Sit. Breathe. Sit. Breathe.

The day-to-day is good.

I don't save lives

but I put love into lattes

and give smiles to strangers

and send support to sisters and friends

and receive it in abundance.

The day-to-day is great.

Following my heart (and crazy whims) has always brought me to the exact place I need to be. When I arrive it's usually different than what I had expected but always surprisingly right. This week has been one of those times when things began effortlessly clicking into place. Letting go feels so amazing! I'm free!

Moving to a new place has given me a lot of perspective on my life and what I'm doing with it. Old desires are gently falling away like the skin of a snake and a new kind of clarity is emerging. It must be a "life-phase-thing" or "quarter-life-crisis" moment but I feel some major changes coming on and they are both surprising and yet make total sense to me.

I have finally realized that I'm an artist with no desire to climb any ladder or fit into any box or "type". I don't need to succeed by anyone else's terms to do what I do. I no longer feel the need to pursue acting as a career but rather to nurture all of my artistic tendencies as creative endeavors that require no compensation or recognition apart from that of my closest peers. As far as work and career goes I'm overwhelmed with the desire to help people in a more specific and immediate way and my interest in psychology, art and the human mind are leading me towards a slightly different path...

My womanly nesting desire is starting to bubble up but not in the way I thought it would. I don't want to nest with a guy and make babies or anything but for the first time ever I actually want to live alone. I want to settle somewhere for awhile, without the plan to move, and I think I have an idea of where that place is, but I'm going to meditate on it. I feel the want for a little tiny home and a plant and maybe a 3-legged old dog or something, but I finally feel like the most important thing to me is to be a contributing member of a community. A community is like a family and I want to be a part of one. It's just interesting to notice these thoughts and feelings because I've been searching for a few years now without any solid goal and it's just funny to watch it shift around. Who knows where it'll be in a week.

It's scary to accept change and it's hard to let go of attachments that we've had for most of our lives but when it happens the reward is a sense of inner peace and freedom. I don't want to struggle anymore to "make things happen" in my life, I just want to go with the flow, help others around me and continue striving towards living in the moment. It may seem like an obvious realization but the impact is huge, something is happening, I think I'm on the verge of a new chapter, maybe even a new book altogether! Buckle up, here we go again.

Really good advice to me from a trusted source: "Don't just do something, sit there".

Gotta go meditate.

Take Heart. Give Love.

The temperature gets better every day. I’ve found a job. I’ve been upgraded from weeks of sleeping on the floor to a borrowed air mattress (as of yesterday)! Henry has a full tank of gas and got a much-needed bath and when I got in him to drive to the library today, Fleetwood Mac came on the radio! Things are really looking up! Soon I’ll have a real mattress on the floor, and who knows, maybe one day a bed frame too!

I’ve been working on some paintings that I don’t hate (yet) and I’ve never posted my artwork on here, I don’t think, but I’m going to today. Why not, I guess. I woke up thinking about how nice it was to sleep a few inches off the ground and then about this memory of a horse I made. I don’t want to spend every blog talking about me, myself and I, in fact, now that things are less dramatic around here I’ll probably be writing about the world around me more. But since I’m mostly still alone, I can’t help but hear the voice in my head and for some reason it wants to tell you this story:

I don’t really know how old I was, maybe around 9? 10? Not sure, but I had discovered horses and I was in love. We lived in the country so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility physically, however, financially it was a crazy dream to dream. I helped out at a stable in exchange for riding lessons and I fell in love with a horse named Roam. He was a beautiful rust red with a white blaze on his forehead and we understood each other. Out of my obsession grew the desire to possess him but since I couldn’t buy him I decided to make my own version. I just wanted to be with him! I dug around in my dad’s tool shed and found supplies and scraps and started building.

The most important thing to me was that I could actually sit on this model horse so it needed to be sturdy and structurally sound. The torso was fashioned from a big plastic bucket that I stuffed to prevent from bending and cracking. I nailed it onto four pieces of wood and added another one for the neck and head. Once this skeleton was constructed I covered the body in chicken wire and then molded paper mache over it. I wanted to cover him in fuzzy fabric from the fabric store, but it was too expensive so my mom helped me pick out the perfect shade of house paint, brownish yarn made the mane and tail.

The horse was a success! He looked a little stumpy, like some kind of reddish elephant-horse, but to me, he was magnificent! He was strong enough to put a saddle on and ride and to have seen my vision come to life was a satisfying triumph! Later we ended up adopting two horses that were near the end of their lives, it was a great experience having them and taking care of them and I can’t help but wonder if my innocent (and slightly crazy) child’s imagination helped manifest them into reality. The detail I remembered today however, the thing that I woke up thinking about was the littlest part of my red horse.

When we were young, my sisters and I would sometimes cut tiny holes in our stuffed animals and implant little jewels or trinkets to give them “hearts”. Roam got a heart too. In the center of all the stuffing in the bucket, before the layers of wire and mache I planted a tiny, pink, heart-shaped chewable vitamin. This little heart didn’t pump blood and it was no bigger than my thumbnail but somehow, it worked. He had a heart and he loved me. When I think of that little heart I can see it. I can smell it. I can taste it. When I think of that little heart I think, “so this is love...” A child’s heart is less discriminating than that of a world-weary heart and it's easier for a child to love. But we all have something in us, not the chewable vitamin variety, but something much more powerful and amazing and every heart, every heart, every heart is capable of infinite love. Give it freely.

And of course, take your vitamins!