drift like snow flowers down the alpine mountain, born from flooded eyes. Now there is music inside the wood, just as Grandmother had shown her once.

October Camera Roll

Share a few recent shots from your camera roll, no context needed.

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Glittering Goals & Sparkle Magic

Do you set personal goals for yourself?

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Goals. Goals. Goals.

I am a professional goal setter. I get paid to assess situations, determine what’s needed in a particular domain, and then write multi-part, measurable goals. Once that’s done, I often get hired to help folks carry out the goals.

And yes, I also set personal goals.

The whole enterprise – personal and professional – comes with a certain level of formality and an abundance of multisyllabic words. How do you start with abstract words and bring the ideas and imagination behind them into the world of form and action? How do you actualize when words are such slippery fish?

There is a great deal of supercalifragilistic-bibbitybobbitybooishness involved.

Abracadabra.

Alacazam.

sparkle magic

I usually have somewhere between 6-10 goals that I set monthly and track daily. For October, I have 8. Most are single, simple words, but one this month is a different symbol. All are designed to keep me focused and in touch with what I want to make of my precious time while I’m here and breathing on planet Earth. 

Good old-fashioned paper is my preferred medium of choice for this sort of thing and for about 9 years now I’ve been using a journal with dot paper for goal-making and tracking. Every month I make a 8-page layout with hand-drawn grids for tracking and hand-cut Dutch windows and file tabs.

Two of the pages of the monthly set are for tracking what I’m currently reading, including interesting quotes and fun words, like so…

I also glue pages together between months as a pocket, in which I keep groovy little keepsakes of special moments, like….hm well, I just found the Irish flag on a toothpick inside one pocket. The things I squirrel away in here make me laugh. They are truly delightful! The toothpick was from a dinner at an Irish restaurant with friends. Another pocket holds the program from a concert — that was the night I embarrassingly burst into tears upon hearing the song Confessions in the Moonlight from Castle in the Sky for the first time, played live.

✨On Being Spectacular✨

What’s something you’ve done that you never thought you could?

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Performance art is something I am continually surprised to find myself doing.

What in the world?

When I do stuff like this ☝🏼 or this👇…

….my village people (i.e., the anxious introvert, the analytical intellectual, the annoying critic, and the overzealous editor, just to name a few of the characters in my psyche) are utterly shocked by this behavior.

The audacity to step in front of a crowd and make a spectacle of oneself is the mysterious work of the Muse.

Train of Thought

It’s the last hour of the choo-choo-toot-toot-clankety-clacking on this train.

In the observation car, I watched the sun rise over a fluffy cotton field and felt the deep joy of homecoming.

Now out the window:

hazy clouds of sun-sparkled mist hover over the remnants of harvested corn fields

thick forests with hidden winding streams framed by misshapen rocks,

kudzu, kudzu, kudzu climbing, hanging, draping, taking over the world.

Verdant on both sides and above – evergreen, moss green, deep yellowish-green, brown green, shadowy blackish green, sunlit gold-green, grey-green, nearly white green, green overlayed, green folded inside green and flowing in every direction. The lush, untamed, messy jumble is a welcomed sight after all the hard surfaces of Chicago and D.C. Ambition and intention and BIG PLANS give way to an atmosphere that is softer on the senses in every way.

Yesterday’s Chicago eyes were stabbed by glaring sunlight darting from sharp angles of glass towers. Now the sun is filtered and diffused by leaves and clouds and mist. After the bones and ears were jarred by the footfalls and echos off the precisely cut marble of D.C., I am ready to walk again on quiet, yielding Earth.

Sunrises & Dungeons on the Train

Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?

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The sun rises through a dirty train window somewhere in Pennsylvania. At least I think it was Pennsylvania – it’s a little hard to keep track when passing through 9 states.  

The Dungeon Crawler Carl world would be the absolute worst place to live. Matt Dinniman has created a wild sci-fi-fantasy series set in a ridiculously silly, corporate alien and artificial intelligence-run dungeon game that is intergalactically streamed. 

But let me tell you, last night, the  stars, book fairies, and train schedules aligned to create the most memorable and enjoyable story experience I’ve ever had. I finished the first two books in the Carl series before I got on this train [Dungeon Crawler Carl (Book 1) and Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (Book 2)].

Then I got on the train, put my headphones on, and hoodie up, and began The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Book 3) on Audible. I did not know before hand: Book 3 is set on a train. As Carl and Princess Donut were hurtling through tunnels with monsters out their windows, I was fully immersed, bouncing and swaying and chugg-a-lugging right along with them.  

Soundbooth Theater recorded the series and the sound effects and character voices are so fun! The dungeon is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.