School is in session! Sweet Girl is doing amazing. She has her desk setup in her room and logs into each class, participates, does her homework, and seems to be enjoying it. The school is very welcoming and encouraging… every morning from 8:30-9, they have special learning sessions: a 15-person connection group twice a week, a principal talk twice a week (today’s was about setting big goals), and their “house principal” has a Friday session.
I’ve lost 23 pounds so far. The weather here is finally glorious so I went for a walk the past couple of days instead of my swim. It’s nice to be able to go outside without wilting! And we are all currently sitting on the back porch doing our individual work.
I finished the Jerusalem photo diamond painting and am working on some smaller ones. It took me a month.
I’ll be doing Tracy Clark’s Picture Fall photo prompt project this month and her Picture Gratitude next month. I started with Picture Color about 10 years ago and have loved her classes. This one is as simple or as involved as you want it to be. You can join the Facebook group and comment on other people’s photos, or just take them for yourself as a fun personal challenge.
Picture Fall (October 1st – 31st) is the perfect way to spend the new season engaged in a creative photography project. Soothe your soul, nurture your spirit, and have some fun with the gift of simple, accessible creativity with me and a community of other photo-loving friends. For $5 off use the coupon code FIVE upon checkout.
Fun links:
What To Do When Your Need to Please is Ruining Your Life on Tiny Buddha
This episode of Creatives Get Real podcast called “What Holds You Back?” on overcoming creative challenges, feeling like an imposter, and comparing yourself to others.
7 Universal Truths That Will Change Your Life on Mike Dooley’s TUT. I love #2 about sharing your gifts and #5 about listening to your intuition.
OK on to the books!
Everything Is Spiritual: Who We Are and What We’re Doing Here by Rob Bell
“However solid life may appear, it’s also very, very fragile.” I love Rob Bell for telling it like it is. He was selling out stadiums on Oprah’s tour while going through so much transition and self-doubt. Here, he shares his thought processes “behind the scenes” and how he comes to know that “everything is spiritual, you’ve always belonged, the whole thing is an endless invitation.” I have 51 highlighted passages, so I’ll just share a few here.
“There’s a humility baked into curiosity. You don’t know—that’s your starting point. You’re coming from a place of openness, driven by a conviction that there’s something more, something beyond you, something else out there. Curiosity is an antidote to despair. Despair is the spiritual disease of believing that tomorrow will simply be a repeat of today. Nothing new. The future simply an unbroken string of todays, one after another. But curiosity, curiosity disrupts despair, insisting that tomorrow will not be a repeat of today. Curiosity whispers to you, You’re just getting started …”
The title comes from the fact that there is not a word in the Torah for ‘spiritual,’ “because to call something spiritual would be to imply that other things aren’t. In the Bible, everything is spiritual. All of life. It’s never just a job, you’re never just a mom or just a dad, it’s never just money, it’s never just your body. Nothing exists in isolation, it’s all connected.”
Bell takes issue with some of the “Christian” pastors and mega-churches that have a public persona and then their real, questioning selves. The dishonesty and business side of it bothers him.
There are so many meaningful excerpts I could share! I’ll settle for these:
“All of life permeated with the divine presence, all of it sacred. I saw how the Bible isn’t a book about how to get into heaven, it’s a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be.”
“The mind thinks, the soul knows. You need mind to navigate the path, you need soul to know whether this is even the right path.”
“There’s only this one reality, and in it everything is connected to everything else. This reminded me of an ancient Jewish prayer called the Shema. It’s in the book of Deuteronomy, and it has this line about how the divine is one. The Hebrew word for one there is the word echad, which is a oneness made up of multiple parts. Like a unified community. All divisions take place within a unity. All parts exist within wholes. All wholes form one whole. Everything that appears to have nothing to do with everything else is, in the end, connected to everything else.”
Becoming a Soulful Educator: How to Bring Jewish Learning from Our Minds, to Our Hearts, to Our Souls–And Into Our Lives by Aryeh Ben David
I am currently taking a course on prayer with Aryeh and have been eager to read this book. His point of view is from Judaism, but his ideas can be applied to any faith. He draws on Parker Palmer’s educational philosophy, as well as key Jewish thought leaders. He presents six steps to help educators teach to the heart, engage students, and enable students to authentically and personally integrate Jewish wisdom into their lives. He offers guidance for how teachers can share their own vulnerabilities to help students gain new clarity on their own infinite potential for positive change.
“By imagining and envisioning our better selves, we are already moving toward a new and better future. For me to become my best self, I first need to imagine a better version of myself and then reflect on what is holding me back from getting there… Soulful Education is always future based.”
My favorite aspect of the guide for a class lesson is that it closely follows the mussar structure of a meeting. My favorite quotation: “The difference between listening 100 percent and 80 percent is not 20 percent. Is is an entirely different experience.”
Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness by Rick Hanson, PhD
This guide is full of concrete suggestions, experiential practices, personal examples, and insights into the brain. It includes effective ways to interact with others and to repair and deepen important relationships.
“As you become more resilient, you’re more able to meet your needs in the face of life’s challenges and greater well-being will result. Every human being has three basic needs: safety [shelter], satisfaction [food], and connection [bonding]… We meet our needs in four major ways: by recognizing what’s true; resourcing ourselves; regulating thoughts, feelings, and actions; and relating skillfully to others and the wider world. When we apply these four ways to the three needs we all have, that suggests 12 primary inner strengths…”
So in Part 1, Recognizing, the chapters are Compassion, Mindfulness, and Learning. In Resourcing, they are Grit, Gratitude, and Confidence. In Regulating, they are Calm, Motivation, and Intimacy. And in Relating, they are Courage, Aspiration, and Generosity.
“Resilience is more than managing stress and pain and recovering from loss and trauma. People who are resilient are also able to pursue opportunities in the face of challenges. They are able to start doing things that are beneficial, to stop doing things that are harmful, and to keep on going day after day without getting too stressed about it.”
“Anticipated rewards are frequently disappointing. Even the best experiences are impermanent. These two facts can create a chronic sense that something is missing, something is wanting. This pushes us to keep seeking the next shiny object, the next experience. Even when you’re feeling at ease with no problem to solve and no need for anything else, see if you can notice a kind of auto-wanting in the back of your mind, an ongoing scanning for something new to want, even when you are already satisfied… embedded in this auto-wanting is also an underlying feeling of restlessness and a subtle sense that the moment, every moment, is never fully satisfactory as it is. This hunger for the next thing pulls us away from appreciating what we have and toward wanting what we lack. It’s poignant that we habitually seek satisfaction with a mindset shaded with dissatisfaction, which holds complete contentment always just out of reach.”
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A true (as told to me) story by Bess Kalb
Sweet memories of her grandmother, as if told by her. The relationship between granddaughter and grandmother in this book is very close, fun, accepting, and loving. A friend asked me to read this, one of her favorite books of all time. I think that would be because she understands a grandmother’s fierce protection of her family and how difficult it can be to let go. This one was not for me, but a good read nonetheless.
“What have I always told you, Bessie? What have I always said? You’re my angel. I am you. I’m the bones in your body and the blood that fills you up and the meat around your legs. I’m the softness of your cheeks and the way they freckle in the summer, and I’m the streaks of rust in your hair, and I’m the nose under your nose and the eyes that narrow with fire and roll backward in delight at all the same things. I’m your style. I’m your laugh. I’m the rage in your heart that I’m not here. You’re the body I left behind. I made sure of that. From the moment I met you, I never stopped telling you my stories. Because nobody will write them but you.”
Radical Self-Forgiveness: The Direct Path to True Self-Acceptance by Colin Tipping
It can be so much easier to forgive others than to offer forgiveness to ourselves. I heard someone talk about Tipping’s “Radical Forgiveness” process in a discussion about sorrow. I chose this one to quiet my inner critic, learning about his first book’s precepts in the Introduction. It’s a concept that I like but can’t quite fully accept… that things unfold as they are divinely meant to and there are many aspects of a situation we cannot see or control. Often things happen to us for our own benefit. This fits into the Mussar concept of “tests” we face for the opportunity to grow.
The Lost and Found Bookshop: A Novel by Susan Wiggs
This is the exact same story I’ve read a lot lately… woman with broken heart and no direction inherits bookstore, finds satisfaction and love, overcomes financial struggles, and lives happily ever after. I liked it anyway. It was a lighthearted read and had engaging characters.
“When she was very small, her mother used to tell her that books were alive in a special way. Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.”
