moving day.

I realize there was no warning.

Over the course of two days, I moved the blog.

It was something I’ve been considering.

And right now the time felt right for change.

Please come along with me.  I will continue the journey here.

Update any feeds, links or bookmarks and continue with me.

I am in the process of moving the last three years of posts.

In the meantime, the existing posts will remain here.

Time for change……

japan.

I haven’t written about it yet because I simply don’t  know what to say.  I’m so completely overwhelmed by the devastation.  And if I think I am overwhelmed by it, than I can only imagine what the people who live there are feeling.  To think that in one moment everyone and everything you care about can be wiped away with no warning.  It’s everything that you think must be fixed in this world, death, destruction, cold, hunger, grief.

And yet there is no easy fix.  I know that I for one can’t help but sit here feeling helpless.  I’ve been glued to the television in a way that I never am and I’m not one of those stop to look at the train wreck kind of people.  It’s just it looks as if it was the summer movie blockbuster, except that it’s real.

I don’t have anything helpful to say.  Nothing profound.  I have nothing to offer but my love and light stretched out to the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, for those gone and those left to grieve and rebuild.

I do know that I have been hugging my daughters a bit tighter lately.  Appreciating having a house, electricity, food, warmth.  Just the basics, not even all the extras, like coffees and yellow tulips and pizza night.

A reminder to us all.

Silly Girl.

 

You know those annoyingly in love people.

The ones with rose colored glasses.

The ones that cannot stop talking about how in love they are.

The ones who do all the cliche, cheeseball things people who are in love do.

I’m really trying to not be one of those people here right now.

But it’s really hard.

Quirky

{my photo for the new year: acceptance}

When you live alone for some period of time (say almost three years) you kind of have your own rules, or more accurately some rules need not apply.  Like closing the doors when you enter the bathroom or talking out loud to yourself constantly or eating breakfast  closer to noon on a regular basis or talking back to the movie you are watching or walking around in tanktops in the middle of winter because that’s who you are.

Then someone else walks into your home and all of a sudden you realize A LOT about yourself.  Like how quirky you are, how controlling, how much a creature of habit.  Then all of a sudden you are turning to someone else and looking at them and if you are LUCKY they are laughing at you, or smiling or finding the fact that you write an abundance of lists in colored Sharpie markers cute….not insane.

The other thing though about letting someone else into your home is that the things you thought were going to bother you, do not.  Like needing  the house to be spotless, or your hair not slapped back in a messy ponytail, or how you look naked.  Those things just fall by the wayside because you are wondering if you should remind him again for the third time to check the chocolate chip cookies because it’s your recipe and you think they might be burning (they were okay by the way, he had it all under control).

It’s amazing after years of introspection to suddenly see yourself as someone else might.

So maybe it’s not so okay to give him four reminders to check the cookies, but maybe it is okay to narrate the movie.

Maybe it’s not okay to leave the bathroom door open, but maybe it is okay to lay still and let him stare into the real you.

Because that’s what it’s all about.  Because in 2010 I found out who I was and then when I saw myself reflected in someone else’s eyes I saw the same person and I guess that’s called being true to yourself.

filled to the brim.

i have been stressing out about Christmas.  if you know someone who is not stressing about Christmas, even if they claim to have it all done or perfect, please introduce me because i would like to verify that it’s real and not drug induced.  the funny thing is today i stopped being stressed about Christmas.

today i spent with a whole lot of people who showed me a whole lot of love.  i really, really take for granted how many souls out there care about me.  from a one year old to an eighty year old, i am blessed with people who smile when they see me.  you know when you walk up to someone and they smile and are legitimately happy to see you for no other reason but to see you?  i wish i could bottle up that feeling and carry it around with me to hand out at random.

i am damn lucky for sure.

people love you because they love you.  i realized this this year. (and i hate when the same word falls together in a sentence, but i’m leaving it).  confidence is a tough thing to come by sometimes.  it is far too easy to become your own worst enemy, only see your faults.  i love the people i do because i see their souls shine.  i don’t care that they are a little or a lot overweight.  i don’t care that they have messy hair, or a crooked tooth.  i go with their shortcomings and celebrate their goodness.

i am known to not notice things.   a haircut, or dye job.  what color your eyes are.  one time my ex-husband shaved his goatee and i didn’t notice for three days.   maybe i’m just unobservant, but maybe that means i see more to you than what is at first apparent. and maybe you see me that same way too.  maybe you don’t care that my hair is messy, or i have age spots forming on my nose, or my middle is a little squishy.  maybe you just like me because i’m, well, me.  messy but filled up with love.

at thirty eight years old i was scared to death to think about having a first date again.  on my last first date i was twenty-one years old.  take out a photo of me when i was twenty-one, full of fire and energy and youth and beauty and take a look at me now, care-worn and plum tuckered out.  that’s a little scary.  what i found though was that somehow, somewhere along the way i have found my beauty in a whole new way.  it’s the kind that comes with lessons learned and the appreciation of so much more of what you can take from this life.  my first date involved my daughters first and resulted in my youngest getting to hold his hand before me (always sacrificing for the children).  i have waited three years for  this first date and i couldn’t have picked a better person to share it with.  because this one, he sees that beauty that i see.  he sees my soul shine.  i’m just glad i got to find it first.

 

 

Life as I Know it.

 

You know that picture you have of  life in your head.  The dreamy one.  The one you read about on “other people’s blogs”.  Oh, if only I was a homeschooling, back to the land,  Julia Childish, yoga guruish, perfect husband, children, weather, chickens, make everything from scratch, sew my own clothes, never lose my temper, house always perfectly simple, organized, quaint and spot-free kind of thing.  That’s kind of the problem I have with the blog world sometimes.  Because in reality, none of us are all of those or even part of those things.  My favorite blogs are from “real” people because they are open, they are honest, they dialogue the good, bad and ugly.  Life can be beautiful and  messy, all at the same time.

It is Flickr, it seems, that has shown me so much more about documenting real life.  Doing 30 days of Gratitude this November has shown me how easy it is to document all these parts of life.  It’s also given me a new look at how much beauty, how much perfection there is in my life right now, just as it is.  The best part is it is much easier to grab one photo and a handful of words to sum up your day, and  flip through your Flickr contacts to see their visions of their lives through the lenses of their cameras.

Now I am a 365 dropout.  I didn’t make it past March this year taking a photo a day, so I cannot imagine (even though it is a nice thought and possibility) that I could continue a year’s worth of gratitude but I want to continue to make this daily connection with the positive in my life.  I want to continue this journey of loving my life just as it is and I am thankful for all the wonderful new contacts I’ve made there through this project.

This year has been a new path in my journey. A path of looking internally.  A path of self-acceptance.  A path that has led me to believe in myself and this life.  I don’t need to make comparisons anymore.  When I look at the things I have written, at the photos I have taken this year, they are deeply personal.  They are much more internal, much more reflective.

This is me, the way I am.  And as one of those real blog friends of mine would say, this is my life.

And I am proud of it.

 

 

 

Priorities

Here lie my two most important.  I know I have been gone from this space longer than usual.  I know I have been away from Little Bits for even longer.  I’m dreadfully sorry it’s been even longer since I made real blog rounds.  This past week I’ve been sorting out priorities.  It seems you only get so much time in a day (bummer, most days really) and I have tried what is a novel idea of doing the things that should be done prior to the little extras which means more time here in the real world.

My girls and I had a kick-ass night last night.  I mean one of those nights where you laugh so hard at dinner your daughter has to spit out her food so she doesn’t choke.  We have re-introduced the bedtime story, every drawer and cabinet in my kitchen was purged and organized last weekend, the animals bins have been emptied daily and the house looks less like a tornado has just blown through.

I started writing on the weekends, real writing that comes from my soul.  Writing that makes me proud.  I found a writing partner across the ocean and today we sent our first bits of writing off to each other.  When I get done here I will draft off Day 2 to send her tomorrow a.m.

I started 30 days of gratitude on Flickr.  Every day, a photo and a message of something I am grateful for.  I thought it would be fun. It ended up being something more for me.  It reminded me that I need to slow down and appreciate the fantastic things I have around me on a daily basis while they are here.  It reminded me that first and foremost I have to blog, I have to write, I have to photograph for me.

There is a limited amount of time, both in the day-to-day and during this lifetime so I have chosen carefully what I want to focus on.  I want to go out to dinner each month with my adult girls and drink wine and eat good food and laugh in a way I cannot do here at home.  I want to spend more nights wrapped up in a blanket with my little girls or out daring them to push themselves. I want to finally finish making this home the simple nest I’ve been envisioning now for two years. I want to go ahead and lay casually in bed and talk on the phone late at night like a teenage girl and find a new form for an old relationship.  I want to explore my writing and my photography in a way that does not elicit pressure.

I am remaining committed to this blog because it is as much home to me as everything else in my life.  I am putting Little Bits on the backburner because as much as I like it, I don’t love it enough.  I organized my blogroll so that when I have the time I can find  my friends and the places that provide  inspiration easily.

And that’s the whole of what I’ve been doing.

 

one day, maybe i can write something as beautiful as

Mary Oliver

*****

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

 

The Vote

I have  sworn to not talk politics here, but somehow it does creep in now and then, and today I am going to post about it again.

Here is my conondrum.  I hate the system we have in place.  I feel for all it’s intended strengths, the two-party system, DEMS vs REP’s, will never allow us to get anything worthwhile accomplished. I gave up a long time ago  believing that any true good will come out of the government and spend most of my time more interested in the works of some of my favorite philanthropists, humanitarians and general do-gooders.

Until Election Day. Election Day is kind of my reality TV addiction.  I get so engrossed in internet news updates and Facebook debates (Facebook has to be THE place to be on Election Day for entertainment) that I even forget to eat or go to bed.  I get SO caught up in all the drama.  The reality is in the end it doesn’t really mean too much to me, new faces coming in to face the same problems to be resolved or more than likely not and I know that’s a crappy attitude.  I really don’t care to fix it.  I don’t want to bail out on my DEM’s, join the REP’s or join a tea party (unless there are scones, if there are scones, I’M IN).  I’ll just do my due diligence, make sure I vote the best I can and then wake up Wednesday and go back to following and supporting my do-g0oders.

I am a registered Democrat (aren’t you surprised) but I more vote with my heart.  In the past I haven’t paid as much attention to local politics, but like everyone else this year, I inhaled as much information as possible about all our local and Maryland candidates, and as it seems (unlike a whole lot of people) I didn’t vote party lines.  I split my vote.

But I tend to shy away from Republicans.  Except it seems maybe a couple of Republicans I seem to be kind of fond of.

November 2nd.

 

Use your voice.

Because there are others who would die to.

Some do die to.

Some who wish to and cannot.

And because all those people whose messages you hate

(whoever they are)

They are voting too.