Minions!

I needed a new project after the fairy lantern, so my minions conspired to prepare their own garden. I'm hoping to add some other plants to this later on. 

So that was another 20 minutes. Now I need ANOTHER new project. 

Project update

The fairy lantern turned out pretty good, but it didn't take very long to make so that left me needing another new project. 

And here's a plant update. Remember the tiny little palm tree?

It's all grown up now...

I guess it was happy in its little home, but it outgrew the space so now it's free to take over the windowsill. 

Another miniature world

I just bought some items to make another miniature hideaway. This lantern and patio table and chair and some cute little milk pots for plants is going to become a fairy gazebo to enchant the corner of my desk. 

My handwriting journal is working well as a form of zen practice, and it's helping me to slow down during the day as well and enjoy every chance I get to hand write something. In a digital world, I'd forgotten how enjoyable it can be to write something by hand and not have to be in a rush to get it done. 

I'm also reading the book Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson - which was a birthday present from a friend. Like most self-help books, it oversimplifies some problems that plague us with the usual 'just do this!' rhetoric, but one thing it mentioned stuck with me, and that's how we tend to make life into a series of emergencies - which causes stress because really very little in life is actually a real emergency. 

The book suggests ways to not take life too seriously and create the stressful feeling that every occurrence is somehow a problem that needs to be solved - but in thinking about my own stress load, I can see that my 'emergencies' tend to come more from other people thinking things are an emergency than from me thinking they are. 

My general state is really one of laid back laziness. I hate to jump into flight mode over little things and I prefer to take time to put things in perspective, but I have a lot of people in my life for whom life is a problem and everything is an emergency. 

A friend whom I see little of these days was fond of the phrase "What are you going to do?!" exclaimed over many problems, and I recall always feeling like someone lost in a storm when I heard that sentence. It would mold my thinking - What AM I going to do? How AM I going to fix this problem? Am I not taking it seriously enough?

I spend less time with that person now and find I'm much calmer for not hearing that plaintive exclamation all the time. I still deal with a lot of people who make mountains out of molehills and unfortunately my go-to response is to question whether I'm actually under-reacting to something rather than to assume they are over-reacting. It's been my experience that most things that seem like terrible problems tend to un-knot themselves over time and so many things that looked like impossible hurdles turned out to be no more than minorly inconvenient speed bumps when I look back on them. 

I regularly deal with people who are hypersensitive and become morose and pouty over the slightest perceived insult, as well as people who turn every sniffle into a medical disaster and people who exaggerate small issues into World War III whether for effect, or for their own entertainment. It makes it very difficult to look at life as basically calm and uneventful and easy to navigate when, in addition to the media preaching that the sky is falling every chance they get, the surrounding populace is always in a state of bereavement over something - for instance the person who called my office the other day in a tizzy because the street cleaners had created a bit of a traffic backup that had resulted in her children ALMOST being late to school. ALMOST. I mean a close call like that can really ruin someone's day - and of course we all laughed about it, but that's exactly the type of thing that happens on a more personal level to cause stress. 

When a random person has a melt down over something inconsequential it's a source of amusement, but when it's a friend or a family member having the melt down or urging me to have one with phrases like "Are you going to put up with that?" or "Why didn't you..." or "You should have..." or "What are you going to do?" or "You have to..." it becomes a lot harder to laugh.

So my goal is to figure out how to nip these emergency responses in the bud and not allow someone else's perception of life as a problem to make me question my perspective that it's not a problem. 

I'm not sure how I'm going to do that. Perhaps writing in my zen journal will help. 

Art journaling

I know. I know. I waxed rhapsodic about not being able to make a bullet journal work for me, but that didn't stop me from wanting an excuse to buy a nice journal and play around with it. 

So I agonized for a while about how I would use a journal and decided that I would try my hand at art journaling. 

I've always kept sketchbooks with all kinds of art in them from paintings to zen tangles and Pokemon and butterflies and you name it. 

So I decided an art journal that would give me a place to doodle and practice handwriting [a dying art!] might actually be a very zen way to spend some time. 

I spent about $12 on the following - a gorgeous little leatherette journal with lined pages and a set of bold tip ball point pens. So far I'm loving it. It's yet another outlet for creativity with no pressure. I can just write and sketch and tangle. 

I've decided to write zen proverbs and sayings in it as a means to work on my handwriting which has gotten so bad over the years because I don't have the patience to write neatly. 

Here's to beginning...