Monday Morning Mantra... BE

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Rumi

My friend Jeanne, who is a Sufi, reminded me today that when negative thoughts emanate from either side of my head, I am 'out of alignment' with my divinity.

This struck me powerfully - an anxious ennui has possessed me these past months, propelled no doubt by the 72,000 thoughts constant in my brain waging war rather than merely occupying synaptic space. Of course, with a mind so ill-occupied, writing has felt like racing a horse through quicksand.

I've fallen out of my practice of mindfulness, of expelling negativity and replacing it with positivity. This laziness is a natural consequence of the creative, competitive nature of my day and night jobs, both requiring original thought and reactive criticism. But it's my inner critic who mires me, who fills me with doubt and self-loathing and, well, negativity.

Thank you, friend, for reminding me life is a work of art, always changing, always processing. Thank you for reminding me to breathe out the ill winds, inhale the healing air, and take time to - Be.

THE WRITING... Quicksand - remember? Rewriting parts of PURE in third. Scratching out morning words, drabbles, lines of poems. BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT off to my dear beta readers this week. These are the days when I write to write, to get through the words, to keep the practice.

THE READING... Finished COLLEGE GIRL by Weitz. Not sure why I read to the end, hoping (in vain) for the ah-ha. Finishing this book, I sighed with secret relief - I can tell stories. BUT... now I am (happily) immersed in a book that makes me want to weep for the subtle turns of phrase, for the story, for the sweet, doomed characters. And this book is a debut by an indy press and I AM SO SMITTEN!

MISCELLANEOUS... Returned from a trip to our nation's capital. After my all-day meeting at the AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION, I walked for two hours, past the White House to watch the evening news reporters file their stories, past the scaffolding and bleachers, remanants of last week's inauguation, through the Renwick museuem to see some favorite clay and glass pieces, past the Hotel Washington, sadly under complete renovation and boarded up, to the Mall, eventually landing in Borders where I sipped tea and browsed books, doing my small part to prop up the economy. Hubbers and kids joined me the next day; we tooled around in the National Museum of the American Indian and the Air and Space museum. Two delicious days.

Peace, Linda