Mirror

If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself then make a change...
~M. Jackson

For as long as I can remember I have been plagued by this sense that everything is "Now or Never," but also, it is coupled with this desperate feeling that somehow each moment is a judgment of my own worth.

Ugh. I can't recommend this foolishness. It is heavy and exhausting.

When I first began blogging it was on a blog of a different name; begun as a means to find my voice.
When I was 9 years old I stayed the night at the house of another little girl, Jenny, who shared with me a page of her journal. It was one of those tiny little girl diaries with gilt edged pages and an itty-bitty golden lock. As she read the entry, describing her day, I thought to myself, "I could never write like that," and "there is nothing so interesting about me." I decided in that moment that I was both dull and a poor writer. Heh. Nevermind that I had never written anything not assigned to me in my 4 year school career... I was quite sure of this assessment, however.

Somehow, though I had also begun a lifelong infatuation with the idea of journaling. It was something that I longed to do. Over the years I managed to collect nearly a dozen beautiful journals... all bearing no more than an entry or two. It seems that though the exquisite little books called to me, I couldn't find the words to fill them... or perhaps... judged them inadequate to fill such pretty pages.

How I got here is a bit of a blur. Somehow it seemed easier to dump my (judged meaningless) words onto a digital (erasable) page than those gorgeous books that seemed to beg for poetry. And so it began... if only I had known where it was going to go I would likely have succumbed to performance anxiety before ever leaving the gate. :-p It all happened so fast. The phone calls, and the emails, the editors, the agents, the managers, the producers... all calling me a writer... speaking to me as if I knew this... planned this... knew what to do with it. Secretly... here's a confession... it felt like a joke.

Such things flew in the face of everything that I believed about myself, but I tried (oh so hard!) to believe and keep going. To pretend that I was still writing to a great big void... that no one was listening and that it was all just my unimportant thoughts on a digital (erasable) page.

But you know what? In the past 18 months I have filled two of those untouchably beautiful little books I have collected, and I have written (and not erased) some 200 posts here. And it feels so good. Every single time I write, it feels so good. The love that you all give just adds an inexplicable joy to the whole thing. Really. The emails that you send; they often make me cry. The comments; they just fill me up. You're all so beautiful for sharing this journey with me, for helping me to see myself more clearly, and for time and again, pulling me from the lonely world that I tend to retreat to... this false idea of isolation and separateness that we human beings seem to feel so sharply sometimes.

It's a path that I am so very glad that I followed. It's a journey that I continue to try to embrace more fully. A gift that I try to allow myself more often. There are so many things that happen each day that I wish that I would have recorded here... shared here. Yet so many times that I allowed myself to fall back into that foolishness of "unworthiness."

I see, or am starting to see anyhow, that my life is all of the things that I secretly hoped that it would be. Most of all, it is a really full life... waiting all of the time to become even more full.

As they say, Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I am venturing again to stop judging and begin living more fully, more freely...
And I will keep at it until I wake one day to truly understand that I don't have to try anymore... that I already am.

Thank you for helping me to be more true to myself... for giving me a reason so that I could learn that I am reason enough.

Happy Birthday To Me!

Celebrating my last birthday on the FL coast

I love this photo because it's one of the few that seems to show that I'm only 5ft tall

Tomorrow is my 30th birthday and the birthday cards have been arriving. I love birthday cards... even the ones without the cash ;-)
Seriously though, this is a birthday I feel like I've been waiting forever for. I've had good feelings about the coming year since I was a little girl and feel rather like I'm sitting on a launch pad... T-minus one day and counting...

I honestly can't wait for what's coming. I've met all of the dreamy goals I've set up thus far and am finding that the new one's are getting more and more exciting. I'm beginning to find the confidence that I trusted would come with age (though secretly still long for that which comes with age far beyond my own) and am trying not to explode with the force of the drives being fed by it.

These days creativity is running high and my family seems to be well fed on the energy of it. Each day is an exercise in mindfully balancing those creative urges with my other priorities. Giving my full attention to each of my kids when they need me, completing work that fuels my soul, attention to my marriage and stopping to fully appreciate the many gifts of life are at the top of that list. It's a full day, every day, and sometimes I wish desperately for more hours and more energy, but there isn't a night that I don't snuggle down between my partner and my sweet baby and sigh a happy sigh.

One of these creative projects closest to my heart is the healing website. I receive so many emails from people who want to know how I rid myself of Fibromyalgia, and all of the accompanying disorders, that I have felt almost desperately compelled to do this for a long time. I tried to get it going with SinewMe, but couldn't seem to wrap my head around it. Just when I was ready to put it on the back burner indefinitely, in comes a tenacious young woman from good old Cali determined to have what information I have to give. She asked all the right questions, didn't punk out when faced the tough changes and pounded the research pavement.

Re-inspired I was, and each conversation with her renews my committment and jogs my memory. We've decided to work together to get this ass-kicking healing website off the ground. The vision is huge and we're really excited. Jeff is in on the development side and blowing my mind with the scale of what it could be. We're in the process of looking for a designer and a developer to join the team, and then look out! There's nothing like it out there. We're the proud new owners of HealingRebel.com and I can not wait to see it born into reality.

In other exciting news, you'll be seeing some changes around here as we work to develop this site more fully. Over the next couple of months I'll be filling out the new pages that you'll be able to access with the tabs above, and the CageFree Forums will finally see the light of day.
So, if you haven't already, click on the link to your right and become a Follower. I love to check out your blogs and websites by perusing through the little avatars. Also, CageFree is finally on Twitter, so become a friend and follower to see what interests me, but never makes it to the blog... you may be surprised ;-)

Finally, if you are a web developer or designer, or know one who wants to get in on the HealingRebel wave, drop me a line.
family@cagefreefamily.com
I think this baby has the honest potential to grow into one of the highest traffic sites out there. We need some talent to get it off the ground.

xoxo

Pardon Our Dust

CageFreeBlog is finally under construction...

So is HealingRebel.com, but that's a surprise for later... ;-)

I Wanna Be Sedated

Oy. Nothing to slow you down like a good bout of illness buried under several feet of snow!

All three kids came down with the sniffles on Monday which meant late nights, early mornings and lots of grumpy fussiness. Since I like to keep things interesting I went ahead and developed some intense ear and throat pain to go along with it. Don't want anything to get boring, ya know ;-)

And again in the interest of keeping things fun we discovered that the snow was not going to stop, our chainsaw couldn't cut another tree without being sharpened, the cut logs were buried under said snow and our split wood has dwindled to about a 4 day supply. Mother Nature is helping out though, and it was a warm sunny -9 degrees this morning.

A few days have passed and the kids are all cleared up, but my ear pain went from bad to terrible this evening when I made the seemingly poor decision to yawn. So, here I am, 1:30 in the morning, writing to you (NOT yawning) while the Lobelia tincture (the only suitable one I have on hand) works it's way into my screaming ear and I wait for the Skullcap tincture to bring on a state of imminent sleep. Ouch.

Send some healing vibes my way, eh?
While you're at it, send some over to Boho Girl's sister.

xo

Busy Busy

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” ~Lewis Carol
It's been an interesting two weeks for us.
Simone's colic and reflux seem to be gone, and in the end it appears to have been food allergy/digestion related. We eliminated everything from my diet except beef, turkey, chicken, coconut oil, rice, potatoes and snow peas for several weeks, and this week we are beginning to add things back in. In addition to the elimination diet we added infant probiotics. Together we seem to have taken care of the source of her woes...

Just in time for her to begin teething. Yup, at the ripe old age of 9 weeks. But don't try telling her that she is only 9 weeks old because she seems to have a different idea. In addition to cutting teeth many months early she has decided that it is also time for her to begin sitting up. I'll be hiding the car keys later this week... just in case ;-) Better safe than sorry, eh?

Also this week, we were buried under two feet of snow... twice... and because our driveway is looooong and steep we were snowed in for 4 days. Four wheel drive or no you can't drive through 2 feet of snow up a hill... even with a running start.
I know... I tried ;-p
Teething babies make you do crazy things.
Our driveway was not the only thing buried though. We lost two of our wood piles under the arctic dump as well. We woke up this morning to a chilly -3 degrees (outside of course).
We eventually got out and made it to town to load up on teething remedies for our sweet girl. Seems she just needs to be like her bigger siblings, who coincidentally are also cutting teeth. Quinn and Nichola are both getting molars. Teething generally comes at the time of major emotional or cognitive growth spurts, so you can imagine the comfort level around our house this week!

In other utterly fantastic news, Jeff's employer lost a great deal of money when they sold the profitable part of their company and have decided to manage this by firing employees and abusing or cutting hours on the rest. We fall into the hour cutting category. Better than unemployed, sure, but having your income slashed by 3/4 without notice isn't what I would call a joyful experience.
"Effective immediately" is so rarely combined with something that you want to hear. Bah.

Sooo, it seems that many projects that were perking on the back burners (or still sitting on the counter as it were) are now forced directly into the fire. Fun! Nothing like a good fire under your ass to make things interesting!

One of the things that I have been working on is an e-course. Come April I'll be opening the Cage Free: Simplifying, Decluttering and Mindfully Managing Your Life e-course. It looks to be shaping up as a 3 part series, with each part being around 12 weeks. I think it's going to turn out to be a great thing and I'm having a good time putting it together. Thus far there are weekly assignments, discussions, How-to videos, projects and journaling. In addition I'll be setting up a weekly support chatting session and class forums for discussion and peer support.
Should be fun! I expect to open registration in March and am working to figure out how many I can support per class, assuming that as it moves on I will begin to have parts I, II and III overlapping with new classes starting.

I'm also, for the first time, prioritizing time to work on this memoir that has taken so long that I wouldn't be surprised if my agent has given up one me. Just kidding, Brandi!

Aaaand, if that weren't enough, I'm working with another on the designing and launching of a site dedicated to healing Fibromyalgia (and other spectrum disorders), and of course the book that goes along with that!

There's more, but I'll leave that for another post.

Tonight I am going to remember that I had a baby only 2 months ago, realize that exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed is still normal, and allow myself to go to bed before midnight.

So much to do... so little time...

There comes a pause, for human strength will not endure to dance without cessation; and everyone must reach the point at length of absolute prostration.~ Lewis Carol