I’ve always seen life through the lens of, ‘no matter how cloudy the skies, the sun still shines behind their sodden blanket.’
It’s been both a strength and a weakness, but, when I peel away the judgements that cause me to see my weaknesses as a roadblock to joy, I find that there is always a gift, always value, beauty and magical imperfections in EVERYTHING.
Always.
It just means that sometimes, life is asking me to dig deeper to find them.
Now, I also acknowledge that my rosy outlook is also a result of the inherently privileged environment in which I live my day-to-day life.
I have always had food on the table, clothes on my back, access to hot and cold running water, secure housing (ok, there was a brief period while I was in that abusive relationship where that wasn’t true) access to education, employment, health care and a host of other life necessities and niceties.
Being positive is easier when fear of nowhere to sleep, how to pay the bills, or worries about how to feed your children don’t cloud your thinking.
Which is part of the impetus for my She Dares Boldly Series. To inspire finding life’s magical imperfections in all things — big/small, consequential/inconsequential/ exciting/mundane.
I also admit, some days it’s harder to do that than others.
Which is when I need to take time for myself. I need to go back into the studio, write it out in my journal, share my sorrows, woes, and sadness with a friend, meditate, sit in silence and listen to my heartbeat, walk in nature or simply, be still.
Self-care is good care of your life and everyone in it.
Allowing and accepting the magical imperfections in how we take care of ourselves is part of the journey of aging and becoming ourselves.
Namaste
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The moon hangs high in the morning sky above the horizon bruised rose and violet by the sun’s awakening rays.
The air is crisp. The river runs past, its surface gunmetal grey tinted with the soft mauve reflection of the morning sky above. The trees sway in a gentle morning breeze as gracefully as Sufi turning round and round to the soft melodic chants of ancient verses wafting in the air around them.
And the earth keeps spinning.
And we keep breathing and taking, breathing and taking as if the largesse of Mother Earth will go one for eternity.
It can’t.
Go on and on and on.
Not if we keep treating Mother Earth’s gifts as ours to take and plunder and abuse.
We need Mother Earth to survive. She is not just our home. She is the home of every organism, every creature, every sentient and insentient being on this planet.
We must take care of her. We must act like guests on the planet. Not like we own her. Because we don’t. No one and no one thing owns Mother Earth. She is our host and hostess. She is our conduit around the sun every year. Our purveyor of all things wonderful and marvellous in our world.
We do not own Mother Earth.
Instead of taking whatever we want, whenever we want, lets sing a song of gratitude. Let’s give thanks for this wondrous planet that supports all of life without discrimination, without judgment.
Instead of abusing her, let’s change our ways and dig deep into our hearts to become the change we want to see in the world – Sustainability. Longevity. In all life. All things. All ways.
Our very breath depends upon it. And the lives of our grandchildren’s children depend on our changing our ways too.
Now. Forever. And Always.
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“Softly, her dreams took flight on the wings of hope that believing in herself was all she needed to make her dreams come true. And they did.” – Altered Book Journal. “My Mother’s Prayers” two-page spread.
We all have dreams. Big ones. Little ones. Quiet ones. Loud, audacious ones. Dreams of living lives of wonder. Dreams of great adventure. Dreams of discovering far off lands, of creating stories of greatness in our lives.
Sometimes, our dreams come true. Sometimes, we let them go because life happens.
We fall. We face a wall we cannot climb. We trip over a rock that sends us flat on our back.
In our pain and fear of getting hurt, in our concern others will laugh at us or judge us for our failures, we lock away our dreams and continue on our journey taking the safer path, the road more travelled.
We do okay. We create a ‘good enough life’. It’s just not the life we once dreamed of. But that’s okay, we say. Dreaming is for children. We’re “all grown up now”. We have responsibilities. Success. Things. Secure inside the comfort zone of the life we’ve created, we forget about our dreams and carry on living our good enough life.
And then, one day, if we’re lucky, something happens to remind us of our dreams. Tentatively. Hopefully. We unlock the cage inside our heart where we tucked away our dreams long ago and peer inside.
That’s where the magic happens. That’s where our dreams peer back at us and ask, “Are you ready to come alive?”
It’s a big question because if we say yes, the next question we must ask ourselves as we peer into our hearts and gaze at the sleeping beauty of our dreams unlived is, “Am I willing to believe in myself?”
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As with all the pages in this altered book art journal, embedded within the page is one of my mother’s prayer cards. Also included are a photo of my mother and father hidden behind the smaller bird in the cage.
I hadn’t intended to hide them. Initially, I was going to transfer their images to the page with a technique that requires you to rub off the photo backing so that only the ink from the image remains affixed to the canvas. I started the process with the prayer card only to discover, while that technique works well on a canvas, on a book page the vigorous rubbing off required to remove the backing paper can tear the page of the book.
Ooops.
I wanted to quit. To give up. To tear out the page and begin again.
And that’s when this page became something entirely diferent than what I started to create.
Isn’t that what happens to our dreams sometimes?
We start out all excited and open to the journey until we encounter an obstacle or something goes drastically wrong. Feeling dejected, or embarrassed or possibly hopeless, we pack away our dreams and continue on our journey. It’s a little less bright. A little less promising, but it’s okay. It’s a good life and we should be grateful for all we have.
We tell ourselves, “We didn’t really like that dream anyway,” or some such conjured up story that will hide our disappointment. We’re living well so we ignore the ache in our hearts and the yearning in our minds to fly higher.
Until one day, something happens and we remember our dreams. We remember we are brave, courageous, worthy. We remember we are dreamers.
In that sacred, rarefied air of possibility, we take a step outside the confines of our comfort zone and take a deep breath.
Perhaps it is that I have run out of words, or maybe just energy. Perhaps my psyche is telling me I have nothing new to say, or that everything I’ve said stands as true today as it did when I wrote it. Perhaps it is just I need a change of pace. That in order to get a fitness routine cemented into my daily schedule, I need to make space in the morning and not leave it until after work when it’s easy to talk myself out of going to the gym.
Or maybe, it’s just time for a reboot, refresh, renew.
Whatever the reason, I’m looking at ways to refresh my blog. To refocus it so that it feels more organic to my daily life.
I have been writing a blog almost daily since March 2007. On that blog, Recover Your Joy, I wrote 1,730 posts.
I have been writing here at Dare Boldly, originally called, A Year of Making a Difference, since January 1, 2012, a total of 1,213 posts.
Which means, over the past 9 and a half years, I’ve published, 2,943 blogposts. If I break it down by an average of 700 words a post (which is probably short for me) I have written over 2 million words.
That’s a lot of words.
A lot of thoughts.
A lot of ideas.
Which raises the question for me — what’s my focus?
Originally, on my Recover Your Joy blog, my intent was to take every day situations and show people how to find the joy in everything. That included the many stories of homelessness I shared, the trials and tribulations of healing from life’s traumas, and the realities of being a single, working mother.
When I started A Year of Making a Difference, it was with the specific intent of figuring out how to make a difference ever day, even when I wasn’t working at a homeless shelter. It morphed into Dare Boldly in 2014 as I got clearer on what I wanted to inspire in other people’s lives, as well as my own: to Dare Boldly. Live Bravely
It started as Dare Boldly after I wrote a poem called DARE and a dear friend, Max Ciesielski, sent me a track of music he wrote to go with the poem — and asked me to record it.
That poem evolved from a painting and blessing I used to announce the new name of my blog, Dare Boldly, on January 1, 2014:
And I continue to evolve.
All this means is that I am reassessing my online presence, the purpose of my writing here, the value of maintaining a daily schedule and the alternatives. It means in the coming weeks I probably won’t be appearing every weekday with any predictable schedule and it means, you’ll be seeing some changes as I adjust my theme, look, feel and direction.
We are each of us born with unlimited potential to shine bright. We are each born into the of possibility of our life enriching the world just because we are alive. And, we are each of us made of stardust born to be a light for all the world to see in the dark.
Yet we sit, and wait, and lurk behind limiting beliefs, hoping someone might see us cowering over there, in the corner, waiting for someone to turn on the lights.
No one can turn on your light.
You have the power. You have the heart. You have the soul to create a light so bright in your life, there is no darkness deep enough to drown it out.
And all you have to do to start shining is believe. Believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams. Believe in your right to live out loud.
Sure it can be scary. It can be downright terrifying to step out from behind the curtain of your uncertainties to claim your place at centre stage of your own life. But risking is better than living inside a numbed out, nullifying shell of a life that’s been left on the shelf, gathering dust behind the cracker jack box that’s already out of date.
Risking it is better than living with the weight of believing you do not deserve to shine.
Risking it is more life-giving than staying stuck in the dark.
You will never find the edges of the darkness around you if you do not step through it.
What if to find your light you just need to start stepping through the dark?
What if your light is that tiny spark of hope that flickered, for just a moment, when you held onto the possibility of light at the edge of the dark?
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Dare Boldly 