Candlemas Collage

My New Year's practice is to make a collage that represents the experiences I hope to enjoy in the new year. For the past few years, I've been making Soul Collage (R) cards to embody the themes I've chosen for the year. Here you can see my three themes for 2010 as works in progress: Refreshment, Sustainability and Sovereignity.

On the other side of the table you get an upside-down view of the collage my friend Janis made. We love this ritual which we have been sharing for years. We light candles, make wishes, drink tea, nibble on cookies and play with images.

My cards right now are up on the wall in the entry way of my home where they will remind me every time I enter of my themes for the year.

This post is cross-posted at my new blog at Living in Season.

Shedding for the New Year

This new year I’ve been feeling really bogged down by all of the clutter in my house. I thought I would get it all cleared out during the week I was off work after Christmas but, of course, that didn’t happen.

I accidentally watched part of an episode of the TV show Hoarders last year. I don’t recommend it for anyone who has any hoarding tendencies--I’ve been horrified ever since at the prospect that I might become one of those old ladies who lives in an apartment with little paths between the stacks of newspapers. But this tendency does run in my family. My Uncle George, who was the family eccentric in my Mom’s family, apparently had an apartment like that (he also had about a quarter of a million dollars in his estate when he died—unfortunately that part of the hoarding gene seems to have passed me by).

It’s hard to launch into the new year when you’re carrying the weight of all that clutter, all those unfinished projects, all those unread magazines, all those unsorted photographs. And I’m noticing this same theme among the participants in my New Year Dreams class.

I’m hoping that this is all due to the backwards influence of Mercury and Mars both being retrograde at the same time. Madeleine Gerwick, the author of the popular Good Timing Guide says not to initiate any new projects until March 20. That might give me enough time to clear and organize my house.

I’m also reading Julie Morganstern’s new book. I’m a big fan of Julie’s work. The four-step system she explains in her Organizing from the Inside Out book has been very helpful to me. The first step is sorting, and the second step is purging. The third step is containing (finding the right space for the stuff) and the fourth step is maintaining the system you’ve developed. You can use this with clothes, with papers, etc. Over the summer, I used it with my books (and actually got rid of some--a first!).

Her new book, Shed Your Stuff, Change Your Life, is more about how to get rid of stuff you’re holding onto, and she extends it from clutter in your house to clutter in your schedule to bad habits in your personal life. Again, she has come up with a simple system and an Acronym to remind you of it in SHED. First you Separate the treasures from the trash in your life, then you Heave the trash. The final two steps are Embrace your Identity and Drive Yourself Forward.

What I especially like is her focus on the end result. What are the values you are trying to manifest in your life? And do the items in your house (or schedule or life) serve your purpose/help you achieve your goals?

Once you identify the arena in which you want to work, you create a list of entry points, for instance, the pile of unread magazines, the box of unsorted photographs or the box full of old Christmas cards. Then you choose the point which will cause you the minimum amount of difficulty and get you the maximum amount of effect. This is about where I am in the book so I don't know yet how it will work out. But I have until March 20 to carry out all the steps.

Do you have a system that works for you?

Signs of Spring

I spend the entire month of January dreaming about what I want to grow in the New Year, and doing a process of sorting those dreams into themes and goals. This year I'm sharing that process with the students in my New Year Dreams class.

I'm still in the thick of it, generating lots of ideas. Launching an online magazine. Writing a historical novel. Writing essays about plants in the city. Promoting my Slow Time book to coaches and writers. Sponsoring week-long Slow Time retreats. Contributing to Wikipedia, Library Thing. Joining Facebook. Teaching a year-long Slow Time class. The new ideas keep springing forth.

I'm at the point in the process where I need to make choices. It's clearly impossible to do everything. But I'm having a harder time choosing this year than in other years. I like to choose a word for the year that distills my intention for the entire year and this year I'm having trouble with that as well. In previous years, I've picked Fun and Frolic. This year it's something more like Connecting but that's too abstract for me.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying all the signs of spring around me. The red twigs on the maples. The green blades of tulips kniving through the dark soil. The single yellow bloom on the forsythia. The fuzzy buds on the goat willow. I saw my first robin three days ago.

New Year's Power Surges

New Year’s Power Surges

I’m behind on my blog entries. Trying to puzzle out the identity of the various kinds of juniper (cypress?) that appear in many different yards and planting strips in my neighborhood. Meanwhile I thought you would find this anecdote amusing.

For the past several years, on New Year’s Day, I will be sitting at my desk when I hear the sound of bagpipes, and rush to the window to see a procession of kilted bagpipers, drummers and folks waving Welsh, Scottish and Irish flags marching down the street. I think of them as the First-Footers and indeed, they go into various businesses and homes in my neighborhood as a way of bringing good luck for the new year.

This year they went into a neighboring house and while they were inside, a car parked on the street outside caught on fire. It was quite dramatic, with the car alarm going off incessantly and a fire truck arriving and the firemen popping open the hood, to reveal a jolly fire blazing on the engine block. They quickly extinguished the fire (the poor car was later towed away). I didn’t think too much of it, except that in all the excitement, I didn’t wave my Welsh flag out of my window as I had planned when the First-Footers emerged from the house and surrounded the fire truck to play for the firemen.

But a few days later I was in 22 Doors, my favorite local restaurant and bar, and learned that they had been closed for several days because their computer system went down. They were blaming it on a power surge. And it turned out that the power surge coincided with the entry into the establishment of the First Footers. Now I am wondering about that car fire. And it certainly makes me believe in the power of ritual.