Ready to Spring

via GIPHY

Happy Friday! I had planned to write a different (i.e. better) post for today, but after switching to Daylight Savings Time last weekend during a snowstorm that dropped 30" at my house, I haven't had the most productive or inspiring week. 

Walter in his little "snow-asis"

Tomorrow, however, marks the spring/vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere, which is welcome news. Every year, spring brings the promise of renewal, but perhaps no year more than this one. Longer days, warmer temperatures, and increased vaccination will hopefully spread a little optimism after a long and bleak Covid winter. 

With not quite two weeks left in March, there's time to wrap up the first quarter of 2021 and plan for the second. Though I'm still trying to factor discipline into my daily life, I can feel some of my new year enthusiasm waning, so it's a good time for a bit of a reboot.

For a list of  9 ways to celebrate the spring equinox, including the Descent of Kukulkan shown below, check out this list from Mental Floss.

Buh-bye February

 

Is it just me, or has this been the looongest short month? We've had cold, windy, snowy weather all over the country, the pandemic continues, and spring seems far away indeed.

But it hasn't been all bad! Here, in no certain order, are some of the good things about February 2021:

• My family is still happy, healthy, and hanging in there;
• Politics has simmered way down;
• The coronavirus numbers are dropping, and although it's still slow going, more at-risk people are getting vaccinated; 
• This month had some fun things to celebrate, including Black History, Valentine's Day, Lunar New Year, and Mardi Gras;
• I had time to read: The Truants, by Kate Weinberg; The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig; and I'm working on The Best of Me, by David Sedaris;
• I was able to meet with both my book club and critique group via Zoom;
• The days are getting longer;
• Chocolate (which goes without saying); 
• And last but certainly not least, my talented graphic designer friend is putting the finishing touches on the cover for the sequel to my novel, Passing Through. Look for more about this in March.

Maybe it will come in like a lion, but I'm still ready for a new month. 

What made February good for you?

Joy Project: Harmony

Happy Friday, and happy last day of July! It's been more than two months since my last post, and honestly it feels as if it could have been two weeks or two years. These are such strange times, and it's easy to lose track. But the real reason I've been absent is that I've been helping my mother downsize from a four-bedroom house to a tiny apartment.

Downsizing does not come naturally to my mother. She's a keeper, a collector, a saver. She's not the only one; women of her generation learned to "waste not, want not" and were expected to be the caretakers of a family's history through its artifacts--the dishes and quilts and photographs and mementos, sometimes going back generations.

I knew the house was full--that was more than apparent to the eye--but once my sister and I started digging in, the density surprised me. Every closet, every shelf, every drawer, every cupboard. I couldn't help but think of a black hole drawing in matter and compressing it until not an inch of space remained. I won't go into all the details at this point, but suffice it to say that the clean-out is requiring a significant amount of physical and emotional energy. And time.

So this is the context in which I read the next chapter of Ingrid's book, Joyful. The chapter entitled--wait for it--"Harmony".  (For anyone who does not believe the Universe has a sense of humor, I submit this bit of synchronicity as Exhibit A.) 

A significant component of harmonious surroundings is order. Though humans love things wild and messy sometimes, we are also drawn to order. Order implies safety and predictability, which were vital to early humans. "The greater the complexity in an environment," Ingrid writes, "the greater the need for an underlying harmony to bring a sense of order and ease to a space." Order is a manifestation of harmony, and "harmony offers visible evidence that someone cares enough about a place to invest energy in it."

I'll add to that a lesson I learned from my mother's house: if you do not invest energy in maintaining order, the resulting disorder will take that energy from you, and then some. 

For ideas on how to promote harmony within a space, many people turn to the Chinese art of feng shui. And although it is prone to mystical overtones, it really is just about the smooth flow of energy. For me, a big part of that is simply paying attention. We get so good at overlooking things that we hardly notice the stack of mail on the table or the chair that everyone bumps into. Ingrid describes this as "finding friction at a moment when you really want momentum."

So far, 2020 has been full of friction of all kinds, and it doesn't appear that it is going to get much smoother in the near future. But as I move forward with the idea of harmony fully planted in my brain, I'm going to concentrate on reducing the friction within my control. 

Wishing you a harmonious start to the month of August!

   

The Reveal

This post was supposed to happen last week, but sometimes even small projects take me longer than they should. Anyway, here I am with the reveal: I painted one wall of my office space and swapped the large desk with hutch for the smaller desk that was in my bedroom. Oh, and I got a new lamp.

Before:

After:

Color choice is really hard for me, probably because I know I'm bad at it. After lots of thought, I decided on yellow, because my writing space is in the basement and doesn't get a lot of sunlight. I wanted something that would pop--you know, that whole energy/joy thing. In the end, I chose a color called Geographic Yellow. I assume it's a reference to National Geographic, which brought thoughts of travel and adventure to mind. When I got it on the wall, however, it reminded me more of macaroni and cheese. (The perfect color for a Kraft room, ha ha.) 

I didn't love it at first, but it's been almost two weeks now, and I think the color is growing on me. It certainly does liven up the wall! And the big desk looks much better in its new home, so I guess this project is an overall improvement. Whether the change jump-starts my creativity is yet to be determined. Fingers crossed!

If you missed my first installment of Local Joys, pop on over to my other blog and check it out!

Joy Project: Energy

In the first chapter of Joyful, author Ingrid Fetell Lee focuses on energy, and it couldn't come at a better time for me. For at least two months, I've been feeling as flat as an open bottle of New Year's champagne that gets pushed to the back of the fridge and poured out a week later. But what exactly does it mean to feel energetic? A good night's sleep, a caffeine fix, or a brisk walk all boost my energy, but what affects whether an environment changes my energy in a positive or negative way?

Lee breaks it down into two components: color and light.

If you look at your surroundings right now, I hope you see a burst of color. But if you're American, chances are you might not. We are, Lee writes, chromophobic, or afraid of color. Many of us run-of-the-mill Americans do not grow up in a culture of color. We learn to see bright colors as "childish and frivolous," whereas neutrals come across as "mature" and impart a message of "self-restraint."

This may be true, but I think a lot of us aren't afraid of color as much as we're afraid of using it wrong. I blame HGTV and the like for giving us so many messages of the importance of being on trend. Why would I want to commit to this year's blue when next year, it's going to be saffron yellow or whatever? We need to give ourselves permission to choose what we love, and kindly tell the color gurus at Pantone to kiss off.

The other component to energy is light. A great deal of research backs up the health benefits of sunlight or broad-spectrum artificial light, so I won't go into details here. Suffice it to say that light helps us feel happier, healthier, and smarter. Moreover, light is "color's power supply." When photons of light hit an object, the ones that are reflected back to our retinas are perceived as color. We see short wavelengths as the color blue, long ones as the color red, and so on. According to Lee, this "alchemy" between light and color lies at the heart of the energy aesthetic. 

Makes sense, right? Now that I have a better understanding about the importance of color and light, my homework is to implement them in a way that puts the bubbles back in my champagne, so to speak. Because I'm not a big project person, I have just a few small tweaks in mind for my writing space. I hope you'll come back next week to see what that looks like!