Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and family! I hope you have much to be thankful for this year. As we move through the seasons at the speed of life, give yourself some time (even just an afternoon) to rest and reflect before the Christmas rush begins in earnest. 

Wishing you and yours continued health and happiness, laughter and love.

August Good Things

Hi, everyone! It's the last day of August, which always feels like the end of summer. I haven't blogged much lately, for a variety of reasons. But all is well, and I'll share a few things I've enjoyed this month:

Seeing live baseball for the first time in two years!

This beautiful rainbow, which was even more beautiful in person.

My sister was here for two weeks, and we had a few adventures.

More sister fun...using homegrown and farmer's market veggies for this delicious (but rather labor intensive) ratatouille.

Participating in a local tradition with my younger son. Colorado State University used to be Colorado A & M, and the A on the hill has been painted annually for nearly 100 years. Here are the photos before and after the first shift. Go Rams!

A private party/concert with The Motones, a Motown tribute band. Fantastic music and a great time.

I'm so grateful to have had these outdoor experiences this summer. Our Covid numbers are climbing steadily, and I'm afraid we will soon be facing increased restrictions even for fully vaccinated folks like me. 

I hope you are happy and well and ready for September!

Joy Project: Celebration

Celebration is the perfect chapter for this time of year, though it is a foregone conclusion that our holiday celebrations will look much different in 2020. American Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and most people I know have scaled back, or even eliminated, their traditional gatherings. Travel, especially by public means, is highly discouraged. 

Local holiday ale party from a few years ago

My mother is in an at-risk population, so she will not be joining us for only the second time in I don't remember how long. My sister lives in Washington State, where restrictions have recently tightened, and she will not be able to gather with her friends. I fear Christmas will be very much the same. 

But I firmly believe that anyone with the physical and emotional energy to do so should find reasons to celebrate as this year winds down. It helps us forge and strengthen connections, even in these socially distant times. Celebratory emotions such as joy are highly contagious and much healthier to spread than a certain coronavirus that continues to plague us. 

In Joyful, Ingrid Fetell Lee offers suggestions for fostering a celebratory mood, including:

• Festive attire
• Music
• Song and dance
• Color and motion
• Things that sparkle, flare, or burst

And guess what? This is the perfect time of year to find all those things! Even 2020 can't keep us from donning ugly sweaters, hanging lights and sparkly decorations, and dancing around the kitchen singing "Jingle Bell Rock."

Please take time in the coming weeks to unplug from the news, make popcorn and hot cocoa, watch cheesy holiday specials, and drive around looking at lights. Find celebratory moments whenever and wherever you can.

Thursday, I will eat turkey and pumpkin pie and celebrate gratitude with my husband, sons, and dog. And as soon as the leftovers are put away, I'm leaning hard into the Christmas season. 

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends. Stay safe and well, everyone!

 

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!

   

A to Z Joy: Siblings

Amy on the left, me on the right

S is a pretty easy letter for the A to Z Challenge, and I had many options, from Slinkys to sushi, from samba music to Star Wars. But some of my greatest joys in life come from being a sister and having sons. I was going to call this post "Sisters and Sons," and then I realized that "Siblings" would suffice.

Growing up, my sister and I weren't always best of friends. I remember being pummeled by her on occasion, and I once broke a plastic ukulele over her head. But we were all we had, sibling-wise, so we always found a way to make the peace.

Our good times definitely outweighed our bad times. She is two years older, and even though I might not have admitted it at the time, it was reassuring to know that she was there ahead of me, helping to clear a path.

These days, we are very close except in proximity, as she lives in Washington and I in Colorado. And I'm still grateful to have her walking ahead of me on this path through life. She's one of the wisest, smartest, most empathetic women I know, and having her for a sister has made me a better person.

And I don't know how fate gifted me with the most amazing sons ever, but I am beyond humbled every day! They are so smart and handsome and funny, and I couldn't be prouder. I don't know where the time goes, as they are both nearly grown now, a junior and a freshman in college, and they still make each other laugh every time they're together. They are such great friends...and I better stop now before I get weepy.