Circle

How do you find yourself, in the center of this startling cycle of life? I hope you find yourself well, healthy, safe, and warm. I feel this is the perfect time to reach out to family, friends, loves, the communities to which you belong, and get cozy. We all may be in this state of reimagining our way of life for a while.

As our relationships move more toward communication with words and less with touch, smell, and feel, now is a great time to take a communication class with your family online. This is the opportunity to dust off skills and learn new ones. Sharpening our communication skills and practicing with family and friends now can set us up for successfully navigating more challenging conversations when times are tighter and even more uncertain in say, I don’t know, 30 days from now.

I am learning more about transformative justice, boundary setting, and finding out more about my relationship to isolation and solitude; the relationship between loneliness and feelings of abandonment; and I am contemplating more (where did that go? hello old friend!) about scarcity, the Great Depression of 1929, right along side revisioning capitalism and reading Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown.

If you need someone to brainstorm with, please reach out. This is a fertile time to make brave, bold strokes on the canvas of your life. This is a challenging, magical, liminal, fertile space and I very much hope this time presents as an opportunity for astounding growth and powerful, positive change for all of us.

Flourish

How are you growing into the new year? Are you choosing to settle in your relationships, shrugging into another year of lowered expectations and accepting sub par commitments, results, connections, and compromised levels of trust? How are you challenging your relationships to rise up to the values and standards you hold to be true for you?

With the turning of the decade, it seems a great time to assess your connections and set out the intention to not simply survive another year, but to develop; grow. To envision a more vibrant, just world takes courage and starts with our own health and liberation. Hope can grow in crappy soil, and flourishes in rich compost.

Closing out 2019 and shredding files has been a joy! Meditating on how I’ve accepted mediocrity and allowed a busy schedule to feed a defeatist attitude; the exhaustion of carrying a multitude of disappointments into developing relationships and seeing them sag in the middle; contemplating the amount of new energy it takes to commit to fostering healthy growth and healing community; oh January: how I depend on you to restart so many of my engines!

One tactic I am employing is not putting all the work on January this year! In 2020, February through December will find me calling on their support to share the load of my fresh intentions for the new decade. I will be churning in ways to stay organized, develop divine self-care, deploy strategic generosity and random kindness, open my heart a little wider and feed my fears a little less. We will see how it goes.

I encourage you to chip down and scrape out what’s not working for you. Slapping another coat of cheap paint on and watching it peel away by August will result in feeling like ‘resolutions’ are stupid, and missing the opportunity of real lasting change. True transformation is radical and invigorating. Align and thrive in 2020.

Learn

Learn

“Love is never any better than the lover.” — Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

So many of my friends these days are reinventing themselves. Some are beginning new careers, others are finding new ways to be creative, and a few are opening up closed parts of themselves; expressing aspects of their personalities I’ve never even known about before! It feels exciting and I’m inspired to chart new territory myself.

I can find a reason why any season is a good time to start a renovation project, and so as we approach Autumn I’m thinking about falling leaves, bringing in the harvest and cool nights again. I cannot suppress a smile here. I think my heartbeat slows down just a little with thoughts of blankets and staying indoors cooking something low and slow. I get excited at the thought of picking up my meditation practice again, turning inward and journaling!

Thoughts of sparkling fires and hot cocoa pairs so well with taking the time to contemplate. Undervalued and misunderstood as unproductive and a waste of time, contemplation is where we learn about our changed and changing selves; where we can appreciate what’s gone and what has survived. How have you changed since last Autumn? How are these changes informing your new goals for 2020? What have you learned?

Are you making a multi-layered effort to learn more about your communication style and improving your skill set? Do you think good communication should flow magically and effortlessly from any happy, healthy relationship, or do you think you need to make an effort to communicate effectively and regularly, with clear intention and compassion? How do you improve those skills? Do you take classes? What books are you reading now? I would love to know!

I’m reading a lot of poetry these days, and appreciating the life work of Toni Morrison, along with the rest of the world. The way she chose to share her inner world has transformed mine. I strive to find an ounce of her eloquence to commune with my connections and transform my relationships into spaces of deep understanding and love.