I was watching Joy Behar interview Roseanne Barr last night and I started feeling depressed and anxious. Life is happening right now. Life is passing right now. Is this what I want to be doing? Am I doing what I want to do with my life? It became clear in that instant that the world is divided into two camps, consumers and creators. And right now, I am a consumer. My recent desire for simplicity goes way beyond stuff. When I read blogs or play around on Stumble Upon during naptime or stay up to watch sitcoms after the house is once again asleep, I am consuming without any output. And I don't want to be a consumer, I want to be consumed. I want to be a part of the conversation, not on the sidelines taking it all in. I know, I've been tired this year, creating a life and nurturing growth in a small child, but all this mindless consumption is numbing me. I'm afraid I'll wake up 60 years old wondering what the hell happened. I was going to write a book, start a business, produce a film ... if I don't start now when do I think this is going to happen?

So I'm giving myself some goals this year rather than resolutions. In writing, here we go:

1. Write the first chapter in my novel.
2. Host a simplicity retreat.
3. Post at least once a week.
4. Write up a business plan for philanthropy consulting.

That's a good start I think. A bit ambitious even, especially if we plan to move and get pregnant again. Geesh. But if I post these 4 goals maybe they will inspire me to do something when I have a free hour here and there, keep me on track with my creativity. I think part of the problem is knowing I only have an hour or two at a time, I mean, what can I get done in an hour or two? But if I see each hour as part of a larger goal ...

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that. ~Mr. Dobler

Mesmerized

It's been 10 minutes and I can't look away from Breathing Earth ... I guess I've always assumed (wrongly, I know) that people die and are born in a balanced kind of way. I know statistically this isn't true, but it's hard to wrap my head around what this looks like. Fascinating to watch the discrepancy play out. Breaks my heart a little bit, to imagine the web of sorrow and joy each of those blips makes. Just a blip in a computer generated algorithm that represents a whole life, awakening or fading. I imagine there is something like this running on a huge screen in the background of our creator.

Creepin' myself out. Back to househunting.

Hoarding

We've been looking for a new home for nearly a year now. We've seen houses striped of all hardware and houses that don't have stairs to the basement level, we've been entangled in a possible short sale since July that has kept our hopes up and made everything else pale in comparison. It's been a year coming to terms with the fact that we might not be able to move back to the city.

Enter the new year. On Saturday we met our agent at a house that will be listed in a few weeks, after the current residents clean out their stuff in order for proper pictures to be taken. He warned us of the hoarding, that we'd have to have vision, that it wasn't for the faint of heart to see a house before it was ready for viewing. Fear not, I have an overabundance of vision - just sometimes not the cashflow reality to recognize that my 'creative fixes' will run another $50k. This wasn't a dirty home, it wasn't filled with garbage as far as I could tell; just boxes of paperwork, books, piles of clothes, unopened packages containing hundreds of packets of tea. You couldn't see the floor, you couldn't see the furniture. There were pathways and tunnels to get around the house. There were french doors to a lovely deck that you couldn't get to.

In a twisted way it feels like a sign that the current owners are hoarders. Like we could use this as an opportunity to take stock of our own possessions, and in turn make each corner of this house a sacred space, open and uncluttered. I can't imagine being trapped in this homemade labyrinth, yet I wonder if we aren't all, to some extent, burying ourselves alive. Sadness and grief, manifested as addictions, depression or a compulsion of some sort, shut out the light and drown us in our own undoing. If every disorder is a spectrum I'm aware that I share a gene with these people. Do I need 3 fleece jackets? 12 pairs of black pumps? I'm pretty sure it's a fine line between being a 'collector' of nuts and a hoarder.

So we're processing whether we can afford it, the price of the house combined with the vision of what it could be, but we're optimistic. There even seems to be a buzz of energy, a surge of potential that I haven't felt in awhile. So we'll see ... but I find it very interesting that as I'm coming to terms with my desire to create space for simplicity we tour the house of a hoarder, and after a year of looking it might just be the right house.

Onward to 2011

Loving this jewelry (Esther Williams would approve). The article is inspiring me to start early on gifts for the year, find ways to repurpose and regift.

The holiday went ok. We stayed under budget and I feel good about the purchases we made. I also witnessed first hand how overwhelming gifts are to a little kid. We opened several gifts at once and, in a lesson for the parents, he stayed focused on some stacking rings for half an hour. I witnessed how stressful all of this is for many of my family members and I'm just going to take the lead next year. I'm resolved to how I want to celebrate the holidays, and being a parent seems to have given me the permission to do it the way I want, no apologies.

So here's to ingenuity, creativity and repurposing. To breathing in and seeing fresh. Cheers to a clean slate with which to dabble out a life.

Ah, the holidays

This year officially marks my entrance into the holidays as an adult. The kind who creates merry and bright for the children, who runs around meeting the demands of family, friends and in-laws. The kind who desperately trys to stay engaged and present in order to savor the spirit without losing spirit. And coming to some kind of agreement with my husband about how this all goes down is a whole new level of conversation. It all starts with how we were raised as kids and what traditions we want to bring forward and which we'd like to leave behind. I was like any other kid that enjoyed opening present after present on Christmas morning. The anticipation and then excitement in having all new stuff to play with and wear.

Yet, when I look back I can't remember a single gift (save for the Atari that our parents had convinced us wasn't going to happen just so it could be a significant surprise when it did). I remember TV trays on laps at my dad's parents house. Everyone in jeans with a beer or a cigarette in their hands. Older cousins practicing disco moves in the basement and Grandma's pumpkin pie. At my mom's parents house it was looking for Rudolph's nose blinking in the sky on the way home from Christmas Eve mass and tromping out into the snow for a walk. It was getting dressed for dinner at 5pm in the formal dining room and playing cards with Grammy Ruth's chocolate chip cookies as chips. And it was about singing in the Christmas pageant and slowly moving the three wise men down the stairs each day on their way to greet baby Jesus. I want a Christmas that reflects on how blessed we are, how thankful we are, and that provides an opportunity to slow down and prepare for how to be better in the new year.

It's just hard to get around the gifts. Giving should feel good, should feel like you've really seen someone. Right now it feels like meeting a quota. In the past I've found great joy in making things for people, giving them experiences or small tokens. I've never had a lot of money to spend and I refuse to go into credit card debt. This tends to put me at odds with my family who equates gift giving with how much you love them. I'm being difficult when I suggest we draw names. And don't even get me started about the reaction to the 'craft' Christmas idea.

So Christmas 2010 is making me very sad. Where I take this sadness though, that's the looming question. How do you create a holiday that brings joy to those around you as well as to yourself? And now this question carries greater weight because I know the way I live my life through the holidays will serve as a template for how my child expects Christmas to be. I'm workin' on it. But in the meantime, this is a great piece on changing the way we approach this season. Enjoy!

It's ArtsEd Washington!

As mentioned in a previous post I'm joining a board of directors, and I'm happy to announce it's ArtsEd Washington! I had a meeting this week with the executive director and board president and will be officially voted in next Wednesday. I'm excited to sink my teeth into this topic and learn more about what we need to do to provide comprehensive, sequential and sustainable arts education for all kids in Washington state. I'm most intrigued by the thought that the conversation we're really having is about how and why we're educating our kids, and I gotta say I am jazzed to be joining that conversation. I anticipate there will be lots of thought about this on the blog in the coming months as I work through some ideas about how we can provide leveraged funding for arts nonprofits, go beyond bussing kids to one-off productions as their 'art experience', and work within the current curriculum to promote creativity.

Beyond that however, I think I'll also be exploring education itself. One of my favorite thinkers, Peter Senge, has said that 'secondary education is a more purely industrial age institution than any business', and yet we cannot shake it. It no longer successfully serves its purpose and we're attempting to cobble together piecemeal solutions to get different outcomes. Kids are struggling, dropping out or worse, making it through the system only to come out the other end without much intellect. I had the opportunity to see Senge speak a couple of years ago and his talk centered around how we must change our educational system. It inspired me to think deeply about what an education is, how it's different today than it was when I was a kid, and what we want our kids to learn in order to be leaders and thoughtful citizens in the future. Our environment and our culture depends on it.

Anyhow ... passionate, yes. Excited by this opportunity at ArtsEd, yes.

Simplicity

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks:
I want to host simplicity retreats, particularly focused on women and girls finding the space they need to truly create the lives they want. Not just for themselves, but the lives they want for everyone they love, their communities, this world. So my brain is aswirl today. I had time yesterday, driving while the baby napped, sitting at a coffeeshop while the baby played with Grammy, and all these ideas I've had gelled for a moment and I think ... maybe ... not just another idea but really something? Providing the space for women to take some time out to find their own philosophy of compassionate living, to eat well and laugh, talk about how they will simplify and possibly create some real change in how our culture supports families.

I'm energized by the thought of a retreat in the woods, wine and cheese, silent walking mediations, discussions about saving money, creating an altar, baking bread ... would anyone be interested in doing this with me? I wonder. I was reading Alicia Silverstone's website The Kind Life because I had seen her talking on Oprah about going vegan. Her approach intrigued me (as you may recall, dear reader, which I think is just my husband at this point (hi) I have serious concerns, philosophically, about eating flesh anymore) and on her website she said something that stuck with me this last week: she created the kind diet and the website to create community around it because it was a need that she had and she wanted to fill that need. Somehow the way she phrased it, maybe because it hit along with everything else going on, looking for a house, reading about the anxiety of motherhood, joining a board to promote creativity, stumbling across my m-in-laws book on women's sacred spaces, wanting to find a community that will discuss things like Bucky Fuller's concept that death is just another perspective humans have yet to tap into ... it all just came together.