“Here’s to you and your blank canvas” oh…my…can you think of a better way to imagine yourself evolving, or modifying, or erasing from your life that which no longer serves you, or simply improving, even minimally?? It’s not much different than a blank page in a new journal with your new favorite chisel tip pen, or a blank page on your desktop screen, looking right back at you and waiting for words to come from your brain and exit out through your fingers on your Logitech keyboard…it’s an open invitation to possibilities! I mean really, nobody is perfect, we all have room for improvement, no??!!

Vibrant Aliveness…yum! That packs a punch right to the center of my chest & to the deepest well of my soul…what more could a woman want from life and the new year ahead of her than Vibrant Aliveness??!! Admittedly my version of aliveness might be remarkably different than yours; I have a friend who finds it with her camera lens on cold days on the bay getting a glimpse of marsh grass from an odd angle with a sun slowly setting behind it that makes your spirit shiver with its beauty, I have another friend who finds the energy to often go out in the evenings, well past my bedtime, and sing her heart out at open-mic nights, & I have friend a who is learning how to golf despite swearing to the heavens themselves for years that she would never want to play. None of those three things fill me up but the point is finding what fills you up! If I am being honest, which here in my blog is pretty much ONLY how I’m ever being, my most recent vibrant aliveness feelings happened for me over these first two weekends of the new year; firstly the un-decorating of Christmas filled me with so much happiness and joy that I don’t have the right words, but I didn’t just move decor to the attic, I caulked and painted and reorganized & cleaned like my life depended on it. The following weekend I tore apart the bathroom vanity and drawers and linen cupboards, cleaned and organized and tossed, and even made a new playlist, JUST FOR THAT task! Now to you this might seem like dumb “busy-work,” and a waste of two weekends, cleaning and organizing, and to be clear my house is pretty much always clean and always organized anyway, but let me tell you, the level of Vibrant Aliveness that I felt was BIG MAGIC to my spirit. I felt deeply fulfilled and in total control of my happiness, and confident that the life I imagine for myself is in fact my life. While I painted and cleaned and tossed and organized I had all sorts of good conversations in my head. THIS kind of positive self-talk is WAY, way, W A Y better than self-defeating winter stuckness. We are entering our fourth week of a new year and if you are finding yourself grasping at any straw of happiness, I tell you, find something, anything that makes you feel un-stuck and fully engaged and you won’t be sorry!

Here in south Jersey, at the shore where I live, there is a lot of gray this time of year; the sky is colorless and half the trees are empty and the ground is hard and there is not a lot of sun during most of the days…so to say that we have to make our own rainbows is no joke! Finding joy from cleaning and organizing and re-doing things makes me happy. Involving a new uplifting playlist makes the activity even better! I suppose it’s no different than somebody who likes to watch movies on their day off, or play video games after work, or go bowling on Sundays…filling in hours of your week with things that you want to do, and don’t have to do, feels good… IS GOOD. Tossing six bottles of serum that cost me a pretty penny but did not in fact, at all, help the wrinkles in my forehead did not “spark joy” in my bathroom clean-out last week but organizing all the things that went back into that particular drawer, did. It’s really the little things, that all add up. If these last three weeks of the year have you feeling like a prisoner of mediocrity, then start now, tomorrow, just start your new year over…vibrant aliveness is free and sounds so much more interesting than bored or sad. Here you go, Happy New Year!!!

In the dull bitter cold winter I work much less than I do in the summer, and so my vibrant aliveness really bubbles into existence when most of the rest of things are in hibernation mode! In the summer it is not unusual for me to work seven days a week and that is not a complaint it’s just the way things are for me. If a new playlist, and a purge and cleaning of cupboards & shelves can bring me to life in the dead of winter, well then so be it…just like capturing an image with your camera of a perfect shell on a frozen beach, or singing a song that you have loved since you were a teenager and imaging you are Stevie Nicks, or getting a little white ball in a tiny hole that is many feet away from your putter…these are things that make us feel alive and we all have a duty to ourselves to find that which makes us feel FULLY involved with our own aliveness!!! WE are living together on this planet at this time but many of us are just miserable, truly miserable, and I am writing from my heart to tell you to stop, JUST STOP. Find a blank canvas, figurative or literal, and start. S T A R T filling it.

I love to read and I love to crochet. To some people, these might be the worst possible and most boring activities or useless wastes of time a person could do, but I do both willingly and with enthusiasm every chance that I get. When I reorganize a cupboard or a bookshelf I do it with zest and vim and vigor! It’s who I am, silver lining seeker that I try to be…but your enthusiasm could be, and most likely is, totally different than mine…but find it. Find something to make you as enthused as I get from redoing a linen cupboard and reorganizing all the tubes of antibiotic cream and band-aids. Yesterday I did not move very much but I crocheted many rows of two baby blankets and watched two movies I had been wanting to see for weeks. To some people, maybe I wasted my day, but to me I did exactly what I felt like doing. Some days I have the energy of Wonder Woman and have a list as long as my arm of tasks in and around the house and yard that I am excited to tackle and some days I don’t. If there are parts of your day-to-day life or people in your daily circle of existence that make you unhappy, or feeling uninspired or deflated and depleted, and you truly can’t change these circumstances then shouldn’t you, at the very least, change all the things which you can??!! We are born and we live a while and then we die. That’s all folks. THAT IS IT. So why not make any effort you can to make your days of the year deeply meaningful, spectacularly uplifting, vibrantly alive???!!! I’m all in. How about you??

I’m certain, well almost, that I am not alone in this…the space in between my ears is often filled with opposing sides; of details, memories of events, of information, and thoughts about people-places-things, and all of those words in the middle of it all makes me feel positively overwhelmed at times. We are on day SEVEN of the new year and I suspect that many of us have had some deep thoughts this last week about all of that “new year new me” business…or new year ‘change how I handle my work load,’ or new year ‘change how I deal with my co-workers,’ or new year ‘change how often I scroll’…or WHAT EVER…you get my drift. It’s a very universal thing, I think, to think about oneself, and how one functions within the constraints of society, or within a family, or to think about oneself and how we FUNCTION AT ALL as ourselves, who we even are, this time of year. It’s the first Sunday of the new year and we have a whole year ahead of us to think better and do better and be better, if we so choose, or feel a need.

I noticed this last week on my facebook page, in the “memories” feature, that each day, over the last decade of the first week of the year, I shared quotes or poems or passages that made me think about how I want to BE in this life in this new year ahead, and what I found rather curious, or perhaps not, was that all week, when I scrolled through the memories, my only thought after reading the poem or paragraph that had been previously shared was that right now, this new year, I felt exactly the same…It became hard to ignore this week, that, try as I might to change, I am not a person who is changing. I am stuck with who I am it seems. Maybe I just want to be a better version of THIS and not change at all…so many ways to spin it.

I don’t suppose I am alone with this sensation of “if not now, when?” this time of year…if something I do, or someone I know, or thoughts I’m thinking, are just not working for me, not bringing out the best in me, not making me feel “good,” or behaviors are not benefiting me or helping me to feel like the finest version of myself, or circumstances are feeling unfulfilling, well, then what??!! WHAT do we do about it?? ANY of it?? …we change it, whatever the “it” is…OR we accept all of it, the good the bad the ugly. We either take the thoughts or actions and do something about them, or we had best stop worrying & obsessing about them, and just be who we are…acceptance I guess is a change too.

There is a line in a song by Eva Cassidy that hits me, hard, every time I hear it…the song is called “I Can Only Be Me” and the line is  But how many times have you wished you were some other someone than who you are, yet who’s to say that if it all were uncovered you will like what you see This particular line has been on my mind for days, probably it started when I was un-Christmas-ing my house, as I love an empty house with music when I am in the cleaning frenzy zone and I used to have very hard and very heavy playlists for cleaning frenzies, but this year I went with softer and mellower, I went with my playlist that I titled *Sing Ladies* that includes Tori Amos, Cat Power, Eva Cassidy, Joni Mitchell, Mazzy Star, Aimee Mann, Natalie Merchant…it’s 445 songs that is more than 27 hours of music and I just hit shuffle and every song is a good one. This season’s undecorating including an after Christmas caulking and painting job and then of course a total dusting of all books and reorganization of the shelves, and I treated myself, because of a generous bonus from a client, to a new frame and matting for a piece of art that I have had since 1999 that has sat over my fireplace since I moved in here, anyway, my cleaning frenzy was, as always for me, totally joyful and totally cathartic, despite how hard I work and how tired I am at the end of the day, and I laughed this year that I worked harder the last three days of December than I had worked the whole month before, but it was the kind of work that fulfills, me…THAT is another thing that got me thinking this week, about how I have always been this way, since I was a little girl and made my bed every day and always kept my closet organized and my dresser drawers neat…it’s just who I am, THOSE parts that make my whole are not at all things I want to change or wish were different. THOSE parts of me I positively adore. BUT…there is always a but, there are many things about myself that I do wish were different, and choices I make that are not the best to serve my higher self, benefit the greater good if you will… I guess, even if I am slow to change and fight my own self every damn step of the way, at least I recognize there is some need for change? Maybe that counts? Maybe if I did peel back all the layers I wouldn’t like her any better?? It’s a lot of questions for a Sunday morning…

I made a list, it’s short this year, of what I think I need to change and how I think I need to do it. I may check off each item on the list these next months, and I may quite possibly only get to one of them, and I suppose that’s okay, or maybe what I need to write is that I have to be okay with that. Maybe this first blog of the new year is a pep talk of sorts, to myself, and to you, if you need it…I was a cheerleader for all of my childhood and teens you know…cheering for others is what I once did best…and so I guess I shall now offer us all a cheer for the new year…if you feel stuck with yourself, if you feel stuck in some unfulfilling circumstance, if heavy thoughts are plaguing you, “Push ‘Em Back Push ‘Em Back…WAaaaaY back!!!” IF you are moving forward already this new year, and feel powerful, your confidence is soaring and you believe you will achieve that which you wish for, and you feel the changes happening, and it all seems do-able, well, “ALL the way All the way ALL THE WAY GO!!!”