Here's something I read in Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life this week that I want to learn to live:

In our context, the words willingness and acceptance mean to respond actively to your feelings by feeling them, literally, much as you might reach out and literally feel the texture of a cashmere sweater. They mean to respond actively to your thoughts by thinking them, much as you might read poetry just to get the flow of the words, or an actor might rehearse lines to get a feel for the playwright's intent.

To be willing and accepting means to respond actively to memories by remembering them, much as you might take a friend to see a movie you've already seen. They mean to respond actively to bodily sensations by sensing them, much as you might take an all-over stretch in the morning just to feel your body all over. Willingness and acceptance mean adopting a gentle, loving posture toward yourself, your history, and your programming so that it becomes more likely for you simply to be aware of your own experience, much as you would hold a fragile object in your hand and contemplate it closely and dispassionately...

...In essence, instead of trying to feel better, willingness involves learning how to feel better.

So I have totally fallen down the amazing rabbit hole that is all things Martha Beck. And part of this is taking a writing workshop with her called Write Into Light, which is actually what prompted my dusting off Enjoy and Love. We just wrapped up the first of three sessions and in the last class Liz Gilbert blew us away with her insights into the creative life and life in general. This part especially has been keeping me company since:

And that actually, if you really ponder how much your worrying has helped so far, and how much it’s made you a better mother, and how much your worrying has helped your children, and how much your worrying has helped your community, and how much your worrying is helping the world. I think if you’re very honest and you get very quiet, you’ll discover that the answer is not at all. Not one bit. In fact, the opposite. It has harmed you and everything, everything it touches. To me, the most radical thing -- I mean a revolutionary thing would be to see a relaxed woman walking around.

Synchronistically two lovely little pocket-sized books have crossed my desk at the library in the past week: How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh and How to Change Your Entire Life by Doing Absolutely Nothing: 10 Do-Nothing Relaxation Exercises to Calm You Down Quickly So You Can Speed Forward Faster by Karen Salmansohn - fun!! I'll let you know how it goes being a radical, revolutionary, relaxed woman. Perhaps you'd care to join me?

Today I had the great good fortune to hear David George Haskell read from and speak about his newest book, The Songs of Trees. You may know that I feel a deep connection with trees, so of course as soon as I learned about this book I knew I had to attend the talk, held at our wonderful local independent bookstore, Parnassus Books.

The Songs of Trees tells the stories of twelve trees from around the world, including one from Tennessee (he teaches at the University of the South, so not completely surprising). His first book, The Forest Unseen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a meditation on a square meter of old-growth Tennessee forest, which he compared to a Tibetan sand mandala in a fascinating talk at the National Academy of Sciences. All great stuff that you might enjoy, too!

What I'm really loving about Professor Haskell's writing is how poetic it is and how it makes science accessible and interesting for the layperson. So far The Songs of Trees reminds me a lot of Mary Oliver's nature essays in Upstream - high praise indeed coming from me!

Are you the fool now?

Sometimes we need to be wrong

so that we can dance.


(The beautiful Fool card is from an old friend, the Aquarian Tarot Deck, illustrated by David Palladini.)

For almost as long as I can remember, I've been scared to death of death. I went through a phase as a insomniac pre-teen where I would lie awake all night, imagining the void. The idea of having no consciousness for the rest of eternity absolutely terrified me. And hand-in-hand with this fear was the sense that I couldn't survive the eventual death of my beloved father. How would I exist in a world he wasn't in? These fears haunted me.

But the truth I've discovered is that even though my dear dad passed away in 2015, I don't live in a world without him. He lives every day in my heart and I often imagine that I can feel his funny, loving presence around me. In fact, I feel like we now have the relationship I always longed for with him. And so my greatest fear has become my most precious gift. I find I no longer fear death. It has made me re-evaluate a lot. I wonder what other great gifts await me. What great gifts await you in this beautiful alchemy of life?

We all need places -

hidden and mysterious -

for our dreams to grow.

Go deep to go wild.
Darkness in the mountain lake
is most familiar.