2012 in Review

The sun has set on 2012 so in the tradition of every news organization, radio station, periodical and facebooker I will now post my year end list. Here are my top 5 things I am grateful for from 2012.

1. I had my very first (and probably only) art show. It was called 'Evolve: the turning of a chapter.' I don't know how good it was but it for me it was a challenge I thought I’d never rise too.

2. I turned 30! Finally! I've been waiting to be 30 since I was 16, seriously. Maybe I’m a Louie the Late Bloomer or maybe I’m fully bloomed but just don't realize it yet but I’ve always know the 20s wasn't where it's was going to be at for me. I grew up an old soul and lately it's like I get to be a child again, something about the distance I have come and the things I have survived have allowed me to find that childlike wonder from so very long ago.

3. Tejas. I've been teaching yoga for a while but I decided I was ready to go back to school so I re-did my 200 hour certification at Tejas Yoga in the South Loop of Chicago. Trekking down to Chicago almost every weekend of 2012 could get tiresome but I have found 2 amazing teachers and the type of yoga Community I have been searching for as well as trying to create.

4. I found a home! I spent a lot of 2012, and I do mean A LOT, without a home. I wasn't homeless by any means but I surely wasn't in a place of my own nor was there any feeling of being settled in the various places I was living. Yes there were a few different places. So now I have a wonderful little house that I’m happily renting with a big back yard, a white picket fence, a mud room, and an attic bedroom. It suits me and my dog just perfectly.

5. I have hope. See hope and I have a fickle relationship. I've spent the past few years approaching New Year's Eve thinking "Thank God that year is over, next year has got to be better!" But it never worked out and I felt like I was tripping over myself to see how fast I could self sabotage my life. But as the sun is coming up on the first day of 2013 I can look back and say "yes, I make some mistakes, but I have learned from them and I now have both of my feet on the ground, I am living with good intention and being true to myself not the image of me I was so busy creating, and I am ready to entertain the potential of good things happening in my life." So see here 2013 I’m not allowing hope that you will be a better year but the hope that I will be a better person.

Best wishes to you all. Stay well, stay warm and go hug someone.

Peace Y'all!

Sacred Hobbies: The things we do as meditation

It’s the things we do; the times when we turn off our cell phones, power down the laptops and the televisions, the 24/7 stream of news and entertainment, the onslaught of stimulus. It’s the things we do when we make time to be silent and do something we love, whether it is walking the dog or scrapbooking, shooting hoops on your own or picking on the guitar, taking a stroll through the woods or dancing barefoot in the yard. It’s the things we do that draw us deeper into ourselves and further from the rattle of the everyday life.

Tonight the Gallery opens an art show titled Sacred Hobbies. It was a phrase that starting insinuating itself into my language as I struggled with not having time to do my yoga practice. I went back to one of the basic principles of yoga; that yoga is not our physical practice but the way we live our lives. So I started working that theory into my life; when I had to choose between taking my half hour off to either do asana or take my amazing dog on a walk I choose to take my dog for a walk but for that to be my yoga for the day. Leaving the phone behind and not just taking in each moment of our walk but enjoying each moment (even the picking up of the poop moment). And I instilled this new awareness into other areas of my daily life, stealing precious minutes and turning them into profound experiences or taking what seemed like chores and making them my new sacred hobby. My walk up the hill to my office became walking meditations, my job making sandwich and scones turning into the sacred art of nourishing people. And my life, my little life as a struggling yogi and women, became enveloped with prayer and beauty. And I wanted to share!

I started talking this idea of sacred hobbies up to friends. What do they do in their lives that helps keep them sane and plugged into their own inner landscape? There seemed to be something for everyone and it was one friend in particular that gave birth to the exhibit opening tonight. Her own Sacred Hobby was making a thousand paper cranes; she had no “intention” for the cranes but asked if I would be interested in hanging them at the studio. It seemed a perfect fit and also a way to broaden this conversation I had begun among my friends out into the Community. From that reaching out into the Community I asked another local artist, a photographer who still shoots on film and develops his own prints at home in a self built darkroom, to join the show.

When I think back to just over a year ago when I opened Second Star Studio, it was in a way the biggest Sacred Hobby I’ve ever had and now it has helped to bring even more of them into my life. This show began as the tiniest spark of an idea and now holds a very special place in my life. I am so please and grateful for the shift in perspective, helping to see the profundity in every aspect of life, to embrace the idea of sacred as something other than solemn and of course to share this all with my Community.