The most important thing we can do for ourselves professionally, personally, emotionally, and psychologically is get clear on who we really are.  It’s only then that we have a base to start from.  When we get out of our own way and see ourselves for the amazing, brilliant, loving creatures we actually are, we can become the creative artists of our own lives.  We are the canvass.  And we determine the colors and textures and subject matter.

Risk…

brings rewards.  Conflicts.  Change.  Unexpected results.  Risk tests us, draws us out of our set paradigms and forces us to see that we not only don’t have all the answers, but we might not even have an idea about the right questions.  The second we step into risk and decide to break our own mold, we hurl ourselves forward.  

Trust…

has to begin with ourselves.  We can’t even begin to trust anyone else until we grasp that we have ourselves before we have anyone else.  Trusting gut instincts, knowing intrinsically what right and good for us, and being able to give ourselves the things we need provides a base for everything we do and everything we are.

Acceptance…

 in its purest form of love we can give ourselves.  Acceptance as in, stop resisting.  Stop wishing it were different. Stop trying to control other people and events.  Accept what is in your life right now. Accept what is and bless it.  Because if you take risk, trust yourself and accept the results, you own your power.  You own your own truth.

This book is told from my perspective of having changed my life entirely, from language to country to profession.  The

These are the concepts that make up my new ebook Your Truth.  I am giving away the introduction and the first two chapters.

Introduction – The Unraveling – My personal lightening moment of life change

Chapter 1 – the Tau of I Disagree

Chapter 2 – the Harmony Myth

subscribe and receive your free chapters

Once you’ve subscribed, you’ll receive, within 24 hours, an email newsletter with a link to the PDF download for the free chapters.  That’s all there is to it.

All current subscribers will receive a email newsletter with the link for the PDF download.

The rest of the book will be available shortly on Amazon as a Kindle download.

Let’s get these free chapters into as many hands as possible!  If you think these words and ideas are helpful, pass this post along to friends and family who might benefit, who might find the start to their own change if they  just receive a little push.

This book is for you, from me, from the heart.

I am very much looking forward to hearing your feedback and wish you peace.

diana

Well, it’s almost here. I’ve just received the proof copy of the introduction and first two chapters which will be available as a free download here on my blog. When I first committed to writing this ebook, I had a clear vision of the direction I wanted it to take.  And like all works of art and passion, it’s changed, developed, morphed and grown in ways that I never imagined as I sat, those long winter months, and pounded out the first few chapters.

This ebook is entitled Your Truth. And in order for me to reach my hand across cyberspace and offer you a nudge in the direction of finding your own truth, I need to do some digging on my own.   I found myself rereading the works of Malcom Gladwell, Pema Chodron, Brene Brown and so many more just to be able to cope with the ideas that I was discovering.  My reading and my writing led to moments of clarity and wonder that started to come through my fingers in  new pots and bowls and vases.

I realized that I what I really wanted to do was write a book about finding the strength to stand on two feet and say,

this is who I am

this is what I stand for

this is what my life is about

“One of the greatest lessons I learned from honing in on my own path is that while we have tremendous power over our own life, actions, and thought, we have absolutely none over anyone else’s. Accepting our true powerlessness over what other people think is one of the most crucial steps in grasping the enormity of our own personal truth. ” – Your Truth

And thus the book went from being about  your innermost voice and thoughts to encompassing how we take what we know to be our own strengths and use them as a platform to live our lives in the way we want to live them.   And that was a much more involved book to write.

“By stepping into our own risk, we step into our own fullness, into our own vulnerability. We become amazingly sensitized to our own soul. It’s so much easier to empathize with others when you don’t play it safe in life. It’s so much easier to see what people around us have to go through to survive. It’s so much harder to judge others once you’ve put yourself through the ringer of embracing risk in your own life, once you’ve decided to change something important to you and have manifested it through your own power. It’s humbling and extraordinarily life-affirming at the same time.” – Your Truth

I want you to have a taste, a feel for what I am writing, which is why I am making the first 25 pages a gift to you for being part of my blogging life for so long.  I know you know that you’re very important to me, and it’s you that sustains me on some days with your comment love. For those of you already signed up for my blog, the chapters will be available as an automatic download.  For everyone else, you’ll receive your free chapters as soon as you subscribe.

Please stay tuned next week for the free chapter release.

Our B&B just opening up for the season after monster backhoes were here and tore into the hill in back of the house, essentially freeing it from its chains but shaking me to the bones.  I wish I could say it was different, that I’ve learned to love waiting two years for planning permission and getting an estimate four times what I thought something was going to cost and then sitting in my house while the ground shakes, knowing that there will be nothing green in back there for at least a year because of the removal of a massive HILL.  I wish I could say that the fact that there will be no water coming down into any of our buildings ever again was consolation. I wish I could get all peaceful and Zen and say I’ll wait for the zillion clover and lupine seeds to grow and fertilize the new terraces and envision the vineyard that will be back there once the earth has been worked a couple of years.   But instead, all it made me was sleepless and sad, frustrated that every single corner of the house was covered with dust only two weeks before the guests were to arrive.  I wish I wouldn’t have turned into a crying, angry banchee, racing from task to task, falling into the crazy trap of trying to make it all perfect (I swear I only do that when I’m dead tired, because normally I’m sane enough to know what a ridiculous goal that is), if it meant cracking every single nail and not getting my hair cut and not even looking in the mirror, lest I cry from the muddled  lack of self care that would stare me back.  Try practicing what you preach, girl, I would think if I looked in the mirror for more than a second.

Every year we try to do something to improve this property. And every year we cut it too close and the thing that gets sacrificed is our peace of mind.  You would have thought we would have learned by now, but I guess we haven’t.

I wish that I could tell you that there has been a year that was different than this, that I came into the season rested and whole, balanced and feeling good about myself.  I never have, in all eight years.  Maybe if we had a place that didn’t require a Midas effort to get it through the transition from five feet of snow to the pool being opened,  because of mud and water and peeled plaster and creeky old buildings and building permissions and so many other reasons that I can’t even explain, maybe I would be different at the start of the season.  But no matter how much I want it to be easy here, it’s not. It never will be. It’s just the nature of this particular beast.

I wish I could detach from the crazy, stupid amount of work it takes to have a peaceful retreat in the hills long enough to fully grasp what our effort actually means. Because judging by the looks on our first guests’ faces, it means a lot. It means enough to help me temporarily forget the 250 count ibuprofen bottle that was the month of April, the arguments with the backhoe dudes about the ever-mushrooming costs, the two hundred lavender, rosemary, rose and geranium plants that were swallowed whole and I barely noticed because in the grand scheme of things, that ain’t nothin’ on a property this size, the plaster that got wiped away in one day of flooding rains and had to be redone.

But I had no time to detach. No time to go from doing the final edits on my upcoming book to 22 days of being landlocked by two monster snowstorms that kept our car a quarter mile downhill from our house to immediately having the weather be as hot as July for four weeks to a month of cold downpours.  And the digging, the plastering, the painting, the planting – that all ended, as usual, the day before the first guests drove up and I remembered to clean out the dirt from under my nails and floss my teeth. When they retired for the evening, I went inside and cried until there were no more tears because they loved everything but I was just so tired that I couldn’t even move one little finger.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bitch, but it’s nights like those that I wish rural Italy would finally grasp the concept of takeout. 

I download a bunch of new music from iTunes, meditation music, anything to make me feel calm and cure my sleepless nights.  I try to get into the kitchen ten minutes earlier so that the second kneading on the bread isn’t rushed and that I can have ten minutes to think.  Just to think.  It will be ok, I tell myself. You’ll get back into the rhythm.  You do every year.  It’ll be the same this year.  I try to calm myself and I feel the knife in my hand slicing the strawberries, as I grab one of my bowls and put the slices in, one by one.  I arrange the cheese and herbs on my plates with the greatest of care and Micha comes in, presses the blood oranges as the bread bakes and I see the first shutters open upstairs.

The sun streams in the window and my new meditation music, loaded into a new B&B playlist, fills the room.  I go outside and stretch my back and neck and promise myself that this time, I really will make that massage appointment.  This season, I really will take care of myself.  Breakfast is put away, the washer whirls the towels clean for the first time this season, and I sit on the veranda for three solid minutes and breathe.

I’ll get my balance back, my joy. I’ll put on something pretty and go to dinner with my husband.  I’ll find time to throw a pot, or two, or twenty.  I’ll stop resisting, again.  I’ll take the queue from my guests and find it all just as it should be.  I’ll close my eyes. I’ll step back from being crazed, overwhelmed, vulnerable, hurt and sad from exhaustion and find the beauty that is right on top of me and all around me.

I’ll start sleeping again. I’ll start loving my life again.

I’ll start being grateful again.

The new season has begun.

Water in my dreams, hoping that the season won’t bring another break in the ancient main up the road, as I check to make sure the pressure is full every morning during the sweltering days. Water on my hill, threatening the back of my old stone house and washing away my new grass seed.  Water in the rain collector, feeding the pool and the garden, the old pump dropped in and shooting the precious liquid in every direction.  Water sprinkling from my fingers onto the earth on the pottery wheel, softening it, making it pliable and elastic and supple so that it can be a cup, or a bowl, or simply a vase for flowers.

Air through the window, signaling the oncoming storm, causing me to hope the agricoli won’t have any hail this time around that can hurt the baby grapes. Air as the scirocco, blowing my papers all over the room, slamming the shutters and scaring the dog. Air in my lungs, as I expand to take in the extraordinary beauty of the place I find myself.  Air expanding the bread that sits in the warm window, preparing to take its place at the daily breakfast ritual. Air swooping in and sucking the water out of the earth, turning the pot from soft to hard as it sits and waits for its alchemy.

Fire on the hillside, as the excess vine branches turn to smoke in later winter.  Fire in my throat from a peperoncino too spicy to actually eat. Fire in my voice as I curse yet another mosquito bite on my leg, enviously looking over to my husband, who the mosquitos hate.  Fire in the kiln, hissing and melting and bending the earth into an object to serve and desire.

I sit and listen to what the elements have to teach me today.  I feel desperate from the rain;  I need to work in the garden – but maybe I don’t.  Maybe I should be sitting here writing instead, as the water streams down my window pane and my tea cools unexpectedly on this unseasonably chilly day. One day soon,  the fire of the mid-day sun will tell me to stop hanging sheets and go find a chair in the shade and close my eyes.  I’ll sit on my favorite wall – the little one, next to my barn, the one that gets the full impact of the sunset – and I’ll breathe deeply, taking the air right down to my belly, telling myself that it’s OK to just sit and do nothing even if it’s just for a couple of minutes as my hand scrapes the Earth next to me, looking for flowers and ladybugs and a hint of cool moisture.

I carry the elements with me – more consciously today than ever before. They dictate my routine and my life in the unrelentingly harsh, magnificent Piemontese countryside. They tell me to accept when I want to resist, to realize that change is coming even when today just feels like a muddy mess, to revel in the magic of the alchemy that is this moment.

Here’s a lovely piece of piano music called Delight by Michael Jones for you to enjoy, with love from my hill to you. 

This post is for Gloria, Rebecca, Melanie, Alexandra, and Jessica, the ladies of the Italy Blogging Roundtable.

We’re almost there.

Every spring, we become transfixed on corners, on subtle combinations of colors and pieces that, while not reflecting perfection, are a manifestation of what we want this home to express.Sun combines with rain, paint combines with iron oxide to stain chipped plastered walls, as lavender and rosemary try to take root.

White sheet towels are rinsed in fresh squeezed lemon juice and hung in the sun before being rolled and placed in the bathrooms. The kitchen garden is almost fully planted; the only things missing are the peperoncini and the basil, which will go in in a week.  The cilantro and dill are starting to show their baby shoots.

Anyone who knows Italy well knows how wonderful these San Marzano tomatoes will be come August….

 I’m always astounded, every year, how it manages to come together.  Just when I’m on the edge of thinking it’s not going to be beautiful, just when I’m ready to give up and sigh and put my head in my hands, somehow it gets right to where it’s supposed to be. It’s how I know that there’s harmony in everything when I just finally let go. 

So much is asked of us in the average day.  Not  just the tasking, but also the comprehending.  The amount of information available to us borders on infinite as we  cope with making sense of it.  We try not to overwhelm.  We do the best we can with the time we’re given.  And at the end of the day, we see, with great clarity, all the things we’ve pushed off for another day.  Those things fall into a bucket – a bucket of things to do when we have time.  One day.

And we wonder, really wonder if there will be the time, or the resources, or the freedom and support from those around us to fly.  Ever.  

Because flying means taking steps and falling and recovering.  Can we really do that in between everything else we have to do?  Can we really try and allow ourselves the luxury of obstacles and failure and new starts that flying really requires, all the while keeping up the metronomic tact of our everyday existence?

Of course we can.  But it means looking at time in new ways, to try to get what we want out of it, instead of letting it get what it wants out of us.

Once we’ve decided that something is worth sacrifice, we have to sacrifice something.  Time online.  Television time.  Wine drinking time.  Pasting together pockets of time, small ones, to dedicate to something meaningful can change everything. Because once we dedicate ourselves to exploring our interests in a way that’s unencumbered and free, we will be propelled forward until the entire activity starts to take on a life of its own.  I’ve seen it happen again and again.  It always amazes me, synchronicity, because it  incorporates a strong spiritual aspect, one where if we push ourselves in the right direction, we’ll brought to a completely different place, through doors where the keys fit and unlock treasures without as much as a sound.  That kind of spirituality – the kind the moves us just because we’re open to it  moving us.

I’m finishing up my ebook, Your Truth.  The first few chapters will be available soon here as a free download.  If you like it, the rest will be available for purchase on Amazon.  We’re starting our B&B season shortly and are finishing major landscaping work.  And I’m working on the publicity plan for the release of my upcoming novel.  My pottery studio is full of pieces to glaze and finish in the next week or two. Overwhelm is hitting me in the night and the early hours of the morning.  But I look at all of these activities – every single one of them  - and I realize that they are a result of taking chances and flying.  So I’m accepting the overwhelm right now as a part of where I am.  I remember to step back and not think.  To allow my spirit to breathe and take in the moment as it presents itself.  It’s not always easy to do this but I know I must.  And that every day is beautiful, even the ones fraught with challenge and trepidation.

That life is lovely.

Speaking of loveliness, if you would like to seek more treasures about your own life, your own time and how to get what you want from both, take a look at my friends Courtney Carver and Tammy Strobel’s project, your lovely life.  They’re offering the perfect online course for just this subject called your lovely lessons.   

For those of you who are not familiar with these two ladies, their blogs are a trove of inspiration about simple living and making time for what you really want.  They’re two experts on the subject.  I’ve known them both for years, and return to their blogs again and again to center myself. They interviewed me recently for the Lovely Life project – it was an honor to be part of it.

Northern Italy is a symphony in the spring.

The colors and textures change daily, making for a complete creative assault on my senses.  I discover elderly ladies in the lower fields of our property collecting mysterious wild greens.  They smile demurely and close their bags post-haste, not wanting to give up the secrets of the booty their mothers and grandmothers came here to pick over the last hundred years.  It used to salt me but good that they would come on my property to take something without asking, but the years in Italy have mellowed me. I want them to come, to hold on to the traditions, to bring their daughters and their granddaughters to do the same.  It’s not really just my property at all, and the greens, by squatter’s rights, are theirs.

Their path crosses mine in the lower fields.  I came to Italy to find myself;  their path was always here. They know who they are.  When I mention that we came here to put down down roots, no complicated words are necessary.  They understand almost immediately what I’m trying to say.  They cannot imagine a life without roots, firmly grafted to a specific place.

The change in season morphs our property from an ugly duckling of grey earth and soaked bare branches to an elegant swan of flowering trees and neon green grass. I want to grasp each day and not let any of them go.  Spring renews my sense of my own journey, fills me with purpose. Our hands are dried and split from too much time in the earth planting lavender and rosemary and not enough time at the salon.   But it doesn’t matter.  It won’t be completely done by the time the first cars full of guests come rumbling up the quarter mile drive, but it will be enough.  Enough for them to be able to shed their worries for a few days, pour themselves a glass of wine, and sit on the veranda to breathe.  Which is what’s the most important, anyway.

The interactions, the ones with the ladies in the field or with the guests that drive up, feed my soul and give me new direction in my creative work. I’m amazed and awed by what we all go through to survive and thrive. People’s stories, stories that at one time might have bored me or made me roll my eyes, fascinate me now. Each person with whom we cross paths has something to tell us, something to share. If we allow their field of energy to enter ours, we can’t help but grow and change.  Because as much as our external path – the places we live, the things we do – tells of one part of our journey, it’s our internal path – the one of self awareness – that leads us to the deepest sense of who we are.

I’m taking the colors around me and I’m going into the pottery studio to try and develop glazes that reflect nature.  Soft whites and creams, maybe a touch of green. My new pieces are more organic than ever, more natural.  I like this direction – it suits me on the path I find myself on presently. Here are some new pieces in the raw.

What path do you find yourself on?  What do you pick up on conversations with those around you that are signs as to how you should continue?  What is it that moves you as you remain open to events in your life?

I wish you peace on this beautiful spring day from the bel paese.

 photo by turid emberland

Over the last year and a half,  I’ve been working on a project that has consumed me.  One January day  in 2011, as I walked through the vegetable aisle of the local supermarket eyeballing the fennel, I was hit with the premise for a story.  This could be a good one, I thought to myself, as I had in the past about other possible book premises, but for some reason, the thought stayed with me through the cheese aisle and all the way to laundry detergents.  I didn’t have anything but my wallet with me, so I couldn’t write the idea down.  I rushed out of the store, leaving the cart and my Euro deposit behind, and raced home, hoping I wouldn’t forget the idea before getting there.  The fire was crackling away in our small office.  I buzzed in, ignoring my husband’s inquiries about dinner, sat down at my trusty white Mac laptop, and  hammered out what was to eventually become Chapter Three of a story called True Vines.

It’s a story that goes something like this:

Shortly after her magnanimous, strong-willed Italian husband suddenly dies, a heartbroken Meryl Kramer turns her back on the bel paese and Francesco’s loving family to return to her hometown in Pennsylvania, hoping to find a safe place to heal and start over. Instead, she discovers that distance and misunderstanding have changed her relationship with her family, that she sacrificed important parts of herself through living her husband’s chosen dream and that consequences from past choices can’t be ignored. And that Italy, with its harsh, unforgiving beauty, will not allow itself to be forgotten.

I’m so thrilled to announce that I’ve signed a book publication deal with Gemelli Press, an independent publishing company out of Seattle, Washington and Calabria, Italy that specializes in literature of all types pertaining to Italy.  Many of you already know that my friend, fellow expat and attorney Michelle Fabio recently joined Gemelli as a Managing Editor.  Michelle played a key role in editing this book, and I never could have gotten to this point without her.

The publishing of  True Vines is a watershed of sorts.  I’ve been writing for years.  Half written manuscripts lay around on floppy disks, for heavens sake, still yet to be finished.  But there was something about the writing ritual for True Vines that was good for me at this point in time. In order to write this book, I not only needed to discipline myself, but I needed to find flow.  It required me finding a special spiritual place in order to be able to write.  In other words, I connected with myself for long stretches.  This was the exercise I needed at this point in life – the exercise of being present with my own Source.  From that perspective alone, it was worth every bit of energy and love it took to write it.

The book is due out in both print and Epub versions on Amazon and at retail locations in October of 2012.

I’ve sat politely, here on my hill, and listened to people tell me why they can’t do what they want to do.  The reasons vary, but they  always the same group of things.  Money. Time. But I’m here to tell you what I won’t tell my paying guests because I’m too busy being a polite hostess.  Outside of being physically unable to do something, there is no excuse for not moving in the direction of what you really want.

FEAR is the emotion that contracts us into cramped, judgmental shadows of who we really are – and all that judgement?  It’s against ourselves, which is the most poisonous, illness-creating type of judgement that there is.  It’s like taking life’s potential, rolling it up into a ball, and hitting ourselves over the head with it until we can’t stand anymore.

You may be accustomed to using fear as silly putty, molding into excuses like “I don’t have time, plus I don’t have the funds.”  But if you’ve got time to twitter and Facebook for an hour, or look at those soaps or  if you have enough money to get your hair cut every month, you have time and money.  I’m sorry, but you do. You can get your hair cut every six months, or cut it yourself, if you want something bad enough. You can stop buying clothes for a whole year, maybe even more.  There are so many things you can do to scrape together what you need to move foreword in your life towards the goal that lies within who you really are. But first you have to get out of your own way.  You can simplify your eating habits, your TV habits, your expenditure habits. You have to stop listening to advertising and neighbors and well-meaning family and friends and spouses who validate choices that don’t help you with your goals. You can believe your own voice before you believe anyone else’s.  You can start realizing that you have what it takes to do that thing to which you’re drawn.   Because you know everything already about who you really are if you’d only quiet down enough to listen. And when you’ve finally gotten out of your own way, you will find your soul poking out from behind all of that mental clutter, revealing to you every little thing you already know to be true.

Nothing’s easy and everything’s easy.

None of the change will get you what you want.  It will put you in the direction; it will start the Universe’s scheming on your behalf. But it’s not going to give you the thing that you want.  Because, see, it’s never really about the end result.  It’s about opening yourself up to possibilities. And you won’t ever even see the possibilities while you’re standing in your own way, blocking the light, the air, and the energy.  Allow yourself to experience the possible.  Walk towards that which you want – and you will walk toward a thousand doors ready to open on your behalf.  The goal may change.  In fact, you might forget, in the end, what the goal even was. And it doesn’t matter.  Because the path is your saving grace; it’s your hymn, your mantra.

Awakening the sound of your own soul will make everything easy, because you’ll know what’s right for you. Check your gut. Follow what you know to be your truth.  I promise you, you will never, ever go wrong. Ever.

People ask me all the time about starting over and change.  It’s a topic that seems to capture everyone, as though change, in and of itself, was the means to an end. As though a goal that sits at the end of a long series of circumstantial changes will result in a burst of happiness and fulfillment.

I’m somewhat of an expert at circumstantial change, as I’ve lived in three countries and have moved thirteen times in thirty years.  I used to say I was something of a nomad, but I think it goes further than that.  The human energy required to reroot thirteen times explains a lot to me about who I am. There’s been a great deal of searching going on. It wasn’t, though, until I moved to Italy that I had the time to really process the whirlwind of my life. I’ve actually lived in this place longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life.  In December, we will be here nine years.

We came here with almost a maniacal need to put down roots, and to build something meaningful and somewhat permanent that we could lean on to let us breathe.   We were willing to do whatever it took to make this project work.  But what it would really take, in retrospect, to succeed at this lifestyle, was something that I wasn’t ready to reckon with.  I was willing to change my circumstance, my income level, the square footage of my residence, my car, my wardrobe, my diet.  I was flexible to the point of being self-defeating. Whatever it takes, I thought, through the blurred tears and aching bones.

People who knew me couldn’t really understand why I was so fragile, scared and defeated.  After all I wanted all of this change.  We  brought it on ourselves.  What was the problem?

The problem was that I hadn’t yet reckoned with the greatest change to be made of all. I was ready to change this place with the goal of making it the most beautiful little inn on a hill ever, no matter what it took for me to get there. But I was blinded to the fact that even if that grand goal were to happen, I would still be fragile and hurt and unhappy with all that I had accomplished. Because the real problem was that I could not see, through all of this, my own goodness.  I could not embrace the fact that everything I did, every day, was enough.  Everything was good. In fact, everything was better than good. If you would have heard the guests speak of our place, you would say, Diana, what on earth are you talking about?  The guests love your B&B.  But all I could see, all I ever could see, was what wasn’t done. And I viewed each and every one of those undone things as a momentous personal failure.

This was nothing new. Being satisfied with accomplishments has always escaped me.  As I would tick off the things that I had managed to do or learn, I would immediately keep those things in check with the list of what I had left to learn, left to accomplish – a list that was always so much longer and more difficult.  On the days of my biggest accomplishments – landing the best job ever, getting a raise,  learning how to conjugate the past perfect in German, making the prettiest bowl I had ever made – I would crawl under the covers and cry because I would have to raise the stakes again.  Nothing was ever enough.

Looking back, all the need for circumstantial change was just my pushing my aching self further. I created new yardsticks with which to judge my accomplishments.  New languages, new professions, new creative ventures.  When I’d master one thing, I’d move on to the next, and then the one after that.  It’s just now, now at this very critical time in my life, that I am becoming aware of something very important.

It’s enough.

Whatever we put forth, however we do it, it’s enough and it’s good on its own.  We don’t have to take what we’ve done and pulverize it by creating another new goal out of it. we can just let the good be there. There is no need, none whatsoever, to take all the good we do and  minimizing it by looking beyond it as soon as it’s in the past.  We can expand into ourselves and take in the goodness of all we do.  We can enjoy and revel in our own amazingness.  We can relax.

We can let go.  Nothing bad is going to happen if we let go and allow ourselves the pleasure of just being.

*

I have had the most amazing week.

I communicated Amy Oscar about what’s going on and just touching in the same vibration with her made me feel calmer. If you don’t know who Amy is, then I urge you not only to visit her site, but to join Twitter on Sunday mornings at 10 am Eastern time under the hash tag #soulcall .  It has become a regular stop of spiritual awareness for me.  Also, you might want to download her book about angels. 

I caught up with simplicity expert Courtney Carver about what’s happening and about the wonderful new project she is working on with the amazing  Tammy Strobel  called Your Lovely Life , a chapter by chapter course for finding the beauty in our lives. I’ll be talking more about this in the next weeks.

Through my friend Cristina Colli, author of the clean, lovely, and soothing lifestyle blog Positively Beauty, I learned of  Anita Moorjani, an amazing woman who has written a book called Dying to be Me, a beautiful account of her near death experience at the final phase of Stage 4B Hodgkins Lymphoma and her choice to come back and live the life she was about to leave forever.

I went back and forth with my friend Gina DePalma, executive pastry chef at Mario Batali’s Babbo Restaurant in Manhattan.  She’s in the throes of writing her next amazing cookbook after Dolce Italiano, and I am trying to see if I can possibly create a special plate in my kiln that can even begin to do her beautiful desserts justice.  It’s a real challenge, but one that I love, because creating plates for special people and events is a labor of love.

I feel blessed and reassured that everything is exactly as it should be as I go into myself, let go of the doing and embrace the being.

I wish you, my trusted readers, a week full of promise and light.  Thank you for being there.