Sharon read the following poem while we were at the Barefoot Works Yoga retreat last weekend and it kinda kicked me in the gut a little and made me want to read everything I could be Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I love this poem.

The Invitation ~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

There is something that I have known about myself for years and years but have in the past year been ignoring unfortunately. I am an early riser. I like waking up before the sun and I enjoy getting stuff done when most others are still snuggled in bed. I don’t know why but it has always been this way. Even as a youngster, I would wake up bright and early…. often to the annoyance of my friends who would often spend the night. No matter how late I stay up, I will be up earlier than later. I feel more energetic from 5am to about 11am and then again in the evening from about 7pm to 11pm. When I worked at home as a freelance designer, I would often work those hours and take a big nap in the middle of the day. It was great.

This past year I have been ignoring my own bodies rhythms and have not been as productive nor very good to myself. I have been staying up late and trying to catch up by sleeping later and then I woke up still tired and completely out of sorts. I have found myself to be cranky and annoyed more easily than usual and really that isn’t me at all.

So this week I have been getting up at 5 every morning and, as expected, I am getting so much done and I have more energy than I have in a while. I even made it to the gym last night! It is good to be getting back on my game. I was starting to feel like a lump and that is no good.

I started into this past weekend with only general plans and it developed into a wonderful, refreshing two days were things got accomplished and I spent time enjoying the great company of my friend Shannon and my husband John.

On Saturday, Shannon and I met at Third Street Stuff to work on putting together a web site for her. She is an amazing artist and she needed a place to show off her portfolio. Well we sipped coffee…. and I may have had a brownie…. and a couple of hours later, voila!, she has a brand new web site. Check it out! http://www.shannonjohnsonart.com/

We then decided to celebrate the new web site by grabbing John and heading to Joseph Beth Booksellers to have dinner in the cafe and to browse through the books. It was the perfect way to wrap up the day.

On Sunday, John, Shannon and I got up at 7:30 a.m. and headed for the Red River Gorge to enjoy the beautiful weather we were having and to get in a hike. We decide on the Indian Stairway Loop Trail and after a nice little climb up the face of a cliff, we got to enjoy some of the best views in the Gorge.

We even got to see a plant that apparently only grows in the Red River Gorge and is protected, The White-Haired Goldenrod.

The hike was wonderful and it felt great to sweat a little and get in some much needed sun and exercise. I managed to come out of the woods without a scratch on me and then I stepped off onto the highway running by the trail and immediately tripped and fell on the asphalt. I am now sporting some minor road-rash and bruises. I spent the whole morning climbing rocks and stepping over tree roots and then step on a perfectly flat surface and tripped over myself. Good grief!

Let’s all get together and dance. The world would be a much better place I think:

A little over a month ago I wrote a post on some things I wanted to accomplish in this life and there was a list of 11 things that I wanted to start working on. Well I’m excited to say that I can now check some of those off my list and some others are well underway.

I have already mentioned how I have started planning my trip to Alaska and, although there are no definite plans there yet, I feel pretty confidant that I will be able to make those happen within the next year or so and I’m putting that on my underway area of the list.

Next on the list was the desire to sew my own curtains and shopping bags and today I ordered my very first sewing machine from Overstock.com! I’m really excited about it and I got a great deal. It is refurbished but the reviews were great and the price was right so now I await its arrival and then I plan on taking a sewing class.

Number 6 on that list was to build a compost bin and to acquire rain barrels. Check and check! I got an email from my awesome friend Terri yesterday and she had found an amazing deal on rain barrels on Craigslist and wanted to know if I wanted in on the deal. Of course I said YES, especially since they were about half the cost of ones I had seen other places, and then I dropped by her house to give her the money for them. She is going to detour by and pick them up for both of us on her way back from a family reunion this weekend. I hope she doesn’t have trouble with four rain barrels strapped to the top of her wagon!

While I was at her house she also gave me some plastic mesh that she had left over from when she built her compost bin and tonight John and I ran to Lowe’s to pick up some stakes for the corners and put together our very first compost bin. We are really excited about this and I think I can now check off #6 as complete!

The other two things that I have spent some time on but that still need some major work is the biking to work and the focus on shopping local. I have taken my bike out a few times and rode to the store but I till have not made it fully to work. I’m still trying to figure out the logistics of getting all my stuff there and trying to decide what I may need to buy to make that easier. I need to investigate this a little more and I’m sure I will need to come up with a little bit of cash somewhere to get what I need. As for shopping local, I have been going to the farmers market on Sundays and trying to buy as much as I can there and then trying to find the Kentucky grown products at the Good Foods Coop when I can as well. I know I can improve on this but I feel pretty good about my success here so far.

I’m enjoying this todo list thing. I really like checking things off and seeing progress that I have made so this works well for me. I think putting this out here for others to read makes me more accountable too. It’s a good thing!

Sometimes seeing something in a different context makes all the difference. Stats and data are not always easy to visualize. Chris Jordan translate some very sad statistics into a more meaningful picture in a recent TED talk.

Between yard work, house stuff, freelance jobs and work in general I feel like I have been running full speed for some time now. I was looking through my photos I have taken over the past month, that I haven’t had time to process and upload to flickr, and I realized that I have been busy! John and I created a new flower bed in the back yard and planted it full of herbs and veggies. Hopefully we will have tomatoes and peppers soon as well as some basil and oregano and much much more.

I have also been weeding, planting and mulching the front flower bed and it is really starting to come alive. There are a few areas I want to work on but I’m pretty pleased with the results so far.

Gratefully I have been able to spend a lot of time with friends the past few months. In April I went to the wedding of some good friends in Gatlinburg, TN and they asked me to take photos for them. It was one of the most beautiful weddings I have been to. It was outdoors near a stream and was attended by close family and friends only. It was a small, informal wedding and it was perfect. I decided I wanted to surprise them with a book so I came home and started the task of processing the photos I took and laying out a book using the online book template software from blurb.com. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago and sent it off to print. When I got it in the mail this past Friday, I was really excited to give it to them. It turned out great! The print job was wonderful. I gave them the book this weekend and they loved it! Mandy even teared up on me. That is a thank you that you don’t get every day and I’m glad I decide to do this for them.

Speaking of flickr, I have met some wonderful new friends through flickr and it has been amazing. Not only do we have the photo taking hobby in common, we are all alike in many other ways. They are all interesting, wonderful people and I love when we get together because it always a lot of fun. Just a couple of weeks ago I had dinner at my house to get everyone together for one and also so that we could celebrate one of the flickr peeps new job and her journey south for that job. Kristy is now working for Teach for America and has moved to Louisiana. I know it wasn’t easy for her to leave all her friends here but what an exciting journey she is making. She is going to do great and she has flickr and the internets to stay in touch with us all here. I’m already planning a trip to see her sometime as I have never been to Louisiana.

I love this photo below taken by Chris who is the photo above with Kristy. From left to right is Alexa, Kristy and myself, aka Swelldesigner, Posey Pinkerson and Attercat on flickr.

Ladies, originally uploaded by Universal Stopping Point.

This past weekend was a great reminder to me how special my family is to me and how little time I really get to spend with them. My nephew graduated from high school last Saturday which seems impossible to me. It seems like yesterday that I got a call telling me that my sister was in the hospital in labor and that our baby boy could be born any minute. Now he is thinking about his future career and working to save money for college. He has turned out to be so responsible and such a wonderful guy. I couldn’t be prouder if he was mine.

His little sister is just as amazing and I can’t wait to see where she ends up a few years down the road. She is already one of the sweetest, most loving kids I know. We are lucky with those two.

The following photo is one of my favorites I took over the weekend. I don’t get my appreciation and love of the animal kingdom from a stranger. Merlin and my sister’s dog Maggie love my dad. All I have to do is say “peepaw” to Merlin and he starts wagging his tail and whining. Nothing gets him more excited than a road trip to mammaw and peepaw’s house.

It is good to have such a wonderful, supportive family. I’m so thankful for them and I need to spend more time letting them know it.

I woke up this morning full of wonder, wanderlust and excitement about all the things I haven’t done and seen in this life and so thus begins an ongoing project for me to start listing these things here to capture them so that I can start marking them off my list. Because I’m going to you know! I am!

1. Travel to Fairbanks Alaska to see the Northern Lights.
2. Learn how to sew my own curtains and shopping bags (Must buy sewing machine!)
3. Learn how to screen print (maybe get a gocco)
4. Travel abroad for at least a month
5. Go to Iceland… Some friends just went there and their photos make me drool!
6. Build a compost bin and acquire rain barrel(s)
7. Go to New York City.. I have never been… and see a Broadway play
8. Bike to work regularly
9. Become a Yoga diva
10. Become a better runner. Maybe do a 5k or something. I need to find one and start training eh?!
11. Focus on shopping local.

Some of these things on the list scare me and really push me out of my comfort zone whether for money reasons or just the unknown or the fear of trying them and failing. Yay! That is exactly why I wanted to make this list. My comfort zone has recently started to smother me.

It has been a long time since I last attempted to blog but now I feel I have a different purpose and an actual reason to blog. The past several months have been interesting and I have started changing in ways I never expected. I guess part of that is simply that I am growing older and my priorities are changing. I am aware now more than ever of how short life is and how I don’t want to wake up some time down the road and feel like I didn’t make it as interesting and full as I could.

I have been thinking about how I want to improve my life and start living the values I have held inside of me for some time now and the first step was to stop eating meat and to start challenging myself to make choices that were sustainable and beneficial for everyone. John and I joined the local food coop Good Foods and have started trying to eat more organically and buy local when we can. We also bought our first canvas shopping bags and started using those as often as we can. We still sometimes forget to take them with us but we are working on that! Today, we actually made our own washing detergent from a recipe that I found here. I’ll let you know how well it works soon.

On another note, I am slowly turning into a yoga nut. I just started taking classes at a local yoga studio and I love it. I have done the yoga classes at my gym from time to time but they are nothing like this. They mainly focused on stretching and the body. The classes I am taking now are about mind and body and I always leave them feeling more relaxed, less stressed and like I have had a brief chat with my inner critical self and we have come to terms with our differences for the moment. It is such a supportive, loving environment and I can’t get enough of it.

Finally, spring is here and I feel energized and ready to see what else I can learn about myself. It has been an interesting year so far and I’m going to make sure that it gets even better. Here is to the journey that lies ahead and all the growth that is yet to come!