Friday, October 10 – One way to share what I learned in my 30-day journey to find perfection is this Perfect Days Log. Here, every Friday for 30-plus weeks, I’ll sum up chapters from my book 30 Perfect Days, Finding Abundance in Ordinary Life, available through Amazon and Kindle. For now, I’ll share the excerpt on the back of the book: “We Earth travelers are on a journey on the river of life, meandering, flowing over rocks if we’re lucky, working through the obstructive branches, widening and narrowing in our ability to respond to the world and to be our best selves. We find our true selves as we go along, bit by big, even as we change, the changes wrought in us being part of all the things going down that river with us. The bad stuff, if we go about it right, gets left behind.” Why is it so hard to let go of what we no longer need? What are we protecting? Why do we need to keep things like worry, guild, remorse, and abuse for future use?
Writing and Igniting Possibilities
Life is short. We work, we raise families, we rush from one thing to the next, many times not stopping to wonder what the point is. What is the point? Is it to work hard? Play hard? Make a difference in people’s lives? Live as well as we can day by day?
Choices can sometimes be a burden–on a Friday night, we can choose to go to a wine tasting or the art museum, order a pizza and stay home, watch the sunset on the beach, and many times, I would just like someone to decide for me. When we sat with my father in the stillness of his dying, all we could do was allow God’s presence to bring us peace as death taught us more about living in the moment. Living in the moment is the big theme of the book I’ve been working on over the last couple of years, but it’s also about pilgrimage. Once, when someone publicly announced to Maya Angelou that they were a Christian, she responded “already?” I believe we aren’t meant to know everything; we’re meant to seek. And the best choice is often to go with the flow on this meandering river of life, with guidance from above and within.
I created Igniting Possibilities as a way for people to find an outlet for creativity and for exploring what path they’re on and whether their journey is authentic. That’s also why I write–I’m exploring for me, and for others. I hope to touch people with my thoughts, with the words I choose. I want to create events that will cause people to stop and wonder, as Mary Oliver asked in “Summer Day,” “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I’m doing it, one day at a time, one moment at a time, with the river flowing through me and the heavens beckoning.
Connecting with the World
I used to talk about “My Time” to connote a time away from the world when I was free to just be me. When I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I discovered Morning Pages as my time with words, just letting them flow onto the page unhindered by an inner sensor. Here, I connect with the world word by word, or Bird by Bird as Anne Lamott would say, in a way that’s uniquely me. We need our time away from the world, but in writing words that are available for the whole world to see, we are also, paradoxically, connecting with the world.
On this site, you will find information on me, my writing, my book, and my events. You’ll also find links to my blogs: Claudia’s Musings, Ohio Lake Erie Wineries, and Igniting Possibilities. I hope you connect with me, and I with you, through my words. Let me know what you’re thinking about.