I’ve mentioned before the topic of balance, the importance of prioritizing aspects of our time and delegating it appropriately.  This is necessary.  What has been brought to my attention since then is the notion of thriving, going beyond being balanced, finding what it is our soul yearns for and going full speed ahead to make sure we attain what it is we most desire.

Be very aware, for this shouldn’t be taken lightly.  In fact, my husband’s life coach was guiding him (and indirectly me, too) through the process.  You have to find out what it is you truly need, what your values are, what your true interests are and which of those are what you feel your soul’s calling is. 

If each of us have a purpose, I like to think that discovering what it is we want to thrive for will give us a pretty good sign of what that purpose is.  Maybe it’s teaching art classes to children in your community, helping at a local clinic, tutoring, writing novels, opening that cafe, having a gathering center or intentional community, starting a business with your unique ideas.  We all have gifts.  The universe has room for and welcomes what we have to offer. 

Our time is precious.  Get your plan in action for how you can do what it is you dream of.  You have to take care of necessities, but when it comes time to take that leap of faith, if it’s meant to be, the universe will help carry you through.  It’s not as easy as simply finding balance (and who said that was easy?).  But I’m sure the reward for the soul is manifest in more ways than one.

May we all find a way to thrive truly and thus bring fulfillment to our souls and richness to the universe.  Think about the wonderful example it sets for our children, too, as they grow up knowing that dreams aren’t always hokey, that even Mom trusted enough to follow at least one of her dreams.  Maybe the rest will have to wait until the kids are in college . . . or have kids of their own.  Be realistic.  Give yourself time.  Allow your soul to thrive.

I wrote this meditation last year.  A year ago, let’s just say we were putting all our eggs in a basket for a business that didn’t take off like it was supposed to according to our plans.  How often do you hear success stories from Plan A or even Plan C?  Who knows what plan we’re on now, but I feel great about where I am now for several reasons.  Perhaps this will help you, too.

• A New Earth

I know, I’ve mentioned it before, and I know it seems hokey . . . if you’re not ready for it.  Apparently I was ready for it.  The realizations that I had a year ago (above meditation in mind) are reiterated in the book.  It’s just that in reading the book, a new level of clarity was attained for me, which is just fabulous.  But I can’t be attached to that.  : )  Others are having similar experiences.  Read on.

• Purpose

The above book focuses on inner and outer purpose, your life’s purpose.  Everyone’s inner purpose is to connect to the Divine, in whatever lingo you prefer, with your ego diminished and out of the picture.  Great.  Now, with the ego gone, you’re more receptive to the Greater Calling.  Consider your gifts and passions.  How do they mix?  This will lead you to your outer purpose if you’re still enough to listen to that still small voice that speaks to your heart.  I’ve been wondering about how my spirituality, connection to women, writing, mothering all work together.  Well, here I am, writing almost daily on this blog I love, loving my children without owning them, and developing a role in the birth activist realm.  I’ve published my first article to DivineCaroline.  Read it here.

• Thriving

God only knows the potential of the Universe.  If your ego is out of the way, you are tapped into that energy.  On days like yesterday and mornings like today where the wind is blowing and the sun is shining (at least most of the time), I feel like the energy overflows without and within my being.  I feel like I am that conduit of Divine Love and Potential.  I can’t do enough to share this with others.

• Work

To my husband and to many others, all I do looks like a lot of work.  Looking at my lists, it looks like a lot to me, too!  But I LOVE all I am doing.  I feel like this is good stuff.  I tend to feel guilty, like I’m having too much fun, meeting too many wonderful people, receiving too many blessings.  BLAH!  This is GREAT!  No ego here.  I’m just tapping into the wonder that is Life.  Don’t worry.  I have bad days, too, when I don’t feel the connections so strongly.  But today, right now, is where I am, and now is good!  Echart Tolle mentions that the outer work might look like stress, but when you’re passionate, “in the zone,” (you know what I’m talking about), the vigor of your work is perfectly healthy.  With awareness, you know when your time comes to rest, and if you miss the clues, you wind up sick.  We’ve all been there.

Thank you for sharing this journey with me.  I cannot wait to see what is to come.  While I cannot carry you or show you your purpose, I can inspire you to connect with the Divine.  I can carry the Light, a reflection of the Light that is within you if the real you chooses to see.

Let it suffice to say that Easter was pretty good this year, but as ever, I get another lesson on why I shouldn’t wait until the last minute.  The kids really enjoyed it, but, night-owl though I am, I do not enjoy staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning because of how I feel the next day.  I’ve actually considered buying an ’09 calendar and starting to fill in my commitments now as I go through these little lessons so I can at least try not to make the same mistakes again.  Something about planning one year out, though, doesn’t seem natural.  We’ll see.

You can see the eggs I dyed.  (I know, I did it without the kids, but this year that was okay.  At least they had real eggs to find and make deviled eggs out of.  I should mention that the recipe I’m linking to isn’t one I follow.  Instead of vinegar and sugar, I just use sweet relish.)  I dyed the eggs the old-fashioned way with food coloring, vinegar and hot water.  I just followed the instructions on the food coloring box.  This is not necessarily preferred because of the artificial colors that make up the dye.  There are sites that have posts about using natural dyes, and I especially loved this one about making fabric eggs.  I wasn’t sadistic enough even to try it for this year.   : )

While the eggs were boiling, I made a cake from packaged mix that my daughter had picked
out.  To spruce it up, I used some cherry preserves between the layers and a snazzy stencil I got from my best pal in Germany to make a bunny out of powdered sugar on top.  Mini chocolate chips make for eyes and nose to carry out the Peeps theme.  (I personally don’t like Peeps, but we have a ton of them.  I figured this was a good way to use them!)

Many thanks again and again to aforementioned best pal in Germany for supplying us with at least a week’s supply of chocolates (understatement, even for the 6 of us!).  I let the Easter Bunny set it all out, so the kids had quite a spread to wake up to Easter morning.   Believe me, they woke up quite early.

I managed to finish the dress Easter morning since we had attending the Easter Vigil the night before.  I made mistakes, but all in all, it makes for a nice dress.  Daughter said she feels like Cinderella, so I figure that translates into “I like it a lot.”  See a few more pictures that I added on making it at the original dress post.

I hope your spring is a good one.  As the sun shines, posts are going to be sporadic throughout the day.  Playgroups and gardening are time sensitive!  But there’s always time to write and to craft!

Coincidentally, I reach for this meditation in my “book” and find the title but not the entry.  However, this first Monday after Easter presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on what renewal means . . . at least for today and at this point in my life.

I love having Merriam-Webster at my fingertips, and like a faithful friend, she offers guidance for my insight for today.

• Make like new : restore to freshness, vigor, or perfection

First off, strike perfection from that list.  We know better than that.  I see this as the “spring cleaning” mode.  Deep clean everything, clear the clutter and make way for the energy to flow through.  Whether you agree with feng shui or not, energy is all around you, affected by what’s in your environment.  Pretend you’re trying to sell your house, making it just so for potential buyers.  Piles of junk (with various degrees of preciousness) have to go, and glass, pathways and mirrors need to be clear.  Open the windows to let some fresh air circulate winter’s stagnation.  Change your air filter.  Bring out your spring/summer clothes before you purchase anything.  We already have an abundance.  Breathe in deeply.  Is your home like new?  Do you feel vitality has been restored?

• Make new spiritually

I don’t think this means to go out and get a new religion.  For Christians, Easter celebrates Christ’s resurrection.  We can take this anniversary to accept our shortcomings and move forward, resolved to love more fully into our baptismal vows.  Consider yourself a clean slate and go forth in Love.

• a: Restore to existence; b: Make extensive changes in

Have you become so bogged down with your commitments that you’ve forgotten who you are, what it is you want or feel called to do?  Is your life just not what you want it to be, even if it seems great to others?  Take a step back.  Look at it for what it is.  If you can’t accept it, then you have to change it.  Bring your true self back into the picture.  Make the changes necessary for this to happen.  Sometimes even the smallest changes can make the biggest difference.

• Do again

Smile.  Consider this your second chance.  We get our life lessons over and over until we truly get it right.  Some things, like household tasks, are just repetitive by nature and give us practice at doing things again and again without negativity.

• Begin again

Interesting.  How is this different from above?  Consider “doing” and “being.”  I’ll take this as the being, and I’ll interpret this as a reminder to start with  a beginner’s mind in all I do.  This means that I’ll let go of all my assumptions, attachments and judgments and be here.  When it comes time to do something, I’ll be here first, then I’ll do whatever it is with a clear, new mind.

• Replace, replenish

The example is given as “renew water in a tank.”  Remember to fill your well, especially of creativity.  Remember to charge your batteries by nurturing yourself; for if you are not wholly nourished, then you’re not living into your full potential.  Find your fountain of youth and drink from it daily.  Just make sure it is truly healthful and soulful.  Consider, too, that a regular balanced diet and exercise (as  difficult as they may be to realize) are good all around for your physical and mental well-being.

After thorough reflection and a little nap, I feel I can look at this and make a decent action plan for renewal.  The spring sun brings so much hope, warmth and promise.  Life itself is abundant.  May we all partake in this life joyfully, fully renewed each day.

Many know that today, Good Friday, is the observance of Jesus’ death.  This dark and solemn remembrance illuminates human frailty and betrayal of someone who ultimately accepted his fate for humanity’s well-being.  This day represents what the whole of Christianity is based upon.  This day reminds us to sit with the humility, the shame, the dread and the loss.  This blog post illustrates this day quite well.

Obviously my religious affiliation is primarily with the Christian faith, but there’s so much to one’s spirituality that it’s unfair to restrain it to one order.  I love Buddhist meditation and awareness, Muslim prayer times and pilgrimmages, Jewish observance and debates over the Torah, Hindu imagery, Native American ties to Nature . . . and that’s just a surface level list of appreciation.

What I wonder, though, is if in all these traditions there is a similar time to reflect, a time to realize our failures as humanity.  I’m sure there are.  Along our spiritual journeys we all have those long dark nights of the soul.  Without the dark, can we truly appreciate the coming Light, the Renewal?  If you can stand to be with yourself, stripped of ego long enough to feel the present moment, Easter tidings, no matter what your faith, bring glory to your Soul.

Have a blessed weekend.

I think it’s perfectly lovely that Easter falls so close to the first of Spring this year.  Nature seems to agree, with all the trees budding and the early spring flowers opening up.  <deep inhale and contented sigh>

In our effort to be frugal and incorporate more handmade things into our daily round, rather than speed out and buy an easter dress for our oldest daughter, we’re going to use the fabric we already have and make a nice little sundress.  She already has a lovely hand-me-down top to wear over it since it’s still a little chilly.

No, I don’t have a pattern.  Yes, I’ve made dresses before.  Yes, I’m winging it here, but what better way to let the creativity flow?

I’m just getting started, so I’ll keep adding pictures as I progress.

• Like I said, we already had the fabric, washed and dried.  Lucky
  for me, this fabric doesn’t require lots of ironing!   In case you’re wondering, we didn’t dye this fabric.  It came that way.  I’m also using thread I already had.

• I thought up a simple design and used my daughter to
  guesstimate the fabric portions and make the cuts.  I think I’ll double the chest piece to make it a little thicker and disguise the strap ends and top of the skirt.  I also think I’ll add a couple more pieces to the skirt to make it more full.  Who doesn’t like to feel like a princess?  Plus, my daughter can be active and needs lots of room to move.

• I started with the straps, folding in half, sewing along one side.  (I really should be using my serger, but that means switching out thread.  Sounds like an afternoon task.)  Anywho, turn right side out and — voila — nice straps.  Turns out that these straps are extra long.  We’ll either fold them in half and give it a double-strap look or cut one in half and use the other for a bag.  Time will tell.

(more to come . . .  as promised)

• Straps done, I pinned them to the chest piece at the places
  necessary.  I totally just held
  the chest piece around her and
  positioned and pinned the straps.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I cut the length for the straps.  They were almost twice as long as they needed to be.  Since I used two layers of fabric for the chest piece, I inserted the straps between the layers.  Right sides together (which is interesting since the fabric seems to be the same on both sides) and making sure the straps would be facing the correct way, I
  serged the top seam (top photo to right), using the knife to trim.  Then, I turned right side out and added this decorative stitch
  to keep
  the seam from rolling.  The straps were still too long, so we just safety-pinned them in place for the time being.

• I did cut another skirt piece to add room, and I’m glad I did. 
  Again, I used the serger to make the seams.  I am loving the serger for this!  No longer am I intimidated by the threading.  Wahoo!  With all the skirt pieces sewn together, I gathered the top of the skirt.  To do this, I used the basting and pulling method; here’s an excellent video tutorial on gathering.  Then I aligned it to the top and pinned and basted it in place.  I removed the pins and then serged to clean up the seam.  This took me a couple of tries because apparently I had gotten a little crooked.

• Almost finished, I had her try it on so I could pin the hem.  We both wanted it long.  There’s still room to let it out (both at the hem and the straps) as she grows.  She’ll probably outgrow the bust first, though, since it has the least amount of room to grow.  I didn’t feel like switching the threads on the serger, so I just did a quick sew around the skirt for the hem.  Another thing I loved about this fabric is the straight lines!  Obviously I’m not strict about measuring twice and cutting once!

All in all, this was a simple project and relatively quick.  I ended up sewing a square over the extra strap length to keep it in place yet save it for later.  I got the center of the top in the back quite off center in relation to the straps, but that’s what I get for being so lax in my technique, if you can call it that.  If nothing else, I hope this inspires you to try your own hand at creating an original.

Blessings!

After a particularly grueling day of parenting, my husband and I enjoyed several minutes of drowsy pillow conversation, quietly over the babe nursing/sleeping between us.  I vented.  We pondered and wondered how best to discipline, how best to exemplify the behavior we hope for them to embody.  We fell asleep before any epiphanies.

I know I am dying.  Sitting up in bed, I see it in my husband’s face.  Our younger son lays his head across my tummy.  While I’ve been strong up till now, as I run my hands through his unruly hair, my resolve breaks; my heart aches.  I love him so much.  No.  I’m not ready to die yet.  The bright white light comes.  No.  I need to see my older children first.  They have to know, have to hear me tell them I love them.  They’re here.  It’s okay now.

I awoke with that sense of breathlessness near panic.  I wasn’t dead, no matter how real it had seemed.  It was a short dream for me, one who tends to have the epic variety, but its strength and clarity remain with me still.

I’m not proficient at dream interpretation, but I’ve experimented enough myself and have been with others enough to know that dreams speak to us in ways we might not otherwise understand.  I’ve been fortunate to be in groups to facilitate dream work.  At a meeting recently, one of my spiritual teachers was there, too.  We had been in a dream group together, and I admire her immensely.  “In dream symbology, what does it mean when you die?” I asked her.  “Usually it’s the ego,” she answered.  (We could have been asking each other about the weather.  It’s good to have friends you can talk to without the small talk.)  It clicked into place, as it will when you get your right understanding of a dream.

I had fallen asleep wondering how best to deal with my children.  I must have offered my query to the Divine, for it was received and answered.  To best relate to my kids, I have to get out of the way and let love lead.  That doesn’t mean I am a pushover and let them run wild.  Kids need boundaries for what is acceptable or not, and there are consequences for inappropriate behaviors and actions.  What’s important, though, is that I shouldn’t completely freak out just because something isn’t done the way I think it should be done.  These kids may come from my womb, but I believe they’re designed by and for God.  Heaven forbid I mess that up.

So I’m grateful for this dream that reminds me to let go and to love as if this were my last moments.  It sounds so simple.  The lesson is so easy.  It’s the homework that’s hard.

The other morning, not long after my dream of dying, my husband told me that when he awoke the older kids to get ready for school, they both said the same thing.  “I had the most wonderful dream.”  I wonder what lesson they were given.  May they remember their dreams.

Our local Earth Scouts had a family picnic on Sunday to celebrate the coming spring and to reward the li’l scouts for their participatory work thus far in learning about human rights.  Lucky for us, the weather was great for our main planned project — tie dye t-shirts.

We have learned a lot about the process.  There’s this site that has an awesome instruction guide.  We were given good how-to’s by a friend and by the sales guy where I bought the dyes (a local place called Sydney’s Emporium).  The dyes aren’t cheap ($4.95/ea), but good results are priceless.  We were recommended (and we verify the recommendation) to use the Procion MX dyes.

The instructions on the link above are great, and below is what we did and used.

Supplies:

• 100% cotton shirts/tanks  (the package variety but stained/recycled ones are great, too)
• bucket (recycled kitter litter container)
• soda ash (we got it from Sydney’s, and here’s a great site for info about it)
• water (I just found out that if you have hard water, distilled water for the dyes is recommended.  Good to know for next time.)
• dyes (turquoise makes an awesome, bright blue; we were advised to use fuchsia as our red; lemon yellow; bright orange; navy; deep purple, though the turquoise and fuchsia make a deep purple)
• plastic bottles with small tips (Make sure the lids are tight-fitting.  Even the $1 bottles from the craft store were leaky.  A friend recommended a restaurant supply store.)
• rubber bands, the skinny ones
• rubber gloves would prevent the week-long dyed cuticles that most of us have!
• gallon zip-top baggies

Soak the shirts in soda ash water (1 c. ash to 1 gal. water — make sure ash is dissolved) for 30 min.  Ring out excess.  (This water dries out your hands!  Gloves would probably be good here.)

Lay shirt flat.  Decide how you want to dye your shirt.  Some used the bunch and tie method.  My favorite was the spiral; pinch where you want the center of the spiral to be and twist.  We didn’t tie off as much as the printed instructions  above, which is why we don’t have as much white. 


Applying dye is the fun (and messy) part.  If doing the spiral, you apply the dye in pieces of pie shapes or an asterisk.  Remember your art lessons.  Primary colors
(red, blue, yellow) together make brown.  For us, it was good on some shirts as seen above, but it might not be your intention.  This is such an experimental process, and you have to wait to see how it turns out!

After dyed, place the bundle in a large zip-top bag and let it sit . . . for 24 hours.  I know.  It’s a long time, so keep yourself preoccupied and know that the longer it sits, the better off the dye will be.

Then, rinse with cold water.  Cut the bands/strings.  Keep rinsing until the water is
almost clear.  The instructions say to increase the water to hot, then wash on a hot/cold cycle.  We have rinsed with cold then hung to dry.  Today I’ll wash and hope for the best!

(The photos are from the shirts hanging to dry.  If they change dramatically after washing, I’ll post a follow-up.)

Have fun!