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.

blending chaos and order

I've decided to use the library like it's never been used before, slowly working through a list of books that I've been meaning to read for years. Management theory and community building type stuff, which, I will admit, I tend to devour like they were romance novels. Three days and I'm halfway through Dee Hock's Birth of the Chaordic Age. I first came across this book when I was studying systems theory at Antioch and its a welcome find at this point in my life. I'm most hit by his personal story, feeling out of sorts with institutions and a bit out of step with his family growing up; and I'm particularly moved by his realization that VISA was not where he was supposed to be and abruptly leaving for no good reason, because some voice inside him told him he had other things to do. All of this feels like a crackling fire and a cup of cocoa right now. I needed Mr. Hock and his story of scrambling and struggling to make sense of it all. I was looking for a mentor to help me push forward on my non-linear path, which at this present moment feels like I just took a side trail into brushy woods, never to be heard of again. Every transition in my life resembles chaos while I walk it, but order when I reflect back, and I'm incessantly puzzling how I can better balance these two poles in order to stay more present in the journey.

How to recognize that chaos is the natural order of things ... it's a call to the wild. We forget this natural order when we're not exposed regularly to nature. And reading back over this post, the answer is sprinkled throughout in my language. So off I go, today I will go for a walk in the woods and reflect.

10.10.10

I wanna go to TEDxRainier.

See? It's that easy ...

I came across the website of a friend's business in Seattle and the tagline resonated with me: connects brands to tribes
by telling stories that matter

I recognize this language, so similar to community foundation taglines across the country: connecting people who care with causes that matter. People and stories and connecting ... it's as simple as loving life and sharing that passion by injecting it into whatever work you do. And the words that matter are very significant because they get to an authenticity which is core to the everyday philanthropist.

What matters to you? It's probably a lifelong pursuit, to discover this thing that matters to you. And certainly what matters changes as we transition from student to professor or vice president to mother. But at our core each of us holds an answer to that question. Sometimes the voice is soft, hopefully it is also persistent. How do we dig deeper into our stories of what matters and make every simple gesture a word in that novel? How do we breath more passion for life into what we're doing?

It can feel so immense, trying to be a good person every day, trying to do good things in the world. Yet in a nugget, people and stories and connecting ...