“The woman next to you just paid for your lunch.”

I looked at this blonde stranger with incredulity in my eyes. I was as hungry as I let myself get. I’d been digging in my purse to find my wallet. It wasn’t there. I left it on my desk when I took it out to renew the antivirus protection on my computer.

Home was 45 minutes away and there weren’t many groceries there. This tender, blue eyed woman fed me when I needed it. I’d never met her before. My eyes must have asked why.

“We all leave our wallets at home from time to time,” she answered.
I thanked her profusely, but with genuine acceptance, as only a hungry person can.

Then I thought of A Place at the Table, a documentary I recently saw. The little girl, Rachel, who has a staring role, alongside Jeff Bridges, lives in a state of perpetual food insecurity. She goes to the same school as my son. I knew, in my wallet, at home, I had plenty of money to pay for my salad, but not having that money with me, I felt vulnerable.

Hunger changed me.

Suddenly, if only for an afternoon, I felt the distraction Rachel describes in this lovely film. Instead of concentrating on her lessons, she sees her teacher as a banana and her classmates as apples and oranges.

Her teacher, Leslie Nichols, a woman who first welcomed my daughter when we moved to this small, mountain community, has taken the issue of feeding her students seriously. Leslie Nichols delivers bags of food from the local food pantry to hungry children who fill her classroom. She has turned this student around because Rachel is no longer distracted. Her reading ability reflects that.

I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been distracted writing a book. Rachel wasn’t learning because she was thinking about breakfast.

It’s a little odd to compare my “problems” with Rachel’s. I feel like a complete dweeb. But I take my connections where I find them. Today, Rachel helped me see that when I’m distracted I don’t attend.

I was distracted from my blog because I was writing a book – a worthwhile distraction in my view. Rachel however was distracted from learning because she was hungry. NOT equally worthy.

For the split second that I stood at that counter, feeling a bit faint, and listening to my tummy grumble, I wasn’t quite certain what I was going to do if I couldn’t eat that salad and had no wallet to grocery shop before I made my 45 minute drive home.

Did I even have enough gas to GET home?

Then someone helped me. Everything changed.

I ate my salad. I finished up the pages on my e-book. My distractions dissipated and I could see the world around me. Gratitude abounds.

Distractions arise every day.

If I try to think about feeding all the hungry people I get overwhelmed. My volunteer work in this world is something different. I am dedicated to helping prisoners with writing. I don’t want to become distracted from my work because I get overwhelmed by the world’s many problems.

Neither do I want to become blind to Rachel, who can’t think about her contribution to the world yet. She’s too distracted with hunger. If I do my small part to get her fed, each of us here on planet earth will be allowed to be distracted by our dreams, then emerge having created a life of our own.

What distracts you? Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of need in the world? What empowers you in those moments?

Help Rachel and other kids like her with a donation of $5 or 10. You can mail your check to Plateau Valley Assembly of God Church, 57228 US Highway 330, Collbran, Colorado. They run the food bank that feeds the community you see in A Place at the Table.

What is your local food bank up to? Where are they located? How could you help with your limited time? Are there 2 months a year that you could afford to donate extra food their direction?

I didn’t host any parties this year. I didn’t serve my husband’s fabulous eggnog. I didn’t host a dinner after we lit the lights.

This has been a tough Holiday Season for me. I’m missing people who should still be here to lift a glass and tell me what the New Year might bring. Usually I can find some hope in the punch bowl; this year I am struggling. So I asked for help.

As my guest today, Heather King knows, alcoholism doesn’t discriminate. It reaches from the homeless shelter right on up the corporate ladder into presidents’ offices. I’ve known, loved and watched people die in both places and this year I can’t seem to make peace with my ghosts.

Heather’s words comfort me, just as her invitations each Tuesday have been helping me all year to quietly, often privately, invite my ghosts to the surface to whisper in my ear. Enjoy Heather’s perspective on parties and drinking sober:

Invite me anyway. My problem is not your problem. Let me decide if I can handle standing with all the other party-goers, their glasses of wine or their eggnog or their gin and tonic in hand. My problem is not their problem. I can be offered a cider or even a water and it will fit in my hand and keep it busy.  Please don’t assume I wouldn’t want to come, or that I cannot handle showing up.

While I’m there, I always notice who does and who doesn’t drink but that’s not about those people, that’s about my brain’s focus on my drug of choice. I see how much there is in a glass, what gets left behind, I mostly notice that. I’ve never known how to not finish a glass and I would even have finished yours if you did not. How do you just leave it? I don’t get it.

There isn’t much about going to parties, for celebration, for grown up socializing, that’s easy for me. I used to buffer my propensity to get overstimulated with wine. I used to calm my nerves with whatever the host was pouring. I used to get ready, applying makeup while sipping, ready.

I feel bare now, sometimes, when I show up. I’m empty-handed and trying hard to stay in the moment. I’m working at engaging with people in a more meaningful way, not focused on keeping my buzz, but on the stories of the people who are just as socially uncomfortable as I am, at first. I work at bringing them comfort, and this occupies me. When people ask if they can grab me a drink when they go back for more, that’s okay. Most people don’t know. I just say no thank you. When pushed – No, really… I can grab you something! A glass of wine? – I say that I can’t. This is when I wish to shrink away sometimes, but I’m not ashamed. I just don’t want to make the other person uncomfortable. The stigma sometimes stings and hovers over me, right before I feel the need to explain further. I can’t. I’m in recovery, but thank you.

Apologies are next and I shake my head and wave my hand and make a bad joke.

I want people to smile and move on, but it’s hard for them to do that because so many times I’ve brought up something like fear or shame in them, accidentally. I don’t fully understand it, but that’s what vulnerable moments do, I suppose. A lot of people drink too much and they think I see right through them because most of the time I do. But I’m not judging them or questioning them. I’m just there.

I don’t want praise and I certainly don’t want the look of confusion I sometimes get. You? Really? No…

as if this disease has limitations.

Many of my friends and family know, of course. Some of them know me well enough to offer me help, knowing it can’t be entirely comfortable to be in a bar or a restaurant or house party in the season of swilling. They go out of their way to get me something free of alcohol to occupy my hands. There’s something so comforting about at least one busy hand. And some of them know to grab my arm and look me in the eye, to say “are you okay or should we get out of here?” They know that doesn’t mean I’m about to explode or that I’m about to sneak off to the bathroom with a bottle of wine under my shirt. They know I’m simply anxious in the face of so much imbibing, how it makes my insides hurt because I can’t drink normally and because I see it working its powerful way into conversations and relationships, making drama appear where it wouldn’t have and sparking too many bad jokes and forced laughs.

Drinking isn’t bad, until it is.

I can do this. I can show up. I can decide if I’m strong enough that day. And then I can leave when I know I’ve had enough of not drinking and enough of watching people not know when they’ve had enough. I can walk away and I can get in my car without any fear at all and I can drive home sober and have some tea and read. I can get up the next day with clear eyes and no headache. I can be free and I can think back on the night and the gifts it held because I was sober enough to see them. I can smile to myself because I made it, again. Another 24 hours free of intoxication, of lubricated emotions, of intensified frustrations and heartaches, of drink-induced silliness I wouldn’t even remember very well at all. I’m uncomfortable in the midst of all of that, but it’s my choice to be there. Sometimes, I want to be there, and sometimes I just don’t.

What hurts most is not being invited at all.

What parties have you failed to host because you were anxious about the internal dialogue you’d kick off? Have you canceled events in order to keep peace? Who have you failed to invite because you worried they wouldn’t be able to handle it?

What do lobsters have to do with the birth of baby Jesus? It’s a fair question. The manger has always been a story of hope and redemption. Humble God, decides not just to become human, but also to arrive to an unwed mother and is first laid in an animal’s feed trough. Not exactly a kingly beginning.

Out of that humble story, however, arises a Love story so contagious, that we speak of it 2,000 years later. I’m interested in Love that is equally catchy. Love that surprises. Love that would inspire the man at the seafood counter, who makes his daily wage selling dead meat,  to get out his wallet and promise to add his gifts to those of the Magi and bring resurrection to the creatures in his cases.

Once again, a child brings this hope. A big thanks goes to my guest, Sarah Craighead Dedmon, for this story.

Griffin had become a vegetarian by degrees. First, at age five, he stopped eating red meat. By seven he had stopped eating chicken. He was 8 when he started saying no to foods cooked with chicken broth, and by 9 he was a full-fledged vegetarian. Sometimes we’d get the stray, “Why?” from a quizzical friend, and I would answer, “Because he loves animals.” Griffin became a vegetarian for reasons of compassion.

One of the things I loved about our new hometown in Maine was its small but well-stocked grocery store. On our first trip to buy food there, Griffin and I zipped through the produce section, held our noses as we rounded the corner with the seafood case, and made our way to the dairy aisle. Just a few feet past the lobster case, Griffin was openly weeping.

His tears caught me completely off guard. I had always passed the lobster tank just as easily as I passed the fruit cocktail. But here was my ten year-old son with tears streaming down his face, weeping for the lobsters, seeing them not as groceries, but condemned creatures on death row. His raw emotion, his unvarnished perspective hit my heart like an electric shock. I comforted him, hurried him out of the store, and tried to hurry him out of his tears. It simply wouldn’t do to cry over lobsters in coastal Maine.

Standing by the canned goods weeks later, he looked up at me and earnestly asked how many lobsters he could buy with his birthday money. My mind sputtered. I said, “Oh, honey…”, as if to discourage him. How would we get through life with his heart so open? How could I protect someone who willingly made themselves so vulnerable?

I weakly tried to dissuade him by sending him off to get the details from the seafood counter on his own. He ran off undaunted, and ran back to me with the prices. How many he could buy? $5.99 / lb for soft shell, $7.99 /lb for hard shell. I saw the sense of life-or-death urgency in him. Emotionally, I dropped my shoulders. What could I do? It was his money, it was his heart. I felt macabre as I offered that he could save more lobsters if he purchased the soft shell. He ran off to order $20 worth.

From behind my shelf I heard a man’s voice asking Griffin if his father were here. I reluctantly turned and pushed my cart over to the lobster tank, where he asked me if it was OK for Griffin to buy lobsters with the intent to free them. Yes, thank you. There were tears in Griffin’s eyes. Bruce introduced himself and started to load the lobsters into a small bag. He said, “Don’t worry, buddy, don’t feel bad. If there were more people in the world like you, the world would be a better place. Don’t feel bad.”

Griffin put the white sack of lobsters into my shopping cart, and I rushed us through the rest of our list as if they were only potatoes. Three lobsters to return to the sea, and it was already dusk. As we passed the seafood section one more time, Bruce called out to us. “Hey! The next time you do this, I’ll match you lobster for lobster!”.

Once home, we bundled ourselves up and raced across the street to the cove. I turned the bag out onto the dark beach and shuddered at the waving legs and claws. Of course they had come out on their backs, like giant red spiders. I turned them over, and moved quickly to take the elastics off of their claws. I was making agitated noises under my breath, frightened of the claws and irritated by the whole exercise, but Griffin was calm and peaceful, cooing, “It’s okay, it’s okay”, to the lobsters. To me?

I stepped off the beach into the mud to put the lobsters into a few inches of water. They did nothing. We watched. We waited. The tide was leaving them. I wanted to be home starting dinner. I was in agony. Were they suffocating? Were they too stunned to fend for themselves? Griffin began to fret, too. By the time they came to their senses, I feared, the tide would be yards beyond their reach. It wasn’t going to work.

I loaded them into their white sack, and we ran up the hill and down the road to the harbor, very likely the harbor where our friends had first been brought to shore. The only path to the deep water lay at the bottom of some slippery rocks beside a private pier marked ‘No Trespassing’. I asked Griffin to wait at the top, and carefully made my way down the rocks. I was torn between frustration at my derailed evening, and fear for my son’s open heart, now tied to the lives of these listless lobsters.

I found a small, deep channel in the rocks, and watched the tide push in and out. It would have to do. I put on my gloves and took my first charge from the bag, checking him over for signs of life. He waved his antennae. In he went, I held my breath. The water pushed him backward once, and then he disappeared into the darker depths. I slipped the second lobster in, and he quickly disappeared. The third lobster was not showing many signs of life. What could I do for him? It was so late, too late to find another spot. I dropped him in, and watched horrified as he landed belly-up.

The tide pushed him into the rock, the tide pulled him out. The tide pushed him in again, and he did nothing. High above me, too far away to see, Griffin cheered from the hillside, “We did it! We did it! We did it!”. Utter joy. I looked back to lobster #3, now right side up, but still the pawn of the tide.

I began to pray to every entity I’d ever heard of any human praying to. Please don’t let this lobster die. Please don’t let my resistance penalize this lobster, who is so loved by my son. I made up my mind to never tell Griffin, I made up my mind to leave while there was still some reasonable doubt about his survival, but I couldn’t look away. And then, suddenly, he was gone. I looked again, sure I would see him inches below the waves, but no, he was well and truly gone. I walked back up the hill to an exultant Griffin.

We held hands and walked home past the nets and under the street lights of the salmon factory.

What stories of liberation do you tell around your dinner table? Are you a vegetarian during this season of feasting and how does that go for you? Have you ever pardoned another creature? bug, fish or over zealous cookie froster?

This December has felt different at my home. I’m off my rhythm. Now, with the events in Connecticut I feel even more adrift.

When I was growing up, whenever I felt hollow or lonely, my father urged me to do something with my hands and my mother encouraged me to help someone. Both things always made me feel better.

I recently met Maia Duerr. Her site, The Liberated Life Project, is a peaceful sanctuary. I don’t yet know how to react to all that has gone on this week; I simply know that continuing with holiday frenzy feels odd.  Maia’s words here are well timed for my soul. I know you will benefit as well:

Giving From the Heart

If living beings knew the fruit and final reward of generosity and the distribution of gifts, as I know them, then they would not eat their food without giving to others and sharing with others, even if it were their last morsel and mouthful. 
~ Avadana Jataka

There are all kinds of ways to deal with the holiday shopping season. One is to buy nothing on the day known as “Black Friday,” an action pioneered by Adbusters.

Another approach is to take part in the cycle of giving and receiving, but to do it in a way that may be of benefit to others. A few years ago, I got to be on the receiving end of this kind of gift and it warmed my heart more than anything else I’ve received in my life.

I am a big donkey lover. I’m not sure I can even tell you why, but I am. So, that particular holiday season, I was tickled pink when a friend of mine gave me a donkey as a gift. I was delighted to open an envelope from her and see a card featuring a great big photo of my beloved animal. The only catch was that my donkey was actually given to a farmer in Darfur, on my behalf, through Oxfam America.

It turns out that donkeys are a key piece of helping farmers in that African country to become more self-sufficient. The donkeys can transport materials, help with cultivating the fields, and they can also be hired out to others. So in many ways, the donkey made a huge difference in the life of this farmer and his family.

Even though I never got to see my donkey live and up close, this was one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. I was so gratified to know that my gift made a positive impact for a family living in a region that has had more than its fair share of suffering.

If you’re looking for a way to give a gift that does more than gather dust and may make a difference in someone’s life, here’s a list of suggestions:

• Seva Foundation’s Gifts of Service
Through Seva, your gift can help restore sight to a blind person in Tibet, Nepal, India, Cambodia or Guatemala, or support other projects that alleviate suffering caused by poverty and disease. Seva works with local people to create sustainable solutions.

• Oxfam America
Oxfam America – the givers of the aforementioned donkey – is an international relief and development organization that creates lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice. Besides the donkey, other gifts include mosquito nets for a family in Africa, a dozen chicks that will provide eggs and income for an HIV/AIDS-infected household, and support for indigenous craftswomen.

• Changing the Present
Changing the Present is a clearinghouse of gifts that “change the world.” Shop here to give everything from an afternoon of tutoring for inner city kids to funding a loan for a widow in India to start her own business. Nonprofits can also register on this site so that more people can learn about their cause.

• Equal Exchange
Equal Exchange is the largest Free Trade company in the US. You can buy organic coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa, and chocolate bars produced by democratically run farmer co-ops in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

• The Women’s Peace Collection
The Women’s Peace Collection an enterprise that fully supports women in regions of conflict and post-conflict as mothers, peace builders and skilled artisans. Their website features handmade jewelry, textiles, and other gifts from around the world, including “dolls of compassion” crafted by Karenni women living in a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border.

• Lulan Artisans: Contemporary designs fused with ancient weaving techniques to create extraordinary hand-woven textiles, apparel, and products for the home. Your purchase helps to support more than 650 weavers, spinners, dyers and finishers in weaving cooperatives in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and India.

• Same Sky: A trade-not-aid initiative that employs HIV+ women in developing countries.  Trained as artisans, SAME SKY women earn 15 to 20 times the average Sub Saharan wage to hand crochet beautiful glass bead jewelry. Instead of a HANDOUT, we give these women a HAND-UP and the tools to lift themselves out of poverty. 100% of net proceeds are reinvested to train and employ more women in need.

Thank you, Maia, for bringing a different perspective to December gift-giving.

Have you ever used giving to connect to another part of the world? Do you love donkeys the way Maia does?

It’s December 7 and my house doesn’t look any more Christmasy than it did November 15^th. Is that OK? I haven’t even hung up the beloved advent calendar I made to remind me of my mother.

Is this the beginning of the end of Christmas decorating for me, or a one time blip? With my daughter in her sophomore year at college, she is a bit more adjusted this year. The “coming home for Christmas thing?” We’ve done it and we know it works just fine. We’re comfortable reuniting as a family. So I don’t have that agitated feeling of gotta-get-the-house-together-to-make-things-alright.

Is this why I was always frantically decorating? Because I was agitated inside and wasn’t sure it felt like home?

Um….if the answer is yes, does that mean I’m a bad mom?

These days, when my son gets home from basketball at 7:30 and I’m still busily working on my computer, he’s happy. I’m happy. I greet him. I hear the news, and, after he’s settled in for a bit, we cook dinner together, connecting as we chop veggies and keep meat turning in the skillet.

If we’ve had enough connection in the kitchen, we watch a show like Modern Family while we eat, laugh and then, this hulking kid lays his head in my lap and I rub his back while we watch a little longer. If we’re lucky, his dad will get home and join the couch pile up. His dad works wacky hours in the ER, so sometimes he is leaving, even as we are going to bed.

If we’re really lucky, his dad will have been home all day and we’ll be eating something  tasty at the table. I’m a fine cook, but I got tired of cooking a couple years ago and now I put things on the stove because I need to feed people. David cooks because it’s an adventure, and because, 2 years ago, when we hit a really bad bump in the road and he asked, “What do you need me to do?” I said, feed me.

Like many women, I’m hungry in my marriage. I’m hungry in my family in general because I’ve been cooking and lighting the way for a long time. It’s lonely out front.

My boys might notice if I decorate the dining room table for Christmas. But they might not. I can tell you this for certain: hanging lights in the yard for Christmas is not how they want to spend their precious Saturday time. So until I’m certain it’s what I want, I shouldn’t drag them through that.

For years I hung Christmas lights up to help me create a cozy family feeling inside my house. I wrapped trees with lights, painting with purple, blue and green until my yard was a completed canvas. I won the award at our student housing apartment and got a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. Each consecutive home got treated to lights until I’d lighted them all up with love.

This was what I needed.

I needed a home with love. I needed a family. This is important for me to notice. Because all to often I think I put up all these lights for the other 3 people in my life. Surely they benefited. No doubt. I’m so glad they benefited. I adore them! But when I get hungry and resentful, I want to blame them for why I’m tired of lighting their way, when really, I drew inspiration from them to light the way for myself.

I am fed on the bread of juxtapositions. Jesus came to be a king and was born in a feed trough. Did you know that’s what a manger is? Sometimes we clean things up too much.

I listened as my Pagan daughter attended church and texted me raving about the singing.  I watched as my fierce hunter son snuggled with our dog and tended to her wounded neck. Our dog stayed prone, trusting this boy completely as he squirted syringe after syringe into her gaping gash.

My kids are complicated puzzles. They keep me guessing, and that excites and ignites me. Perhaps this ignition is why I’m not so compelled to light up my lawn this year. The to-do about Christmas is too much for me. My heart is already bright.

Why do I feel embarrassed about this in hindsight? Well, not really embarrassed. It seems like a normal path. We do things externally to make them internal. I practiced on the outside what I wanted to feel inside.

And it worked.

I can be proud of that.

Pride is another thing women have a little trouble letting in the front door of their lives. Is there a yard ornament for that?

Do you need to practice on the outside before you can feel on the inside? What is your favorite December complication? Do you put lights on your lawn?

I’m participating in Heather’s Just Write blog series. Join the fun and read great stories.

Sexual freedom, a deep appreciation for our military, and a renewed interest in my children: these are just some of the gifts my clients have given me. As I count my blessings, my clients top the list, for they bring depth and dimension to my life. The relationship between coach and client is holy because we need each other, and learn from each other.

It’s not a one way street. That’s why it works so well.

Frigid and Thawing

She is exploring sexuality with her husband and willing to ask questions. Her vulnerability is astonishing. She wants to be happy but doesn’t know how. We work together to find that pleasure in the bedroom easily transfers to the rest of life.

I welcome the chance to lean in to these questions. There are abundant correlations between orgasm and the ability to relax in general. So many women I know wait. Wait in bed and wait in life. What good is waiting doing for anyone? What are we waiting for?

Free NOW

She felt trapped by her slow children, imprisoned by shoes and hands and meals. Then found abundant joy in the juicy flesh of her children. Pincushion hands, roly-poly thighs and heads that were too big for the bodies that were attached gave pause during diaper changes. Laughter ensued, and what followed was a dip into the luscious NOW of a child’s timeline.

I got to re-remember my baby’s moments, smell anew that soft skin and sink into the Jurassic Age of parenting without the sleepless nights.

Shallow Silenced

Her husband is in the military. He wants to run their home with the same precision of an army base. She wants to follow the special needs of each individual child. She gets her way a year at a time when he’s gone. Then he comes home. She doesn’t want to be sad to be reunited as a family. And then there are the army families with real problems like the fathers or mothers who aren’t coming home. So she feels like she should just “shut up.”

There are people dear to me that serve in our military. Working with her has changed my perspective entirely. I understand the fear that lives in each of their hearts as they round the corner from grocery shopping and see the dreaded car that carries the officer who brings “bad news,” and they momentarily cheer that it’s not parked in their driveway, then realize their friend is suffering. The pins and needles of this lifestyle became all to real as we worked together on real life issues that initially felt “too shallow,” given the comparison.

Laughing at Anger

With many of my clients we laugh our way though sessions because life has already seen enough tears. She was a good girl all her life. Anger was not part of her vocabulary. But the clutter in her home told me she was storing something under that sweet smile. There is an advantage to working on the phone where we can’t see one another and, when I first suggested she try showing the middle finger she resisted, then giggled. I laughed and our laughter grew. Pretty soon I could tell that middle finger was making a steady appearance and the clutter was magically disappearing.

Susie Sunday all my life, I’ve been resistant to anger as well. Laughter washes away the inhibition, the shame and the hesitation. A Jesuit priest once told me the shortest prayer is f_ck. It makes it fun and not so scary to know it’s OK to laugh at my anger.

Cheering Writers

He is a writer. He writes every day and I read his words. I respond: part cheerleader, part editor, and part curious maven digging for more.

I’ve learned about consistency. Writers write. Writers have partners who help them. Writers talk to people who see things and want to know more. I adore this process.

Tranny Girl

He showed me the closet and what it’s like living with dark secrets and shame. I was a witness as he explored the deepest underground and the freedom of riding the escalator to the make-up counter on the top floor where everything is well lit and a girl can learn all she needs to know.

The church long ago said goodbye to me because I wanted to bring my gay friends, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus and Protestants…all of them… all to sit in the same pew and I was told I wasn’t welcome. But God had other ideas. God brought the pew to my door wrapped in bendable gender lines, writing, military service of a different kind, sex that offers pleasure, and children’s chunky fingers.

Lost but now I’m found. Amazing Grace. Oh Lord, hear my prayer of gratitude for this abundant life.

I hope you will join me for this month of soulful gratitude. Leave a comment and tell me what small thing is bringing you happiness.

In a spirit of abundance for all that has come to me, I’m offering a no-cost coaching call on Tuesday, December 4 @ 10am PST/ 12 CST/ 1 pm EST. We’ll be chatting about any of the above topics. I invite you to stop by or bring your friends.

To be a part of that call simply dial (805) 399-1200 then enter your *secret code* 208594#
*Long distance rates will apply, but otherwise the call is free.

My brother, Steve Mullen, made music Rockstar Fabulous and approachable at the same time. He’s been interested in music as long as he’s been interested in baseball, which is to say all his life, and with equal, giddy fascination.

All my memories with him are tied up with music. 9 years my senior, I remember visiting him in Chicago while I was on my summer vacations from high school. He’d spend hours in the recording studio and I never tired of the engineer’s booth with a thousand sliding buttons, stale popcorn and burned coffee.

Watching Through the Glass

I know what it’s like to listen to a crowd of bandies imitate the exact pacing of Every Breath You Take in hopes of scoring the next big hit, and I heard how many people give my brother a hard time because he wouldn’t take a day off  from the practice room.

I remember the look on my mother’s face when she came home to find our piano missing. A guitarist takes his guitar with him to his gig. My brother felt no differently about his instrument. He came by the house with a pickup and a few burly friends, loaded up the piano and away they went.

His career has similarly known no bounds ever since.

He’s one of those rare birds that, at 56, has made his living, every last buck, from touching the keys of a piano. These days he’s got a pretty nice baby grand in his living room, a song on the charts, and a host of film scores to his name.

Instruments Unite Us

He teaches at The Art Institute of Chicago where he tells his students about the amazing power of a simple instrument like the banjo. The banjo was originally an African instrument, but slaves weren’t allowed to bring it over on the ships. It went through many iterations, changing hands through class and race from hillbillies to socialites. Most recently the banjo appeared in a GAP ad on television.

Instruments bring us together.

“I guess it is the desire to have a much more nuanced cultural discussion than we seem to be capable of that sends me to music.   The idea that there may be numerous points-of-view, all with beauty and validity, is not a foreign concept to the musician,” says my brother in one of his essays. Steve talks about how many melody lines can co-exist simultaneously in a musician’s palette.

We talk about this a lot. Especially during election season when so many voices are looking to cancel each other out rather than find true harmony.

 Music Lessons for an Expansive Life

My brother-in-law, Andrew Pettit, is also a musician. He began offering impromptu viola lessons to my daughter at a young age.

I have fond memories of a hot family reunion in Nebraska. To escape the heat Andrew, my daughter and several others retreated to the basement where they found an abandoned piano. The keys were like an old man who neglected to put his bridge in his mouth, with big gaps, the keys that were there were cracked and sharp. It was terribly out of tune.

But the neglected state of the instrument didn’t stop Andrew. Filled with passion and precision, he wanted to draw only the largest expression out of this stunned little girl, and the ancient, out of tune piano in a forgotten basement wasn’t about to hinder him.

His 6 foot 1 frame towered over her tiny body and pulled music from her fingers with his voice. He sang the lines of familiar songs she was playing with new phrasing as his arms windmilled though the mildewed air of that basement. She sat mesmerized and echoed him, each note out of tune and completely lovely.

Music, in the best moments, sweeps us away to some other place. The message I took away from the cracked and sour sounding keys on that rickety upright piano was that earnest music has little to do with the instrument. It is about a Voice much deeper than pitch perfect clarity. True music is about community, unity and the discovery of our own basement sounds.

Travel and Return

Andrew grew up playing the viola and was accepted to Peabody Music Institute where he spent a single semester before he realized the narrow path of concert musician was not for him.

He left the college to make wine.

As intoxicating as that dream was, music kept beckoning Andrew and he taught himself to play the sitar. He had the good fortune to then study with a master who invited him to India. Andrew fell in love with the culture as well as the music.

He applied for and was accepted at the ethnomusicology department of UCLA. That’s a fancy way of saying he studies how music affects cultures. Just after he began studying lullabies, he was awarded the Fulbright scholarship and traveled back to India to do further research for his doctoral dissertation.

I think about how lucky I am to be surrounded in such sound. My children have sat in Andrew’s living room listening to him play the sitar as well as asking “Where is this?” when they hear what my brother, Steve, has done with an Alan Lomax recording.

Music allows us to travel, to reach across a great divide and to give Voice to something greater than ourselves. All this we do with the ease of humming a melody. Thank you, brothers of mine, for making something so wondrous so accessible.

I hope you will join me for this month of soulful gratitude. Leave a comment and tell me what small thing is bringing you happiness. Come talk with me Tuesday, November 20 @ 10am PST/ 12 CST/ 1 pm EST  when we’ll be chatting about the power of melody, harmony and the wonders of recording gratitude.

To be a part of that call simply dial (805) 399-1200 then enter your *secret code* 208594#
*Long distance rates will apply, but otherwise the call is free.

I am 17.  I’ve spent more than an hour on my hair. I wear a dress that has absorbed a few swear words while my mother struggled with the sewing machine because the fabric is sheer and every seam is Frenchly pressed.

Still, after all this time with my hair, I’m ready early and my prom date has not yet arrived. My stomach won’t allow food in, so I can’t spend the time calming nerves with chocolate or ice cream.

My mother sits me down at the piano and we begin to sing hymns. How Great Thou Art is helpful because she sings the alto harmony to my soprano. I must attend or I will get lost in her voice. Sometimes she can play the whole hymn on these piano keys and sometimes she plays the left hand and I offer the right.

When Peace Like a River flows easily, and my stomach thinks maybe I will make it through dinner with this boy who will one day celebrate 25 years of marriage on a ranch in Western Colorado with me. The back of my neck relaxes and I breathe deeply. Years later, when this hymn cycles back to me at my mother’s memorial service, it is still well with my soul.

We join our voices to sing Amazing Grace and the sound is sweet indeed.

I am grateful for music. I am grateful for a mother who sings. I am grateful for memory so inextricably tied to song.

I’m grateful for a doctor who invited me to sing to my children. I’m grateful that parenting is a constant invitation to begin again, because today I know things I didn’t know yesterday.

I hope you will join me for this month of soulful gratitude. Leave a comment and tell me what small thing is bringing you happiness. Come talk with me Tuesday, November 20 @ 10am PST/ 12 CST/ 1 pm EST  when we’ll be chatting about the power of melody, harmony and the wonders of recording gratitude.

To be a part of that call simply dial (805) 399-1200 then enter your *secret code* 208594#
*Long distance rates will apply, but otherwise the call is free.

I am grateful for aspen trees, especially at this time of year. Their leaves turn golden as if the sun has come to shine inside the white bark trunk of every tree and glow out the tip of each shimmering leaf.

Are you aware that a grove of aspen trees is a single organism? This is another reason I love them. Everything that looks like individualism is community united by rootedness underground.

This is my world.

I take a lot of pictures so it makes sense that I would have a lot of photographer friends. A nurturing community of souls help to color my life with more vitality and depth.

I teach skiing with Jim Cox and numerous times he has saved me on the slopes. He takes my sulky student for a chairlift ride and works his magic of songs and stories on the 7-minute ride up the hill. At the top, the 5-year old girl who was a ragdoll and limp is now full of pep and ready to go.

He does the same thing with his camera, taking lonely places and filling them with life. This is because Jim is a natural at spying where community is blooming. He transforms stop signs much the way he changes ski slopes.

Steve Maxwell uses his lens to listen. Last year he took photos of homeless people and recorded their stories for a traveling show. These are the invisible people that many of us marginalize and tend to disappear from our consciousness. Steve brought them into sharp relief and, by making the invisible seen, a part of me I’ve kept hidden felt able to walk about as well.

The beauty of art is that it brings a subject forward and allows me to make friends with it. When I went skiing with another photography friend, David Frank, he helped me see life against the perfect background.

A bird was flying ahead of us. It disappeared into a tangle of trees, then reappeared against the clear, white, cloudy sky overhead. I lost that bird again as she dove right in front of me but was obscured by the camouflage of bushes at her back. Without contrast, I could not see a bird that was merely feet in front of me. A clear background is everything.

This is why I am also grateful to Jim Hamlin and his wife, Harriet Carmine. By radically adjusting the background, they are allowing me to see where love abounds.  By shaving people’s heads I can see past vanity and witness beauty.

They had a son die from cancer. Last year they organized the first St. Baldrick’s Fundraiser in Grand Junction, Colorado. and made over $25,000 to fund the research of childhood cancer. I can’t look at all those bald heads without seeing a layer of love where hair used to be.

It is no surprise that Jim Hamlin is best known in our Plateau Valley for his gorgeous photographs of the aspen trees. We are a community of individuals, but we are tied together at our roots.

What does your community show you? How are you tied to the people near you? What have you missed until the right background revealed it?

I’m grateful for the chance to walk my high school son down our dirt road to the bus stop. He could tell me to get lost, or leave me in the dust. But, for now, he’ll let me linger at his side a little longer. I could see it as a chore, facing the cold, but I remember, most of the time, motherhood is a gift. It’s changing who I am, one step at a time.

I hope you will join me for this month of soulful gratitude. Leave a comment and tell me what small thing is bringing you happiness. Come talk with me Monday November 12 @ 10am PST/ 12 CST/ 1 pm EST  when we’ll be chatting about the power of focus, photography, and the wonders of recording gratitude.

To be a part of that call simply dial (805) 399-1200 then enter your *secret code* 208594#
*Long distance rates will apply, but otherwise the call is free.

Nothing makes me happier than listing the things for which I’m grateful. The simple reason is that, as I notice things that make my life wonderful, the Beauty of the thing GROWS. Why is this?

Focus brings clarity.

So I’m beginning my gratitude month with photography. I have a cadre of photographer friends who have brought new Light into my life.

My first photography friend/mentor was Haley Kay. I traveled with her to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary where we both held kitties and walked dogs. The scenery there is beyond gorgeous and Haley encouraged me to take off the auto focus and simply trust myself to do the seeing.

“They began to change when I allowed myself to decide what was the central focus,” said Haley. I know she was talking about photos, but to me I was drinking at the fountain of Zen. “They” could mean my kids, my clients, the meals I cooked. I used the camera to drink in a Life Tutorial.

While I was swallowing, my son served up some mud. He recently helped a friend of ours who was raising money to combat child abuse. The two of them headed into the woods of the ski area above our house to build an obstacle course and I was one proud Mama. I was also out of breath.

The first 4 minutes I ran up the hill I’d spent the winter teaching people to ski down. Then, while people sprayed me with something the size of a firehose – oh, but lightly – I crawled on hands and knees down the muddy slope, through a tunnel and up  and over a 15 foot slippery log ladder.

Because my son and I were a team and the rules of the race stated team members needed to remain in sight of one another, the announcer, in this moment was saying to my son, “Logan you need to wait for your mother.”

About this time Sue Rodda, famous local photographer, snapped this picture of soggy me, simultaneously cheering me on. “You go girl!”

All parents who take the family photos will know how few representations there are of my face in the albums on the shelf. It bolstered me for the hard stuff that lay ahead. As I waded in water more than waist deep, and failed to scale the 30 foot mud hill on my first attempt, I kept thinking about that photo. I was seen.

My son is 16. He runs the mile in track and places well. I turn 47 this month and I hate running. But I love my son. I love the muddy mess of parenting.

He’s at the age that he chooses other people far more than he chooses me. He wanted me to be his teammate that day, even though I questioned his choice and told him I’d slow him down. The course was imaginative and grueling and he wanted me to see it. He wanted me running (and sometimes walking) in the steps he’d carved.

This is when I realized profoundly and again (we’re always learning the same lessons aren’t we?) the value of seeing people. To see and then be seen, this is the goal with a clear focus.

What focuses your joy? Who has made you feel seen in life? When has being muddy given you a clean feeling?

Here is my (first!) gratitude video. I’m hugely grateful for the fun class I took with Abe Cajudo who taught me not to fear technology and simply make it my own. Abe assumed that I would know where the “on” and “off” buttons were. The mom in me had to refrain from editing out my son’s forehead when he comes in at the end to help me. November is certainly a time to be grateful for technologically inclined teens. PS: I promise not to cry in all the videos I make.

I hope you will join me for this month of soulful gratitude. Leave a comment and tell me what small thing is bringing you happiness. And come talk with me Monday November 12 @ 10am PST/ 12 CST/ 1 pm EST  when we’ll be chatting about the power of focus, photography, and the wonders of  recording gratitude.

To be a part of that call simply dial (805) 399-1200 then enter your *secret code* 208594#
*Long distance rates will apply, but otherwise the call is free.

For years I vacillated between either and or. I ate Oreos until my sweet tooth fell out then I tossed a bunch of fruit and veggies in the blender and pressed liquify until everything in life was smooth. That’s about the time I realized a cookie would taste delightful. This teeter-totter lifestyle was crazy-making.

Either/ Or leaves me tangled, flattened or otherwise discombobulated.

Soulful cleansing is not about putting on a hairshirt, getting out a whip and beating myself into obedience. It is about finding both. Striving and Grace. Authority and Harmony. Rest and Productivity.

I’ll Have Both.

I want to wake up to a clean kitchen every day, and I want to go to bed when I’m tired.

I want to send lovely thank you cards on luscious paper, and I want my presence in each moment to be enough.

I want to do laundry a little bit every day, and I want to have a day dedicated to laundry where I can devote myself to a single focus.

I want a simple, sleek bathroom drawer, and I want to welcome every lip balm, barrette and essential oil that parades itself my way.

I want to stock up on sale items, and I want to welcome an empty shelf in my pantry.

I want to be busy and I want rest.

I want to notice those pockets in life where my service is of value so I can offer freely, and I want to accept the help of others with grace.

I want to drench myself in simple pleasures, populating my home with fresh flowers and aromatic soaps, and I want to be content with the world precisely as it exists in this moment, noticing the wonder of the sun on a bird’s wing when it calls its friends to ignite the sky with flight.

I want long, lingering walks where conversation is the reason to be outside, and I want sweat that drips and muscles that let me know I used them.

I want to be eager to learn more and I want to be satisfied that this is enough for now.

Both.

And.

I want Oreos and green smoothies.

“I like both,”  says Sheryl in a video (I couldn’t load for you) that cracked me up because I’d never heard of Tim Tam cookies. Here, in another video, she is showing off her non-edible Oreos.

It has been fun to share my 4-step philosophy in Soulful Cleansing. Identify – Notice – Address – Tend.  Today is the last day of my  31-days of Soulful Cleansing, but it is the beginning of many other ideas for conversations. I don’t want you to miss out as we continue to talk about clutter, cleansing and bringing our best soul to each new day.

I want to thank The Nester. Join her here and see all the other 31-day projects. Please