Restlessness

Today I am filled with unresolved desire. No, not THAT kind of desire. I am awash in the need for more. I want more time, more energy, more beauty, more laughter.

I want more.

I want to trudge along the shoulders of mountains in Montana and merengue with the tides on the Oregon coast. I want to roll through Napa Valley, savoring the sights and the smells of harvest time. I want to learn to dance. I want to learn to draw. I want to play with color and paint word pictures that make readers sigh quietly.

Like Molly Bloom, I want to say yes. Just yes. Yes to the music, yes to the moon. Yes to the cold winds of winter and yes to the cerulean sky. Most of all, yes to my restless heart and mind. Yes, let's go to the library and read. Yes, let's learn things we'll never need to know. Yes, let's fritter away entire afternoons researching ideas that will never, ever fit into a book on designing with ceramic tile.

I want to live Molly's words, the last line of Joyce's book: "Yes I will yes I said yes." Instead, I tell myself to stop this foolishness and get back to work on the books that pay the bills.

And yes, for now, I will.

Pretty Complicated

Finally did the audition for the commercial yesterday. The process of getting ready was really something.

2:30 to 3:15 pm Wednesday: Get face waxed. Eyebrows, mustache and chin cleared of all offensive hair.

11:00am Thursday: Go shopping with close (very skinny) friend. Find nothing that fits, nothing that feels even vaguely flattering.
2:30pm Thursday: Return home feeling frumpier than frumpy. Wonder why in the hell I agreed to this.

10:00am to 12:00 Friday: Get hair colored.
12:00 to 2:30 Friday: Go shopping (alone). Find 20 things I like, 3 of which fit and look okay. Settle on one "look." Walking out of store after a torturous hour, catch sight of a cream jacket, try it on, ditch all former decisions for entirely new idea. Moan to myself about why I agreed to this.
3:00 to 3:45pm Friday Try on several permutations of planned outfit for various "advisors." Discover that no two people like the same combination. Decide to decide for myself.

2:00 to 4:00pm Sunday: Launder new clothing. Polish shoes. Search for scarf in disastrous closet. Do facial masque. Conduct search and destroy tweezing mission on hair resprouting on chin and upper lip. Ask myself what the *(&% I was thinking when I agreed to this.

6:00 to 8:30am Monday: Wash hair. Blow dry hair. Steam clothing. Hand wash matching velvet glove I spilled soup on Sunday evening. Frantically try to dry velvet glove.
9:00 to 9:45am Monday: Get hair "done" by stylist at my salon.
9:45 to 10:00am Monday: File and polish fingernails.
10:00 to 10:45am Monday: Apply make up.
10:45 to 11:00am Monday: Submit to inspection by everyone in salon. More stray hair removed. Outfit scrutinized. Lint roller employed. Search for velvet gloves.
11:10am Monday: Find velvet glove flopping around (still damp) in salon dryer.
11:20am Monday: Collapse into chair at audition, wearing my assigned number: 13

The audition itself was fun. The photographer showed me the digital stills. Surprisingly ok. I'm not afraid of video cameras after all these years of occasional tv spots, so the taping was fine. The woman who asked me to audition later told me the director really liked me. Good news, but who knows what that means. They're auditioning 200 people for 10 spots, after all.

In the end, I felt well dressed and well groomed. Sort of pretty, even, but it seriously took a village. Grooming gets pretty damn complicated after 50.

And people? I just don't have that kind of time.

A Cold Sunday Afternoon

This cold winter afternoon produced a wonderful batch of soup and this.



Still have a lot to learn, but I sure am having fun with this drawing thing.

Corn

What is it about corn? Somehow I can't get enough of it. Some Rubenesque types hanker for brownies or hot fudge. Not me. Those things are okay, but the things I long for when I'm hungry, the food items I can't turn away from all include corn. Give me tortillas, Fritos, cornbread, corn nuts, popcorn or Doritos and I'm happy. Throw in a little cheese somewhere and I'm ecstatic.

Scalloped corn is a delicacy I dare not even taste. Corn pudding? I'm totally there. Make a bowl of corn/bean/avocado salad and I'll eat til my cheeks puff like a squirrel storing acorns. Roasted corn on the cob is my favorite indulgence at any farmer's market sophisticated enough to feature a roaster.

What am I feeding with all this corn? It clearly isn't pure physical hunger because physical hunger ends when you've consumed a moderate amount of food. My hunger for corn doesn't diminish no matter how much of it I eat. One chip leads to 20 and at the end, only logic stops me, not satisfaction.

Years and years ago, a leader at a Weight Watcher's meeting asked, "If what you need is a hug and what you reach for is a chocolate chip cookie, how many cookies will it take?"

Make that nachos and you've got yourself a damn good question.

A Girl's Dreams

In 2004, Jennifer Hudson's fans were shocked when she was voted off American Idol. My daughter and her friends were outraged. Just outraged.

Jennifer herself had to be beyond disappointed. If you stopped the story of her life at that point, it would have seemed like a pretty sad story.

Who knows what would have come next if Jennifer had won AI, but her life would surely have taken a different path. As it was, she had the opportunity to do Dream Girls and rose to the challenge in a big, big way. This morning Jennifer found herself on the Today Show, trying to answer questions about her Oscar nomination. She seemed dazed and talked about needing time to reflect on her blessings.

Her story looks a very different today.

You go, girl. Lots of people, including my Katie, are thrilled to see your talents recognized.

My Story

Eight or nine years ago I read Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Remen, a book that propelled me along my path as much as or more than anything I'd read before or since. For some reason, perhaps because a dear friend is much in need of healing right now, Rachel's book has been on my mind a lot lately. This afternoon I picked up a copy again, having long since given the original away.

It is as wise and wonderful as I remembered. Listen to what Rachel says about our stories:

Hidden in all stories is the One story. The more we listen, the clearer that Story becomes. Our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains us, is in this story. The stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope, and healing, of loneliness and the end of loneliness. Stories about God.

In telling them, we are telling each other the human story. Stories that touch us in this place of common humanness awaken us and weave us together as a family once again.

Sometimes when I ask people to tell me their story they tell me about their achievements, what they have acquired or built over a lifetime. So many of us do not know our own story. A story about who we are, not what we have done. About what we have faced to build what we have built, what we have drawn upon and risked to do it, what we have felt, thought, feared, and discovered through the events of our lives. The real story that belongs to us alone.

Those are some powerful words, my friends, and they call me to new understandings. I'm one who all too often mistakes what I've done for who I am. My dear friend, Bryan, sometimes says that my story is that of the search for love and the prices I've paid for it. He could be right. Like every other human, I want to be heard, to be known, to be accepted. Like many others, I've traded the shining beads of my self for the blankets of getting my needs met. I've faced some fearful things with amazing courage and hidden like a child from others not nearly so dangerous. I've felt fleeting moments of genuine peace and endured long stretches when I imagined myself alone.

Tonight as I write, my only clue about my true identity is that I'm a child of God; why I've chosen this path and this life is Mystery.

The front of a card Bryan sent me recently shows a colorful person/creature precariously balanced on a fulcrum, driving a nail into the end of the main arm. The text reads: Is willing to accept that she creates her own reality

except for some of the parts where she can't help but wonder what the hell she was thinking.

Pretty much sums 'er up.

Finding My Voice

Because I said so.

Shut up and do what you're told!

Shut up or I'll give you something to cry about.

Shut up. Just shut up.

These words were the theme of my childhood, played against a soundtrack of "Jerri always has to be different."

For a child to whom words and ideas were as important as air and sunshine, it was a lot like telling me not to be. It's clearly no coincidence that I later married not one but two men who could tolerate no disagreement, could stand for no opinion but their own to be voiced. Having long since left those marriages behind, it's no accident that I bought a business with my older sister, whose main mission in life is to prove how right she is about everything. Everything.

My son (now 24) was not yet born the last time I spoke up to her. I remember every syllable: "I wish I knew as much about anything as you know about everything.

She still hasn't forgiven me.

Still when she needed help, I willingly rode into town, checkbook in hand, and hitched my time and my energy and my future to hers. When she rolls her eyes when I ask a question and then answers slowly as though to a slightly impaired child, I tell myself her response is not about who I am. When she leaps to anger when questioned in any way, I silently remind myself how painful it must be to be so defended. When she buys more orange accessories or furniture for the spa and tells me she wants me to finally recognize how beautiful it is, I smile and tell her it goes well with everything else in there.

When I was married, Bill had to approve everything purchased for the house. Before we moved into our last house together, I ordered new bedroom furniture. Shockingly, I ordered an armoire he did not approve of—it was the smaller, more graceful of the two available armoires in the style he'd picked. After the furniture was delivered, I came into the room to find him putting away his clothes in the drawers of the enormous dresser. He was using all them. "Bill," I said calmly, "don't forget that I'll need at least a couple drawers."

"Not in this dresser," he replied. "If you'd bought the armoire I told you to buy, there'd be plenty of room for your things. You didn't do what you were told. That's your problem, not mine."

I silently arranged my panties and bras and jammies in baskets on the closet floor. One of the last things he said to me the day he moved out of the house three years later was, "Look at it this way. You've always wanted a drawer. Now you've got plenty."

These are not stories about the terrible people in my life. (They are not terrible people. They're people with their own wounds, their own pain.) They are, however, stories about how well I learned to shut up, how well I learned to acquiesce to authority, how well I learned to grin and bear it. And how consistently I seek out opportunities to practice these skills.

Until Friday morning when I was tapping with my teacher/healer/shaman, I'd never connected these dots. Working around the idea of not speaking up for myself, she asked for my earliest memory of feeling I couldn't speak. Turned out it was my earliest memory, period. We tapped on several statements surrounding that memory and others from later childhood, and suddenly it came clear that in situations of conflict, I feel like a disobedient child.

Shazaam! Now we're getting somewhere!

Who Knew?

Working with a teacher/healer/shaman this morning, something rocketed into my consciousness that now seems so obvious I can't believe it felt like news.

I became a writer to have a voice, to be heard, to create a place where my feelings and thoughts mattered. (All this time I've thought it was because I just happened to like words.)

When I was a kid, family members constantly accused me of deliberately being "different," and as Barbra Streisand once sang, different was "another word for wrong." I quickly learned to keep my opinions to myself. Now that I'm in business with my sister, I'm still wrong whenever I open my mouth and so still keeping my opinions to myself as often as possible.

Except here.

Thanks for listening. It means the world to me.

Fun New Possibility

Just got off the phone with a woman who asked me to audition for a television commercial. If I get it, they'll pay me (a modest amount) AND they'll pay all my expenses to go to Florida for a five day shoot. WooHoo!!!!

I really, really want to do this. Please help me manifest it into being. The audition is Monday, January 29 at 11:30: Visualize. Meditate. Believe. If you've got suggestions for how to pull this off, let me know.

What a strange and interesting life I've got going on here. Just never know what might happen next. Isn't that great?

Be Still Like Broccoli

Just finished my post-lunch 30 minutes on the treadmill. Yep, that's me: proud owner of a brand new Nordic Track treadmill, purchased on sale at Sears last Saturday.

AND I'm publicly announcing my goal of losing 33 pounds in 2007. Not so easy for me to say, considering that it's pretty embarassing to admit I've got 33 pounds available for loss. But I do, and it's got to go.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Well, actually, it was. But that's another story entirely.

This post started off to be thoughts about stillness. Passed the time on the treadmill (just can't say that enough!), reading O magazine. Including, ironically, an article on weight loss. According to James A. Levine, MD, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine no less, people who fidget burn about 350 calories more a day than people who are still when at rest. That's 33 pounds a year!

So, in other words, this past two years when I've been working so hard at learning to be still, finding inner peace and true physical rest, I've been lulling myself into gaining the EXACT poundage I'm now struggling to offload?

You absolutely have to be kidding me.

Damn. Everything has a price. Even inner peace.

Sunday Scribblings: Ideas

Ideas are writing's life blood, and for me, they come in questions. I wonder if. . . . I wonder why. . . . I wonder how. . . . Curiosity come to life.

I vaguely remember in the book What Dreams May Come when the author said all art, all writing exists complete in the Universe somewhere. The person who produces it doesn't so much create it as tap into its vibration and then translate it for others to experience. That makes sense to me because it's only when I open myself that the ideas flow, only when I let go of my self-criticism and self-consciousness that the words come freely.

When ideas and words do arrive, I'm often surprised by them. I can't count the times a solution has presented itself to me, an idea truly beyond my ability to think up or create. Sometimes phrases appear, surprising me with their beauty or their aptness. When I'm deliberately constructing sentences or painstakingly producing ideas, the result is usually acceptable—workmanlike and orderly. But when I cast orderliness to the winds, throw open the doors of my heart and mind, stretch my arms wide and dance with the pulse of the earth, I'm sometimes carried by an idea, swept along by its current, lit by its energy.

It's the reason I write: to ride the tail of that kite now and again.

For more on ideas, go to Sunday Scribblings.

Wherever Two or More of You

My deepest thanks to all who joined the healing meditation for Mark just now. As we gathered in Spirit, I experienced a sense of peace and connection that surprised me with its strength.

It's cold and windy here in KC this afternoon. Sleet is hurling itself to the ground as though in fury. Mummified in layers, I sat outside facing my beloved pond with a plastic trash bag beneath me. The candle I keep lit for Mark was beside me.

At 2:00pm, I began my meditation and all awareness of the cold and wind left me. My hands, especially, felt warm. The geese on the pond, usually noisy and active, were silent and still. At times I felt incredibly rooted to the earth and at other times completely buoyant, as though my body could float across the miles to Darlene and Mark to deliver the golden light of the meditation.

Surprisingly, Mark's candle remained lit the entire time despite the wind. And I remained connected to All That Is.

Again, thank you. Meditating and praying with you all was an honor and a priviledge.

Peace above you. Peace below you. Let all around you be peace.

Meditation Invitation

Like many other bloggers around the world, I have followed the journey of Darlene and her son, Mark, with a lump in my thoat and an ache in my heart. Also like many others, I light candles in his honor and pray for the entire family.

And while this has been what I could do from afar, it has not felt like enough in the face of the enormous challenges faced by these dear people. Reading the comments on Darlene's posts, it seems many others feel the same.

While we can't all show up at Mark's bedside or hug Darlene in person, together we can do something real and positive—a simultaneous healing meditation.

Please join me in meditating* for Mark and his family on Saturday, January 13 from 2:00pm** to 2:15pm, Central Standard Time.

* If at all possible, please sit outside, on the ground, so that we all have a direct connection to the Earth.

** If you're not sure what time that is in your area, check timeanddate.com Click "Full World Clock" and then "Converter" and select US, Central Standard time and 2:00pm. It will quickly tell you what time that is in your part of the world.

I plan to do a very specific type of meditation called tonglen and invite you to join me in this practice.

Tonglen involves deep compassion for ourselves and for those who are suffering. After a period of preparation, the meditator consciously breathes in the pain and fear and suffering of the person for whom they are meditating, allows the love and compassion in their heart to transmute those things, and then breathes out love and peace and healing. It often helps to imagine inhaling the pain and fear as a dark cloud or as smoke and then to imagine exhaling golden light.

This is a serious mediation and requires strength and true compassion from the meditator. I consulted Liz Elayne of Be Present, Be here who is a yoga teacher. Here's the guidance she offered:

My teacher shared this meditation with me when several loved ones in my life were ill and it became part of my personal practice for several months. Because this meditation is a strong one, it is important to have an awareness of your own strength and how you feel physically and emotionally. Anyone, even someone who has never meditated, will be able to particiapte in this meditation; however, I suggest that you check-in with yourself before the meditation begins. One way to do this: Sit quietly, eyes closed, and notice how you feel physically and emotionally. Think about the idea of breathing in your own suffering and notice how that feels. Take a few breaths as you notice what comes up for you. If thinking about this feels okay for you, think about breathing in the suffering of another person. If either of these check-ins invites you to think that this practice might be too strong for you at this time, you can practice this meditation using only compassion and healing. In this case, you would inhale compassion and exhale compassion and healing.

Another important piece is to start this meditation focused on breathing in your own suffering and then exhaling compassion for yourself. My teacher explained a simple lesson to me that has had such a big impact on how approach this meditation and compassion in my life: You must feel compassion for yourself before you can feel compassion for and another. If you are new to meditation or to tonglen meditation, you might want to practice a personal tonglen meditation over the next few days, focusing on breathing in your own suffering and exhaling compassion and healing for you. This would be a great way to experience this meditation in preparation for our community experience on Saturday."

If you have questions, go here to find a discussion of tonglen written by Pema Chodron.

If meditation is not part of your faith tradition, you're welcome to join us in any form of prayer that is. It be wonderful if we could send streams of golden light to Mark and Darlene and the rest of the family from every corner of the globe. Please help spread the word. Talk to people. E-mail others who might be interested. Post an invitation with a link to this post if you feel comfortable with that. Let's invite all like-minded souls to join us as we breathe healing and compassion into the Universe for Mark and his family.

Sincere and humble thanks to you all.

Sunday Scribblings: Kisses

Ah HA! I've found it!! I've found the thing I'm a genius at (see yesterday's post), and it's KISSES. With a kiss, I can divine a child's temperature within 2 or 3 tenths of a point, assure my aging parents I will be with them and stand for them through all that's sure to come, or ignite desire in a (receptive) man.

I am a genius at kisses because they're vital to me. Kissing is one of the purest pleasures available to humans and the thing I long for, dream about, create in fantasy when it's absent. In the long, loveless years of my marriage months sometimes passed without sex, but sex was not central to the dreams that haunted me. Instead, kisses floated behind my closed eyes like mirages in a hot, dry desert.

When I reached the oasis of dating again, I drank in kisses as though from a deep well filled with cool nectar. My new love and I dated for many months before consumating our relationship, but late at night we danced in my candlelit family room and kissed for hours. Hours. When the time finally came, we explored the pleasures of lips on skin well beyond the mouth and I discovered new and unknown levels of sensory delight. You'd have thought I'd discovered fire.

In a way, I had.



For more thoughts on kisses, go to Sunday Scribblings

Lost in Translation

I am lost.

Ordinarily I feel an extraordinary connection to All That Is and, on many occasions, to the Flow of Life. When I am aligned with the flow, I am carried along by its current so that even very hard work feels like play and every day feels like the opening of possibilities.

Right now, even basic things require more strength than I can gather. Like a tire driven over a big curb or into a deep pothole, it feels like I'm working in opposition to the goal: lots of activity, no forward movement.

The other day a friend laughingly said she was a "genius" at something or another. It struck me that there's not one thing on earth that I believe myself to be a genius at. Not one. Eventually I did decide that I'm quite good at teaching others what I know through my books, but that's as close as I've ever come and trust me, it's not genius.

Whether or not I am a genius at something is not the issue here. Instead, it is believing that is important and so at first I thought this ennui was a crisis of confidence. I spent much of the last couple of days exploring the idea of confidence--where it comes from and why and how one acquires it.

You'd think that a long, long (my dear friend Bryan would point out that I'm old, after all) history of completing tasks with a fair amount of success would generate confidence. Writing for example: the books I've written or been the lead editor for have sold more than a million copies collectively. Wouldn't you think that would give me some confidence in my ability to tell a story? So far, not so much.

Art's another great example. A friend with an MFA saw one of my drawings recently and told me she'd worked with graduate students who couldn't produce such subtle shading and line. She wasn't trying to be nice, she was making a point when she said it. Three-quarters of being an artist is believing yourself to be one, yet I can't imagine getting to that point.

Lately I have spent far toooo much time lying on the sofa watching mindless TV, an electronic pacifier. It soothes my jangled nerves and comforts my outer layers while shoving my insides out of alignment much the way a real pacifier does to a child's palette if they cling to it too long. I know this. Still, faced with a little free time, I find myself horiztonal, staring at illuminated movement rather than moving to find my own illumination.

Looking back over what I've written, it sounds like clinical depression and there may be some element of that. But don't cry for me, Argentina. When I reconnect to the Source, All will be well. And all will be well. And all manner of things will be exceedingly well. (Juliana of Norwich)

Connected to the flow, in the stream of life, I feel charmed. I find things like blogging and writer's workshops and this wonderful community of souls. Fascinating experiences find me and I glide from one interesting encounter to another.

THAT's my life, that's my experience when I live from my soul and I will find my way back to it, to a connection so deep I hear the heartbeat of the earth in the lapping of waves and feel mountains singing to me in my bones. I once stopped hiking to sit on a large rock in the midst of a wild blueberry patch on an Alaska tundra, convinced I could hear nearby mountains singing to me. They told me not to fear being different, not to worry that my path's not "normal." Their song told me to live my own life and it echoes in my head and heart even now—Lindsey Buckingham urging me to go my own way. Really. As I sat on that rock, I could hear Fleetwood Mac singing "Go Your Own Way" and thought it was a Message from God. (BTW--don't try this. I could have and probably should have been eaten by bears sitting alone in a fruit-filled berry patch on an Alaskan tundra in mid-August.)

Having written this all out, I feel better. More hopeful. A connection that strong hasn't disappeared, just gone dormant for a bit. I'll find it again. Some small thing will happen and I'll follow its trail as though a string had been left for me to follow. Life is both ebb and flow. This is the ebb. Flow's got to follow.

Damn, I wish it would hurry.

WTF????

Some of you have been following Darlene's journey with her son, Mark. If not, you may want to go to Darlene's blog to catch up.

Darlene is a mother, writer, artist, and seeker with a soul as wide as the sky and a heart to match. She writes as she apparently lives—with grace and passion and love. Always love. A little more than two weeks ago, Mark was in a terrible car accident. His survival was a miracle, but still he hovers at the edge of danger. Yesterday he had emergency surgery, his 3rd since the accident. Darlene, who has lupus, visited him from the wheelchair made necessary by a flare up.

The driver of the car Mark was riding in is out of the hospital and has been charged with a misdemeanor and released.

WTF????

I do not wish the driver harm, mind you. He's going to have a heavy load to carry every moment for the rest of his life. I just don't understand. Here's a young man from a loving family, grievously injured and struggling from one minute to the next. Thanks to the blog community, hundreds--maybe thousands--pray for his recovery and for his family's strength.

Will God intervene? Does He or She control our journeys? I believe in the power of prayer but question the value of prayers of petition. In other words, I know my faith in God, in the Universe, in a Loving Spirit will help me survive, even thrive, despite difficult circumstances. I pray for the wisdom to see the Path and the strength to follow it. I pray for Mark, several times every day. I pray for Darlene and the rest of the family. But I don't really know that the hand of God will reach down and protect one individual from harm. (And I'm pretty damn sure He isn't converting pop flies to home runs when some ballplayer crosses himself before he swings a bat.)

What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I wish mine was a blind faith, writ large in ideology I dare not question. Not really, of course, but sometimes it seems so appealing.

However you pray, please join me in praying for Mark, his mother Darlene, and their family. The driver, too, while we're at it.

Moonlight Madness

Moonlight waltzes on the pond's dark water tonight, doing sparkling quick steps and slow looping turns with a silent grace and beauty that seeps into my soul as I watch. On my meditation altar, three candles burn. Theiir flickering light reflects in the dark windows facing the pond. Gorgeous instrumentals play in the background, and I am doing absolutely nothing beyond absorbing the abundance.

Well, and typing out my wishes that you are enjoying your evenings every bit as much.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

Stopped in an art supply store this afternoon to buy some more pastels and some paper. Trying to explain my level of proficiency (and establish a reasonable price range for appropriate paper), I fetched Sunday's drawing from the car. The clerk seemed to understand and we happily skittered off to the paper racks, leaving the drawing on the counter. When we returned, a lovely lady asked me if the piece was mine. When I said yes, she said, "I knew it. You look like the person who did that."

When I asked what she meant, she said the piece was detailed, intricate, controlled and precise; she mentioned that the way I was dressed and my appearance matched it.

All my life people have told me I'm sweet. Puke! I hate being called sweet. Now I'm experimenting with color and line, stepping waaaay out of my comfort zone, and a complete stranger tells me my attempt is "detailed and precise." I'm sure she meant no harm—didn't intend to be unkind—but, damn, it was like being told I'm sweet.

If you've spent your life being a "good girl," how do you break that mold? I don't want to be sweet, I want to be exotic and interesting—a little dangerous even. Not aiming for irresponsible here, just not "controlled and precise."

It would be great to make 07 my "year of living dangerously." Not risky, really. Just on the far side of sweet. Got to figure out where to start. Stay tuned.

New Year, New Goals

Skipped the parties I'd been invited to last night. Snug in my little house, I played with color. This piece, inspired by a photo taken by Liz Elayne at Be Present, Be Here, is the first step toward one of my New Year's Goals. Lately I've ached—physically ached—to draw something, to express myself with lines and color. The thing that's always stopped me is a total lack of talent.

Well, guys, fixing that is one of my goals for this year. I'm not gonna let little things stop me anymore. What's more, when I work on projects, I'm gonna show 'em to the world. They don't have to be great. They don't even have to be good. What they DO have to be is expressions of myself, attempts to enjoy even those things I'm not great at.

WooHoo!! Here's the first one, a soft pastel drawing: