Updates

I have so many photos to choose from now, it's hard to pick which one I like best. My Zen Clam Photo Blog is filling up nicely. 

Recent trips to a local botanical garden and a zoo have given me a lot of subject matter, not to mention flowers blooming all over the neighborhood. 

This shot will appear on the Photo Blog soon - I think the leaves look like they're made of glass or ceramic. 

Other than taking a lot of photos and reading, I'm not doing much. Perimenopause is getting me down - the aches and pains, the lethargy, despite eating well and taking vitamins - it's gets tedious feeling tired all the time. 

Of course the voice in my head keeps telling me, just get some more exercise, and the other voice in my head says, if I had the energy to exercise, I wouldn't be so tired, right?  Ugh. 

The garden is finally coming along after so much rain and cool weather. 

Potatoes - growing like gangbusters
Blueberries - Amazingly it looks like I'm actually going to get some berries!
Tomatoes - bigger every day - tiny tomatoes are starting
Strawberries - escaping their pot and taking root in another nearby!
Cucumbers - just starting to come out of hibernation now that it's warm
Carrots - growing steadily
Lettuce and Kale - taking over their planter
Spinach - bolted in the heat - so I pulled it out today
Jalapenos - growing slowly
Peppers - growing steadily
Basil, parsley, cilantro - hanging in there
broccoli - long and leggy so far, but getting leafy

I've arrived, I suppose

So, surprisingly, the other day I got a comment on my writing blog [the one that passes for my professional website]. These are rare. My online presence is basically ignored by billions of people, so I was stunned to see someone had posted - and of course, it was not a comment on my work or a query about a long-awaited sequel, but the ubiquitous nutjob waxing rhapsodic about erotic romance equating to sin. 

I was, needless to say, delighted. 

In all the years I was an active purveyor of smut - no one cared enough to call me out on it. Now that I've decided to tone down my work and stick to stories that focus more on story and less on sex, NOW someone with a god complex decides to lecture me. 

It's ironic in the extreme. 

The sad/funny part is, this peddler of fire and brimstone started out with questioning whether I was worried about not getting into heaven because of my writing choices. [Oh, hun - I'm Gnostic. We don't worry about getting into heaven. We already have permanent residences there.] I might have been offended except said whackjob proceeded to ramble aimlessly about nonsense for several paragraphs and signed off as Fr. Sarducci from SNL [Saturday Night Live] - a show I have never watched or cared to. So, was this person just trying [and failing] to be funny? Or did this numbskull think that a tongue-in-cheek approach was somehow a better way to reach a wayward sinner who might sit up and take note of her transgressions from the promised path if the 'troof' was presented in a semi-comical way? 

I can't really tell. 

I deleted the comment unpublished, of course. Rule number one is Don't Feed the Trolls. But I did save the message in my e-mail under fan mail - because hey, maybe this dimwit doesn't like my writing, but at least he/she/it cares enough to presume to want to save my soul. 

It might have been fun to take the twit to task and explain however tediously that someone else's spiritual experience has no meaning for me. Only my own spiritual experiences shape my thoughts and beliefs. So someone who fancies themselves a soldier of god is not only a moron in my eyes but also utterly ineffectual, as I'm well aware my path to heaven is MY PATH and I'm being led through my own relationship with the creator. No one else is qualified to be my conduit to 'life everlasting' as I already have that. No one else is qualified to teach me what I can only learn for myself. So, though I've decided not to communicate with this ditz any further, I do want it out there that this rather pathetically executed attempt at leading a straying sheep back to the fold was a complete waste of time. 

I appreciate the entertainment value, though, and of course the opportunity to turn someone else's foolishness into a blog post. Thanks for all the fish!

Mixed Media

I've been looking for new projects constantly, probably because of the season - I get restless in the spring/summer and don't like spending as much time on line. One of my re-released books is actually doing pretty well, so I have that itch to keep working on another book, which is always at odds with my need to disconnect myself from the computer as much as possible. 

To combat that I bought a pad of water color paper and borrowed my daughter's paints. I made these two paintings this week and really enjoyed it. They're a water color base, embellished with colored pencils and black ink. 

 I have a lot more subjects to work from so I'm hoping to eventually use up all the paper I bought. I'm also working on a garden journal and have an idea to re-assign one of my book shelves and start creating more book projects to house there. A garden journal, a water color portfolio, possibly a recipe book, the photo books I've created and maybe start working on the color book idea I had - starting of course with The Book of Purple - a  collection of photos all focusing on purple subjects. 

I have this idea that I'd like to create a repository of my work, just a place to have a collection of things that define me - that other people could peruse. It's a long-range project to be shoe-horned in between the writing I should be doing and the time I want to spend dedicated to relaxing and working on de-stressing. 

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...