“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??