OLW blog hop: being right here, right now

Hello to those of you blog-hopping today! This blog hop is my favorite part of Ali Edwards’ One Little Word class. This month Ali asked us to select a single action, schedule a date, and make it happen in order to move forward with our word and create confidence.  She says it’s a huge step in really making changes in our lives with our word.

First, I scheduled time to review the goals I set in January and do a little progress report and, wouldn’t you know it, I wrote a blog post on it.  🙂 My main goal was to read A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Mindfulness and Life in the Present Tense by Christina Rosalie, a book I can’t recommend enough.  I read it in almost one sitting and as soon as I finished it, I needed her words all over again and so I started anew.  She writes that “living with uncertainty is simply what it means to be alive, day after day” and of “how urgently [she] wants something to hold, to be for certain.”  (Since I feel like I know her so well, I am calling her “Christina” here rather than her last name.  Besides, I wouldn’t want you to think her first name is “Rosalie.”)

Christina says she often catches herself thinking of the future and missing the present.  Uh… guilty as charged over here.  I am very good at planning the future and not so good at noticing the present and it’s subtle beauties.  And I know that gratitude and happiness grow out of that act of noticing present moments.

“Maybe time doesn’t move like a spear at all, but folds instead like a ribbon, your life beginning wherever you are, again, and again, right now.  Think of it.  Right now is always the tipping point, always the source, the time from which all other time blooms or becomes extinct.  Yet we’re only in it for a brief instant, and then snap, the moment is gone.  It takes longer for the mind to adjust.  Our perceptions of ourselves always lag a little behind, and we arrive in the future picturing only who we were before.” BRILLIANT!! She writes so well and says exactly the right thing, don’t you think?

“I know that I stop seeing, really seeing, when I am preoccupied and rushing about.  When I feel the hours slipping away, when work calls, when errands demand completion. Yet this life asks for wonder, for steadfastness, for taking note.  How else do you think moments of beauty will find you, if not like this?” Each of us taking the One Little Word class is searching…  for intention, for added meaning, and for improvement.  Each person reading my blog is also searching for something.  This year, I am attempting to slow down and to notice little moments and be grateful for them.  Christina is an excellent guide for this.

“Rushing every second, we forget that we’re capable of a certain quality of joy that can be arrived at only slowly, as time unfolds.” THIS is why I selected ‘stillness’ as my word this year.  THIS is where I am aiming.

As Christina began to document the process of being right here, I decided to try doing the same, with my camera instead of my pen.  Since my March intention was to capture everyday objects anyway, I used this book as inspiration to preserve some moments of my own … 

Some of my favorite parts of the book:

On the creative process —

“The people who get credit for good ideas… understand that ideas show up in a haphazard heap… and they aren’t afraid if things start out a mess (and stay that way for a long time). They’re in it for the process, and are willing to put everything on the line again and again.” I think it’s that mess that I am most uncomfortable with.  I like to act immediately and if something isn’t completable, I get impatient to get back to it.  If it doesn’t end with a nice finished product, I am disappointed.  It’s so difficult to think long term!

“The creative process is always an encounter with the unknown, and demands a willingness to veer off course and be transformed.” I definitely think this is true.  So many times what I end up with is not at all what I set out to write or create.  It’s often better, but Christina writes that “what matters is taking action: putting words down, spilling ink, pushing paint around on the page, gluing things or ripping them.  What counts is committing to the process, in spite of the possibility that the whole thing might end up a terrible failure, a hodgepodge, a mess.”

“I am someone who needs creative purpose with the same urgency that I need air, and it’s this that I’ve let dissolve like sugar in the torrent of need rushing at me.” YES!! Like Christina, recognizing this need saved me. And yes, it really was that dramatic.

On the process of becoming —

“We are always giving birth to future versions of ourselves.” LOVE that!

“No one talks about the moments in between.  The moments of treading water, of moving slowly, of waiting to become.  The times in between are eclipsed in the stories we tell, by the triumph and magnitude of the way things turn out or begin.  But I can feel it– how the slowness of right now is creating the secret yolk of who I will become.  It’s a hard thing–maybe one of the hardest things in the world–to just move slowly and give in to the process of becoming.”

There have been quite a few times over the past 3 months that I’ve considered changing my word from “stillness” to “becoming.”  I like the idea of a process of moving toward who we are meant to be.  (I don’t like abandoning a goal though.)

“The work of becoming can happen at any time, right here, in the middle of your life, with the subtlest internal shift–with acknowledging your potential.”

On parenthood —

“Then there is tooth brushing, and stories, and the blurry eternity of lying beside [him] in the dark, singing softly until his eyelids close.  Then I move like a slow robot, first one foot, then an arm, then a leg, until I am off the bed, across the room, and out the door.” AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! Anytime I hear of anyone doing this same act that I do, I am relieved.

Christina lives on a farm, raising two children with her husband, who provides the family’s income.  “I try to go about … cooking rice and folding sheets… It isn’t just this kind of domesticity that makes me feel shaky in the bushel basket of my life.  It’s the prospect of losing even this that causes me to say I don’t know when a friend asks me how I’m doing.  I try to explain how I never pictured this — how all we talk about now are the logistics of surviving.  The price of gas, what to make for dinner, or how to try again tomorrow.  The fabric of our dreams that once lifted between us like a parachute feels thin.” My husband and I have got to get away for a break.  🙂

“Now my time is compressed.  The very fact that I am not always at the center of my own life is what spurs me to acknowledge the only Someday I’ll ever have is right now, and to dig in.  Having children forces me to consider my life through the urgent lens of the present, and under that intense regard my creative work continues to surface, as persistent and indisputable as my need to breathe.”

* * * * *

I’m so glad Ali’s prompt this month was to choose one task and complete it.  I have been staring at this book for months and it was the perfect excuse to assign it to myself.  🙂 This book taught me that it’s ok to desire time for creative pursuits… I will leave you with my favorite piece from the book…

“It’s easy to make out what matters now, among the jostle of other unimportant things.  Simply, to have each other; to love; to have mornings with elbows and knees and laughter, despite too little sleep.  To feel the way each day my heart expands because of them, sometimes until it aches — other times till it is brimming with incalculable joy.  This is everything.”

* * * * *

You can see other posts about my OLW project here.  Enjoy hopping along!

Lee: thelinarstudio.typepad.com

Cheri: cheriandrews.blogspot.com

Lisa: Backtoallen.com

Kelly: septemberblue.net

Veronica: www.veronicanorris.typepad.com

Melanie: mellybirddesigns.wordpress.com

Margareta: paperpilekitten.com

Nikki: www.inkyart.com.au/

Michelle: table-for-five.com

Naomi: poeticaperture.com

Ruth: suburbansahm.blogspot.com

Kathryn: katlodesigns.com

Missus Wookie: mrswookieswanderings.blogspot.com

Jackie: blog.jacquelinewolven.com