Note to Self.

Felt appropriate to brush letter this message for myself this week.

As much as I value productivity and growth and achieving goals, I’m recognizing how valuable it is to just rest.

It’s my nature to accomplish all the things on my to-do list, so it’s been a deliberate act of recalibrating and slowing down and drawing boundaries to ensure that my energy levels are sustained. It takes a conscious effort to spend your time in a meaningful way, versus allowing it to be diluted in the minutiae.

Speed is one thing- merely going fast.

Velocity is different. It’s speed with a specific direction.

Let yourself rest. Tune out the excess. Then move with precision towards the things that truly matter.

Deliberate Daydreaming.

“The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.”
— Lynda Barry

Try this simple experiment:

Go for a walk without your phone. Stand in line at the grocery store without looking at your phone. Eat your meals without your phone on the table. Go to bed without your phone in the room.

At first you may feel anxious (at least, I did). And then you may begin to embrace your own thoughts and find your mind wandering and daydreaming. You may have new ideas about a business, a place you’d like to visit, a recipe you’d like to try, a person you’d like to connect with. Trust the flow. It’s fun to see where our mind goes when we give it the freedom to wander.

I find it most fascinating when I ask myself bigger questions:

  • What’s one thing I could experiment living without for a week?

  • If I gave a 20 minute TED talk, what’s the message I’d love to share?

  • If I was asked to teach two Skillshare classes, what would I teach?

  • What are the top three most amazing experiences in my life so far?

  • How would I live a meaningful life if I was blind? Deaf? Paralyzed?

  • Who are my top 3 heroes? What do they have in common?

  • What are some topics I am disinterested in? How can I learn more about them in order to appreciate them?

  • Who am I fascinated by, and what qualities do they have?

We’ve all had plenty of input (social media, news, notifications, email). It’s fun to allow your mind to direct its own entertainment. Follow the flow of your ideas. Ride the wave. Put your hands up and surrender to the creative energy you naturally have within you.

Flowing Together.

Today’s alcohol ink art. Meditative and fluid, like the ocean.

This pandemic teaches us we are not separate from one another, from the earth, from Nature herself. A virus we cannot see has radically transformed our sense of normalcy. We cannot hug our loved ones, we must stand 6 feet apart at the grocery store, we are quarantined inside our houses and wear masks when we need to venture out for the essentials.

And yet.

I am experiencing more interconnectedness than separateness in my life. I walk and make eye contact and nod my head with solidarity at strangers on the sidewalk because they cannot see my smile underneath my mask. What was a once-a-week call to my parents has morphed into daily Facetime conversations about our days, what we ate for dinner, what we saw on our walks. The mundane has become beautiful because we paying better attention to our lives. We connect together over those simple moments. Friends from the past have resurfaced and we’re dusting off where we left off with newfound excitement. Thoughtful, heartfelt handwritten cards appear in my mailbox like confetti. I connect more deeply with my clients because we are navigating the same changes, constraints, and uncertainty together.

At first I felt like a lonely trickle of water making its way down a mountain, searching for a place to rest and pool. Now, I am meeting with streams to form rivers, where together, ultimately, we join the sea.

Solitude.

Captured on this morning’s run. Learning to fully embrace this collective pause to think, create, and just BE.

““But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Exactly one year I wrote in my journal, “There is no despair for one who creates.” Lately, making art (actually, making anything) has been a raft that I can rest upon to save me from the river of despair. And surprisingly enough, I’m realizing how much solitude I’ve needed to reconnect to my creativity in a new and profound way. Disconnecting from the world has given me the opportunity to connect with deeper parts of myself. Silence and solitude have been tools to retreat from the world of push notifications and incessant news and chatter. Solitude has honed my ability to listen, think, compost ideas, and plant new seeds of insight.

Thomas Merton wrote, “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.”

Solitude and silence are the towels wiping away the grime and grit from the windows of my life. I see things more clearly now that I have the space to reflect and think without distraction.

I’ve experimented with turning off my WiFi completely at night. Not just putting all my devices on airplane mode- I’ve completely taken it a step further from the advice of a friend, and unplugged the entire router and modem. It’s been a game changer. I’ve had the most restful nights of sleep (last night was day 3), and I’ve experienced multiple dreams per night in detail. I wake up without email or news and begin my day in a mindful, thoughtful way. It has transformed my morning routine and my overall sense of rest and recovery. ‘Unplugging’ has had both physical and mental benefits for me.

This collective pause of shelter in place has had its ups and downs. But I’ve experienced a newfound sense of creativity in the solitude which has kept despair at bay. With everything we’ve lost and are grieving at this time, it’s helpful to remember what we have agency over. We can choose to create. We can choose to make. Make art. Make love. Make meaning. Make memories. Make poems. Make nourishing meals. Make music. Make connections.

Rilke was right- let us build our support and our home from our solitude. And from there, build and cultivate our community and connections with our creativity. There is no room in our home for despair.

Writing as a Practice.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Gravitude Chats, a podcast series that interviews women sharing their stories of grit, grace and gravitas. This was an organic conversation surrounding the current situation of COVID-19, but it soon unfolded into a bigger conversation about writing as a practice. For me, journaling as a daily habit has allowed me to see my life from a different perspective- one that is both close-up and detailed, as well as provide enough objective space (as a reader going back over old journal entries) to notice the broader themes of my life.

By paying attention to what we pay attention to, this allows us to direct the course of our sails towards the seas we really want to explore. Writing helps with that. To notice what we care about, what irks us, what we’re curious about, what we love.

I hope this conversation inspires you to begin a writing practice. To not be afraid of the blank page, but rather to see it as your friend. A welcome mat into the beautiful home that you are.

And, if you make it all the way to the end of our conversation in this video, I’d love to hear what your ‘sunflowers’ are in your life at this time.

Blessings,

Julianne

All of Them.

I’ve started to notice more of nature’s gifts and metaphors during my evening walks. There’s one lemon tree in particular that always catches my attention. Its branches longingly ache and reach over the fence on the street that I walk, and both juicy ripe lemons and rotting black ones dangle above me. It’s quite a sight, the mixture of both vitality and death on the same single tree.

This lemon tree illustrates how life offers us both experiences. It’s not always either/or. Sometimes it’s “Yes, I feel this, and I feel this” simultaneously. We can feel both suffering and joy. We can feel grief and hope. My pastor passed away on Good Friday and on Sunday, his wife created a beautiful video tribute thanking the church family for walking with them throughout the years of his cancer. Her message was one of gratitude and joy that he is no longer suffering from chemo and radiation, and yet mirrored in her words and voice was also a deep grief and sadness for the loss of someone we all loved and admired.

I’ve started to soften and appreciate the full spectrum of my emotions. It feels better not having to decide between one extreme or the other. We are allowed to feel them all simultaneously. Let them hang and grow and exist together because they all have lessons to teach us. Sadness and joy. Grief and hope. Our hearts are big enough to hold them all.

Enunciate.

I played piano on my church’s worship team throughout junior high and high school. We practiced together every Friday night and early Sunday mornings before the main service. One Easter Sunday before service we were practicing the song “He’s Alive” when Dwight, our guitarist and worship leader, stopped us.

“Enunciate. We all need to enunciate better when we sing,” he said.

It’s the difference between singing ‘He’s alive’ and ‘He’s a lie.’”

That lesson has always stayed with me. The importance of articulation. The importance of enunciation. It can make a world of difference. In some instances, life or death.

Happy Easter. He’s alive.