"Thirty days has September ..."

How often I say that ... and how profound these last 30 days have been. Lots and lots of soulwork this month. A table that I can't really eat at any more as its covered in magazine clippings. An ever growing stack of tattered magazines. (I tried to resist that copy of Simple Living I really did, but there I stood in the check out line for so long that I couldn't help myself! :) Two volumes of vision books that are radically changing my relationship with myself ... which changes everything else.

Between my visioning "homework" and this stupid cold that's been hanging around for two weeks now I haven't had a lot of energy for writing here. But I want to try and change that in October. Things to process, and the call keep coming to me to find words. So we'll see how that goes.

order up!

Tuesday night I came home from work utterly fried. My brain hurt. My eyes and fingers hurt. All of me hurt. It's been super stressful at work lately -- partly its the time of year, and partly its a bunch of projects all converging at once at the worst possible time of the year. And of course, it was the first day back to work after a three day weekend. 

So I was ALL as my friend and former co-worker would say. 

But there was this little voice in my head as I was driving home which said "Hey. You don't have it in you to fix yourself dinner. Why don't you take yourself out for pizza and maybe a beer. Wouldn't that be nice?" 

And sure. That sounded great. But there were a million reasons not to do that. Money, time, having to face eating by myself in public, the fact that I had just been to the grocery store the day before and had a whole fridge full of food...

But I've been learning to listen to that little voice. So despite some anxiety (turns out being exhausted is a good way to dampen the doubt in my head!) I got back in my car to drive a couple minutes away, down the hill, to a local pizza joint. 

In my head, as I'm thinking about solo dining I'm always imagining exquisitely awkward conversations about my solo status, and I'm always sure I'm going to have to justify my existence on the planet to my waitress. But in reality she just took away the second place setting, and took my drink order. 

And hey, I don't even like beer that much, but lemme tell ya, that $2 draft Yuengling was the tastiest thing ever. And by the time I was halfway through the beer, all the way through with my salad, and digging into my first slice of pizza I realized I had this huge grin on my face and I couldn't stop smiling. Some of that might have been the beer! But mostly it was a combo of being proud of myself for being brave and doing this thing. And of course, partly that sitting there in my booth (a little bubble of ME), just BEing and eating yummy food, and having a drink was exactly what I needed in that moment. 

Go me. 

Self-care. Leveled UP!

and bonus: enough leftovers for two more meals of yummy yummy pizza. It's my total favorite pizza ever. 

On this journey.

I was driving to Trader Joe's this afternoon and there's a stretch of road where the elevated highway curves, and as I looked out all I could see was sky and clouds. I felt in that moment a bit rootless. Weightless. Untethered.

It's not unlike how I am feeling as I start to work through this month of visioning joy. It's only day 2 and the soul work is giving me so much to sift through. So many "feels" as my friends might put it!

We were asked to name our vision books, and I struggled with that. I had words that I liked, that I was drawn to and I kept gluing them down thinking I'd found the right combination. And then I'd think some more, and cut and paste some more. But finally my book has a name.

A garden of effortless love tattoos. 

And yes. It's like that. The soul work here, and in the previous classes feels like pressing love into my skin. Like every kind word from myself, or from my fellow joy sisters is a balm to soothe old wounds. Well, or sometimes a saucy slap on the rump to get me moving!! 

Working intuitively this way isn't easy. It's twisty and frankly confusing sometimes. And things tend to spill out that you either never expected or didn't think you we're ready for. But I'm finding that for me, it's crucial to find the feeling first. Then the process is more like finding your way home. 

September is going to bring wonderful scary brilliant things. I can feel it. 

I wonder what they will be?