An older and very wise gentleman at a church I go to shared two things with me that changed how I move in and appreciate the world.  Thank you, Carl A.

First, 20 years ago, “These are the golden years, the ones you’ll think about for the rest of your life.”  Carl and his wife stopped to share with my husband and me outside church.  Our young sons were running and screaming through the playground.  Weary years was more like it.  But I could see  in Carl’s eyes, he really wanted us to understand.  “The weight of them on your lap.  The way they look to you.  So much joy, there’s nothing like it.  Pay attention.”

I felt truth’s shivery finger slide up my spine—I knew it.  I’d been keeping journals for my sons and I’d made it a practice to pay attention.  I could see time roaring by.

I’ve always been a noticer, but his words reminded me to be fully present in the glory at hand, this moment, because I was going to be on another side one day, looking back to that day and I better have been there.

I appreciate these days, too, pandemic days with our two grown sons back in our home for awhile—girlfriends, graduated from college, full-time jobs, cars.  Its own glory, laughing around a table with grown men and people they bring along.

A few years ago, Carl gave a personal reflection at church (such a cool tradition of Judson Church!).  Carl shared something his father taught him early: make someone happy today.  And that’s what Carl did.  Isn’t that beautiful?  Wouldn’t the world be different if we all approached a day and each other like that?

I don’t know what Carl’s politics are.  What he thinks about climate change, abortion, guns healthcare ….  I do know he has lived a wise, kind, willing life of great character.  We need more people like him.

Today as I’m doing some revisions on my novel, thinking about love letters and the main character in my book reaching out in the world,  I think I’ll write a love letter to Carl, while we are both still here.

To tell him he was right.  To tell him I listened.  To tell him he made my life grand and I am grateful.

Art by Griffin

This has been a year.  Isn’t that right?  Struggle fills so many days: lost jobs, deaths of loved ones, unseen family, a pandemic,  a murder followed by civil unrest in my city of Minneapolis that destroyed my school where I work, and all that chased down by an election season that was the most negative and fear-inducing of my life.

Every time I hear a siren, I feel like my heart stops a little.

And.  Three things.

A leather notebook made its way to me at the peak of the civil unrest, even though our post office was looted and burned down.  This seemed like a miracle, and maybe a sign.  Maybe: Use this notebook to make some kind of difference.

I went to my school after the sprinklers finally turned off and it was cleared of danger.  Several of us, with masked faces came to see if there was anything to salvage.  I stood in my ‘office’ now a pile of waste, broken glass and furniture that people tried to set on fire–burned and scarred.

As I stood there in so much loss, this phrase “rubble gifts” came to mind.

Two things remained that mattered to my heart.

A waterlogged frame full of my twenty-three year old son’s kindergarten drawings was still there.  Dirty looking, buckled, but the six ‘guys’ now with another story of survival.

My red lamp that matched the four others at home.  My hope lights, I guess you’d say, the red light of possibility—bold beauty.  Here it was.  Working even.

Rubble gifts. With so many things stripped away—you can see what remains.  They might be dirty, broken, but there they are.  Yours.

Essential elements of your life.

Stories to tell, people I love, a dog companion, novels looking for their way in the world, all more visible in the dust and debris of loss.  The rubble.

I dusted off my pant legs and stood a little taller than when I entered that school, with my artwork and lamp.

Rubble can show you what matters most in all its imperfection.  In all its holiness.  Take a good look at what is around your feet.  Might be able to dust it off and give it new life.

Too much wings, nothing happens but a lot of flying around.  Too much rails, big boring check-off lists and nothing that matters deeply to you.

Here is how I attempt to keep the wings and rails in balance:

1. Set up a system, or way you do things (you don’t have to be a notebook and pen fanatic, like me, but it certainly keeps me motivated). This is where I both catch ideas, and make lists of things I need to do.  The Bullet Journal idea is a great system because it’s all your own doing.
2. Create a template of a perfect day or week. I template a week.  Some days have blocks of time for creative project work, some days I batch a lot of task items that need to get done.  I find that batching things at dependable times, lets me think less about how I need to work and use the time for doing.
3. Use early morning (or late night if you’re of that ilk) dark to let the wings flap and soar.
4. Pull the ideas that come alive in the dark, into a place where they can be actionized later. Review this regularly.  Action is where dreams get done.
5. Journal about it, be grateful, thank the flight awakenings, and then get to work.

You can go back and forth between wings and rails all day.  When you carefully balance you have enough system under your wings to arrive at a remarkable destination—that you imagined and made happen.

The world on your head, invites ideas.

It invites wonder and hope.

It blows story around in interesting ways.

On this particular voting day, having voted already, I am taking a convertible ride, with the top down in November and letting a story of democracy blow over my head.

The color of this beautiful fall was a good companion, might have even saved me.  This is a recent drive from outside my car.  I wonder what you do to fuel the hope and creativity?

In my particular life, the days behind me have accumulated into a larger pile than future days will be—even in a best case scenario. I look back at those days, moments piled around my feet, and ask myself: what am I cultivating?  What is the body of work I will leave behind?

Another body.  The body I inhabit will leave, one day.  I try to give it only as much (enough) attention to serve me well, as long as possible. No more.  I see my body as a vessel.  The form or shape of me.

Body of work is the point of me.  What I create, share, offer the world, leave behind.

Body of work sounds egotistical for a moment. Until the winds of grace and miracle blow over it—and they do.  Humble. Ready.  Showing up, lighting a candle, welcoming a story or an idea and filling a notebook.

These stories and ideas are also piling around my feet.

I bow in gratitude.

The U.S. Post Office is under attack.  Even as I write that, I can’t quite imagine it.  Mailboxes and sorting machines removed, funding cut, and in my city, Minneapolis, two of them were destroyed in civil unrest.  Whether stilling voting voices, or stealing packages it strikes me as a very tragic harbinger.

The post.  Something coming to you from somewhere else.  Across great distances, maybe.  Full of professions, maybe.  An envelope or box full of mystery—for you, or from you.

Letters can leave behind a story long after you are gone—like the letters featured with this post between my Father-in-law and his mother over many years.

The notion of letters finding their way to you is at the heart of a novel I recently finished.  The sheer hope of writing words on paper and putting them into the world in the belief that someone will read them and feel Beloved.

Letters, and novels, too, represent freedom.  The freedom to share yourself, and freedom to receive it.

Letters can change things.  I dare you: write letters.  Share yourself with people you care about.  Not only will we feel more connected and maybe even loved, we might keep the U.S. Post Office thriving.

A friend of mine who writes and loves notebooks helped me coin this word: scribwist, meaning one who delights and finds reverence in the tools of writing. These tools include (but are not limited to!): pens, ink, fine paper, leather notebooks, paint, an occasional gadget, and the bags that carry them all.

A wistful scribe. She is me.

I always have a book and a beautiful pen in my hand. Life in all its beauty and tragedy catches me daily, and the pen records the experience. As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Big Magic, “… that ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightening does).”

I believe Gilbert. I’ve felt it. So I carry a book and a pen everywhere I go, so I don’t miss that idea when it arrives.

When you prepare your scribe with tools for the journey ahead, you are accepting the challenge of the mystery.  You come awake, literally and metaphorically, grab the pen and the just right notebook with its smooth waiting blankness for this idea that will not come at any other time.

Tools matter. They help engage and honor the mystery of story and idea.

Look forward to the exploration of the tools. This idea was caught with my Manuscript 1856 pen called Northern lights, belly full of iridescent Iroshizuku Tsuyu-kusa Japanese ink. The pen wrote on Nanami Paper’s B6 slim, Tomoe River grid, café notebook. The notebook was held in Chic Sparrow’s B6 slim, Deluxe Austen Lady Catherine (rich orange). The idea came in the woods with my dog Remy. Beauty and walking awaken all kinds of things.

And wistful? Because I know I will not have nearly enough life for all the ideas.

He’s a smart and naughty dog with a sense of humor.  And when it comes to food, his focus is complete.  Nothing else exists in that moment.

He and I have a ritual. I scoop his food from the bin while he sits on the stairs.  I give him: one, two, three kibbles.  We walk into the kitchen.   He sits silent and still as I chop in deliciousness, his eyes on the bowl, nose slightly twitching back and forth tasting the air.

This day—I dropped a kibble.  I heard his breath change a little.  He saw it fall.  He wants it.  He does not move.  At all.  His eyes stay on me and the preparation of his breakfast.

This dog who ate a dozen chocolate chip cookies in less than 30 seconds, a raw chicken breast while I blinked, a pound of habanero cheese—I won’t talk about the small appliances and socks—and everything else. He does not move or abandon his focus on this meal I am preparing for him.

It’s time.  Our eyes meet.  I feed him the kibble from the floor and put down his bowl. Our ritual is complete.

Focus like his is my goal. Here’s what I think it takes:

1. Know exactly what you are doing and what you are after;
2. Breathe into it for a few seconds, smell its success and promise, imagine it;
3. Put an appropriate amount of time around it (focus like that has its limits);
4. Get everything else out of the way, see only that, and let it come (even if something amazing drops to the floor);
5. Be grateful.

Mo has plenty of other characteristics that I am glad to leave just to him, but I am grateful for this lesson and a shared moment.

This love/hate informs me—I hold it close and let it teach me something.

I made a summer breakfast, partially from the garden.  Then I painted it, the eggs and fresh tomatoes with a bowl of green beans and a goblet of icy cold water.

Still Life with Summer I called the little watercolor.  The meal.  A noun.

Then the adverb slid in, still life with summer.  Here I am, still alive in this beautiful world to do the things I am meant to do.  Summer is still here.  Now.  Not for long.

Then the verb ambles up.  Still life with summer.  Hold it close-in, quiet, full in my heart with its cricket wing-on-wing beat, summer thunder, stretching blossoms.  Quiet yourself. Be still.

Summer, you are a gift.

It is a time where the skill for idea and fact discernment and alignment has never been so important as people, even nations are trying to mislead you.

[insert outrage]

So this: put your money where your mouth is.  In other words: let’s act on our talk.

When the pandemic, civil unrest, flagrant political utterings started really ramping up—for me the first week in June as I watched my city of Minneapolis, and Minnesota Transitions Charter School where I work, get destroyed following the horrific murder of George Floyd—I understood something was being asked of me.  Of us all.  To put our money where our mouths were.  To align action with proclaimed ideas.

People online who didn’t mention the unrest in our nation, who didn’t seem to support Black Lives Matter, equity and fairness—I stopped following.  Easy to do.

And the beautiful flip side gift, was finding new voices.

Especially Penzey’s.

Penzey’s has always been my preferred spice company. In pandemic days, getting it meant ordering online instead of visiting the store down the road and all its amazing smells.  I subscribed to the email list with my order and thus began my deeper love affair with Penzey’s.

Bill at Penzey’s writes heartfelt articles delivered to my inbox.  I gobble them up.  He talks of voting, equity, equality.  In your spice order right now will be victory pins, voting stickers and messages of love.

One post referenced a customer he’d lost because of his openly political stand. Bill didn’t care. He stood for something bigger with his life than selling a jar of spices, something like acting on your dreams and principles.

Every day I find more ways to align my values with my choices and my actions.  If I discover avoidance, lies, silence where action should be—I make new choices.

I load Penzey’s spices into everything I make.  Cajun, Ozark, Singapore, Chipotle …!  I evangelize on their behalf—daily.  They are doing good in this world.  I believe in them.

When we put our money where our mouths are, we can literally transform the flavor of our food with Penzy’s, and change our world with action.

* Momento:  “You own the life you live.”

*   Yes, I do know that Momento is really the Latin word, Memento. But Momento is my word, coined for its life in a moment, and for that moment’s ability to impact forever, which can be your gift to the world.