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Archive for essays – Page 2

oh happy day . The Summer Jar

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Friday is here, and I’m finally getting back to my Oh Happy Day! Gratitude Project posting series. I started it as a way to remind myself to make gratitude part of every day, every week. Thornton Wilder wrote that “we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures,” and beginning with gratitude is the best way I know to live aware of how blessed we are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that blessing over the last few weeks as we’ve been finishing up the school year and getting ready for summer. This spring, I devoted some time to thinking through the direction of this blog, and by extension, my business. And, I guess, by further extension, my approach to work and how it integrates with the rest of life. As an artist, so much of creating and exploring new ideas is an on-going process that isn’t necessarily confined by the typical workday. As a single mom, dealing with the loss of my husband and the changes that has brought to our lives, I’ve also grown to understand that for me, it’s very important that what I “do” in my work and how I spend my days creatively be meaningful and inspiring.

As I was thinking through some of my blogging topics and inspiration-focus back in March, I wrote a “creative map” and lots of notes about various aspects of the creative life. For my “living” category, I wanted my thinking, writing and creating to reflect a “quiet, authentic and conscious life” — there is that word “conscious” again. My goals for some of the writing and sharing settled on three things…

  • to talk and “be” about real things
  • to be a good steward of time and blessings
  • to infuse daily life with beauty, creativity and celebration

The concept of being deliberate and conscious in what we’re doing isn’t easy sometimes. Being that “good steward” can be difficult when faced with all the mundane activities required in working, mothering and home-keeping. And, of course, busy-ness can be our enemy as we get stretched and pulled in lots of different directions. We often start to lose the joy in whatever we’re doing and begin checking items off our calendars and to-do lists.

I want to stop that cycle in my life. I want, as Emerson said, to “finish the moment” — each moment — and to make the most of each opportunity represented in that moment. I think I’m particularly more motivated in that commitment as I see my children growing at what seems like an exponential pace at times. As they become more and more independent (and just physically bigger), I find the desire to grab onto each fleeting moment with more of a white-knuckle grip! And, I suppose, summer offers it’s own impetus to slow down. Our schedule slows down, and we have fewer commitments as a family, but how will we use that freedom? I don’t want to get to August and say “where has the summer gone?” We’ve had an unprecedented build-up of excitement anticipating the start of summer, and I’ve been determined to put every effort into taking full advantage of it.

Enter the Summer Jar.

The children and I decided to create a list of things we wanted to do this summer — experiences big and small that would help us have memories and joy to show for the time spent this summer. We decided to put them in a jar that we could pull from to plan for activities or to surprise ourselves with fun experiences. Baby Girl decorated the jar with her special brand of summery illustrations, and we have it front and center on our dining table with a pen and sticky pad ready to add more experience suggestions. We’ve included things like our normal trips to the farm and to the beach, but also things like building our train set and a lego city, getting yogurt or ice cream, going to the library, eating outside on the picnic table, swimming, game nights and more.

None of the activities are earth-shattering, not all of them require “going” somewhere, and most aren’t new experiences. But, the power comes in the intention — the conscious choice of experiencing and “finishing” each moment. I want to recognize the joy and to take time to celebrate it in my heart at the end of each day. I suppose that’s the essence of gratitude. And, I want our summer jar to encourage us to embrace the beauty and wonder in some of those mundane activities that weave our lives together between the other fun experiences. I hope we can have a healthy mix of going and simply being together in those moments of someone sitting in my lap, working together to cook dinner, reading together at bedtime, playing games and sharing the same space.

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We started some of our “summer jar” experiences yesterday with a trip to Denny’s for pancakes for breakfast and a visit to the MSU Library to see the Kinsey Collection on exhibit there. I’ll share more about this remarkable collection of African American art, literature and historical documents in a later post, but today, I’m so thankful we had the opportunity to enjoy it together and have it as one of our memories of the summer of 2015. It is open in Starkville through June 20 at the John Grisham Room of Mitchell Memorial Library, and it’s well worth the time in experiencing some little-seen aspects of our own history.

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On this “Oh Happy Day,” I’m also so, so grateful for the opportunity to build my work life on my own terms with the freedom to organize my days so that these types of experiences with my children are possible. It’s never easy to balance family and work responsibilities, and I’ve become more and more mindful of the blessing I have as freelancer to set my own schedules. It’s a true gift I don’t want to squander or take for granted in these seasons when all my loves are together under the same roof.

Oh Happy Day!

 

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This morning I started with more alphabet painting practice and some still-wet notes to myself. We find it so easy to compare ourselves to others — in business, in art, in mothering, in life. Today, I needed to remind myself that nothing valuable comes to the world through an attempt to live someone else’s story. No, all of my true impact in this world will come through living the story God has created in ME. After all, I am the only way that story will ever be told.

oh happy day 030615 . Stories + My Old Friend

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I started blogging in May 2008 in a little corner of cyberspace called EyeJunkie.com. Some of you faithful friends have encouraged me there as I’ve shared a lot of writing through the years. This “Oh Happy Day” post is a transplant of a series I did at EyeJunkie that I want to bring over to Small Pond Graphics. The Friday series started as I was thinking about our cultural love of the phrase, TGIF, or “thank God’s it’s Friday.” I wanted to consciously incorporate gratitude into my work and life so that TGIF wasn’t just a silly acronym, but a true reflection of a thankful heart expressed each week. Gratitude, as it turns out, is actually a pretty poignant and successful business model!

Today, I’m relaunching Oh Happy Day here with gratitude for an old writing “friend” and the clarity for how we can go new places. Here’s the story…

I began the EyeJunkie blog as a creative outlet while I was working at an advertising agency, chasing two crazy preschoolers, and pregnant with my Baby Girl — the perfect time to add something new to my plate, right? It actually WAS perfect timing, and the process turned out to be a great opportunity to express myself. Almost all of my creative time was being spent doing work for clients. The children had taken up any “free time” I had for creative or “making” projects. And, we all know that raising toddlers carries its own brand of creative thinking! At the time, I began to realize that I needed a way to do something creative that wasn’t related to selling sandwiches or shoes or branding new businesses. I needed something for me. That outlet became the blog, EyeJunkie.

I experimented with all kinds of things at EyeJunkie. I learned WordPress, which I now use exclusively for client website development projects. I participated in all kinds of memes, posting themes and “national day of…” writing events. I explored a ton of what I call “hare-brained” ideas. But mostly, I wrote. And wrote. I wrote about ridiculous things. And not-so-ridiculous things that made me think. I wrote about my family and my faith and the culture around me. I never gained a substantial audience beyond that circle of friends and family who hung on my words, but the writing became important to me — a way of thinking. And a way of disciplining myself to focus on things that mattered.

Living deliberately was sort of the theme of EyeJunkie. I deemed it “adventures in paying attention” — the pursuit of taking a deeper look at life without and within. I used the writing to try and bring meaning to everyday experiences, and to slow down and record those precious moments with my children. To give them their due. In the writing, I settled into sort of a loose mixture of prose and poetry with a bent toward stream-of-consciousness that sort of helped me find my “voice” in a lot of my communications now.

The last seven or so years of writing on the EyeJunkie blog have carried me through the daily experiences of raising the little souls in my charge, the changes in our family, changes in my work, the launch of my freelancing business, the suicide and grief surrounding my husband’s death, a lot of journeys toward what I believe about social issues and culture today, and of course the persistent pursuit of faith throughout. EyeJunkie is an old friend.

As my posting and writing for EyeJunkie.com has become more sporadic over the last year or two, I’ve been struggling with my feelings about that space and how or if it should continue. I love it, but haven’t had the will to write there consistently. But, I suppose, as in all things EyeJunkie, the posts have been so tied to my own thinking that to say goodbye to them was almost like saying goodbye to myself. In my thinking and planning for 2015, I finally decided it was time to let it go. Although, not really. I suppose I felt it was time to let it stand — stand as it is, as an archive of my thinking and the beautiful, and sometimes challenging, experiences chronicled there.

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I’ve spent the last month or so regrouping on the Small Pond Graphics website and my blog here. I usually do that at the first of each year in an effort to make sure my time is spent well in what I share publicly and that the core of what I’m doing is represented well. I’ve found this year, that I really wanted to bring the best of EyeJunkie — that piece of my soul that’s been out on display — into where I’m moving for Small Pond.

The goals and ideas behind the EyeJunkie writing are the true undercurrent of how this freelance business has moved and grown and changed over the last 4 1/2 years, and much of that thinking has fueled the boundaries I’ve set up for myself in business and the choices I’m making about where it goes from here. I have an increasing conviction that my “work” — how I conduct it, the projects I choose, and ultimately the communication that emanates from it — should reflect what I value in my “life” because work IS life! We live in a culture of sharing, of communicating — almost more communication than we can handle. For me, sharing and communicating is an inevitable outpouring of creating. When I crawl in bed at night and I’m left to my own thoughts, I want to know that the hours I’ve devoted to working reflect an honest pursuit of a quiet, authentic, and conscious life. I want to talk and share and “be” about real things.

To that end, I’ve been working to revamp the “categories” a bit for the Small Pond Graphics blog to expand my thinking beyond design and images. As part of that, I’m excited to share a featured section called “stories,” which now contains a chunk of what I think are the most relevant and “evergreen” writing from Eyejunkie — my old friend. My goal is to begin posting more “stories” and thoughtful writing on some of the root ideas I’ve mentioned — peppered in with the watercolor and lettering and design-centered things I usually share, of course. I’m so thankful for all the experiments and life chronicled in the EyeJunkie stories, and those “legacy” posts will serve as my own accountability and encouragement to make sure whatever I share moving forward is governed by authenticity, sincerity, quality and creativity.

I’m so blessed by the opportunity to do what I love on my own terms and to be able to share that journey with so many of you.

Oh happy day!

If you’re interested in reading some of the legacy posts, my ever-overthinking brain has organized them like this…

beautiful ordinary  |  essays  |  mother’s heart  |  on faith  | on social justice

southern stories  |  twelve days  |  widow’s tale

Milestones

Voice.

Sigh. I’ve been struggling to find it lately. I set out at the beginning of this year on a writing pursuit, seeking to find, speak, know and share my own voice in new ways. I wanted to share my voice with new resolve in this particular medium, yes, but more importantly in the broader strokes of my life. Since then, my writing has been virtually nonexistent.

This past week I’ve been celebrating my oldest son, Little Drummer Boy, turning seven years old. As many mothers can relate, the birthdays are almost always bittersweet lumps of joy where my vision is quite clouded. I see him with all the new skills and interests and jokes and signs of independence. But somehow in the very same frame of the lens, I also see that little face resting on my shoulder, the tiny hand clutching mine and all the firsts I’ve witnessed that have now turned into his beautiful habits. As I was reminded by a friend, a “happy birthday” to LDB is a “happy birthday” to me as well, for a mother always has an intimate recollection of birthdays.

With much less fanfare, I’ve also been celebrating a personal milestone — the fourth birthday of this blog, EyeJunkie, on May 6. I started it in many ways because of LDB. I was at a time in my life where I felt I needed a personal creative outlet. My readers probably know that I’m creative for a living, like most of us are. I’m just called upon to do it in a much more overt way than most. I’m a designer. LDB thinks I draw for my work, and in many ways that’s true. But I started EyeJunkie in 2008 because I wanted a creative outlet that was apart from work for hire. I needed it. I needed something that would allow me to act out those creative tendencies in a more personal way. I needed to show him. I needed to show LDB, and Bug, and now Baby Girl what I was about on the inside. That’s the crux of it.

This space has been indelibly tethered to my voice ever since. So, to leave it unattended feels like a failure in many ways, like dropping the ball, like being out of the loop with myself. Do I even want to continue it? does it matter to me? Is it a valuable contribution to my life? A worthwhile investment? Can I continue it in a meaningful way? In some ways it feels like losing ground, like losing my voice. But, I know my voice is there. Somewhere. And that need for a creative outlet apart from work is still there. Somehow.

When I launched the whole “voice” thing for 2012, I wrote this:

To be able to hear the sound of our own voices with clarity sure simplifies things. It makes choices and decisions much more obvious. It makes the worthwhile investments of our time and energy much easier to find.

Those statements still ring true in my heart. I still see the necessity of hearing my own voice. Of discerning my own core requirements for a life of blessing. Of determining my own parameters of what constitutes a life of significance. Of rigorously chasing that life with daily decisions. Of giving the gift of that life to my children.

As I’ve been processing these two milestones, I’ve recognized that I HAVE heard my voice in many areas. I HAVE made decisions and movements that reflect my own voice. I have begun to more deeply refine my work life with Small Pond Graphics so that it serves me rather than vice versa. I have begun to reclaim control of areas of my life and relationships where I felt I had surrendered my own voice. I have begun to step outside of fatigue or busy-ness or laziness to create more significant experiences for my children, to recognize and incorporate habits of joy into their lives in small things. These are all urgings I heard from my own voice. And I’m beginning to speak them each day in tangible ways.

Here’s the thing. The writing isn’t the thing. The living is the thing. The doing. The growing. The learning. The listening.

It’s all those things that make the writing something — something that enriches all that I glean from the living and doing and learning. Through this soul searching, I’ve recognized that I write to keep my heart and my voice close to the surface. I do it to clarify my voice. And I do it to recognize  the sound of my voice as I’m living. And that makes it valuable. To me.

A 2012 Posting Pursuit

“Courage does not roar. It does not need to.”

I read this truth a few weeks ago in an article by Nilofer Merchant. The post recounted an “aha” moment for Ms. Merchant when she heard herself saying something out loud for the first time — something that spoke her true heart. Something she hadn’t articulated before, but instantly knew was spoken in her own unmistakeable voice.

The moment she described has been festering in me since then.

The article was titled “Courage Does Not Roar.” That’s what caught my attention. For the last two years I’ve been haphazardly thinking about courage. I’ve made a practice during part of my blogging foray to choose a “theme word” each year. The word is something I want to define or learn or allow to characterize my life and thinking over the course of a 12-month period, and I try to explore it in words and thoughts through EyeJunkie posts. The word for 2010 & 2011 was “courage.”

This article appeared on my radar just as I was trying to decide on a theme word for 2012 — or even if I wanted a theme word. My thoughts have seemed so scattered lately, that I’m wasn’t sure I was really able to determine a year-long focus. I mean, that would require focus.

In the sphere of remarkable people and living, Ms. Merchant wrote of “courage” as being less about bravery and more about clarity. Boy, that really struck a chord. One I couldn’t get out of my head.

To be able to hear the sound of our own voices with clarity sure simplifies things. It makes choices and decisions much more obvious. It makes the worthwhile investments of our time and energy much easier to find.

These days, I hear a lot about finding “my own truth.” And while I don’t necessarily belief “truth” is that much of a moving target, I am also firmly convinced that we each carry a truth about ourselves inside of us. We each carry our own voice able to speak to what really matters to us, what brings us joy, what reflects our deepest desires, what acknowledges our purpose, what confirms the value we want to collect in our lives. That voice of truth deep in my soul helps me discern what I know, without question, is right in my own individual life.

The problem is that it’s so easy to allow that truth to be drowned out.

“Courage does not roar. It does not need to. The truer that voice, the louder it will sound, and the farther it will reach. That’s why I believe great innovators pay attention to the thoughts that come from their heart. They honor their truth. Because that knowledge will lead you forward. It will give you courage. It will make you brave. And perhaps, it will lead you to be more remarkable than you are.”

As these thoughts began to resonate more clearly over the Christmas holiday, I found myself actually excited about this theme word concept again. MY word was clear.

VOICE

It’s what I want to pursue in 2012. My own unmistakeable one — resolving to find it, speak it, know it, share it in new ways. And in old ways so familiar to me that I’ve perhaps become deaf to them.

Finding my voice where it’s been lost.
Listening to my voice where it’s been drowned out or squelched.
Knowing my voice where confusion has overshadowed clarity.
Speaking my own voice into decisions and choices and habits.
Hearing my voice come through in the defining moments,
Lending my voice to those who can’t speak.
Sharing my voice on issues and ideas that matter to me.

VOICE is a noun. And a verb.
It’s being. And doing.

2012 is the time to voice my life.
There is no other time like now.
And, I’m ready.

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