Here Comes the Bride

My 2012 collage

As you know if you've ever been a regular reader of this blog, I choose a color and a word for each year.  This year my color is purple and my word is juice.  Last year, I also started the year by making a collage that represented my color and word, which turned out to be a wonderful thing, so I did it again this year.  I have a ton of stuff I want to share about how this year and its themes have unfolded so far, but I'm going to have to break it into several posts, so I hope you'll bear with me and come along for the ride.

In choosing the images for a collage, I keep my theme(s) in mind, but sometimes I will find myself drawn to an image that doesn't completely fit.  In the 2012 collage, that image was the face in the top right corner.

She is a bride from a small village in Kosovo where they paint women's faces for their weddings.  The colors used on her face, other than the obvious white, are blue, red, silver, and gold - not purple.  But I felt the need to include her with no idea why.  A bride?  What did that have to do with anything?

Lo and behold, a couple of days after I finished the collage I got an email from one of my editors at the Taos News, asking me to write an article for the Taos Wedding Guide supplement that comes out every spring.  I would be interviewing three women in Taos who are all ordained interfaith ministers and wedding officiants.

After interviewing these amazing women and then transcribing the interviews, I had no idea how to jump into writing the article.  Weddings are not something I've experienced much in life.  I did marry the same man twice, but the first time was on Halloween in a cemetery, and the second time was on a Wednesday night (in a church this time at least, but it was extremely casual).  I was a flower girl in my uncle and aunt's wedding as a child, and a bridesmaid for a friend from high school, but that's about the extent of it.

I always like to say there's a fine line between "the pre-writing process" and procrastination.  In this case, I felt I needed some inspiration to get started on the article, so I went onto Netflix to try to find some kind of wedding show to stream.  After comparing the few that came up, I chose a reality show called My Fair Wedding because it was higher rated than the others, and I proceeded to watch two episodes in a row, which did in fact inspire me to write the article.

However, this show had a far more profound impact on me than just helping me write.  I ended up watching all 24 episodes available on Netflix over the period of a few weeks.  Once again, something fluffy has changed my life, and in my next post, I'll tell you how.

How A Fluffy Movie Saved My Life

I'm writing this post in response to a question a friend of mine posted on Facebook; she asked bloggers what their goals are for their blogs.  I started to formulate a response, and quickly realized it would be too long-winded for a Facebook comment, because I have more than one blog, and more than one reason for each of them.  (It's probably even too long-winded for a blog post, but you can decide that for yourself.)

This blog was my first.  And I don't think I've ever confessed this here before, but I started it because of watching that epitome of "feel-good" (i.e., fluff) movies, Julie and Julia.  If you've seen it, then you know that it's based on the true story of a woman who started a blog and eventually became famous for it.

Well, I knew going in that there was little chance of fame in blogging these days, now that EVERYONE has a blog.  No, what convinced me to try it was what the Julie character said in the movie when she made the decision.  She said it would be a "regimen" for her, and she saw it as something that would fulfill her need to do something meaningful and creative.  This inspired me, because at the time, I had been living in Taos and working at Subway for about a year - it was one of the most miserable years of my life.  I was a lifelong writer who wasn't writing, and hadn't really since I'd finished my Master's in creative writing four years earlier.

For my Master's, my concentration was poetry, but I had always wanted to get into writing personal essays.  Blogging seemed like a great way to do that with the benefit of immediate gratification, just getting it out there and dropping the whole burden of "trying to get published," which graduate school had completely turned me off to.

So I started this blog, and proceeded to visit other people's blogs and leave comments.  Within a fairly short time, blogging completely and wonderfully exceeded my expectations.  I found myself part of an eclectic online community including (to name just a few) a young man who had been homeschooled, taught in Korea, then proceeded to get his bartender's license and his pilot's license more or less simultaneously; a male Buddhist kindergarten teacher in the Bay area who is married to the town's female mayor; an Australian storyteller-poet-naturalist; a glitzy woman entrepreneur in Dallas; a Scottish woman with equally passionate interests in cooking, photography, and literary pursuits of all kinds; and several spiritually-oriented women who sort of became my church.  One of those women I actually count now among my very closest friends, even though we've still never met in person. 

That in itself was fulfilling enough, but there was more.  Blogging gave me the confidence to think of myself as a writer again, so I started a writing business called Illuminated Manuscripts and created another blog for it.  I made business cards and brochures and joined the Taos Chamber of Commerce, and out of that, I got offered a job writing a weekly column for the Taos News, which I'm still writing today.  Other writing jobs came my way as well, and I have found myself living my childhood dream of writing for a living.

However, since I now had several clients and was no longer working at Subway, one might say I had a life, and blogging began to take up less and less of my time.  And anyone who blogs knows that if you don't do it on a pretty regular basis, the warm glowy sense of community begins to dissolve.  Less and less people comment on your blog, as you comment less and less on theirs, and after a while you just kind of lose touch altogether.  In the past year or so, I've posted here very infrequently, and hardly anyone comments anymore.  It sort of feels like a ghost town.  I miss those golden days, but that's okay.

The blog I started for Illuminated Manuscripts never really took off at all because I found myself with more than enough work without having to promote it.  I'm now about to expand my business' services and will be building a new website for it elsewhere.

My third blog came about when I decided to buy land off-grid and build an earthbag house on it.  Where my purpose for The Whole Blooming World was simply to be writing and sharing that writing, my purpose for Home Sweet Hive is more to document my project and connect with other people doing similar things.  It fascinates me to see that an entirely different group of bloggers has sprung up around me over there, although there are a couple of loyal readers that followed me over from this blog.

I know a lot of people blog for money, and I also know that if you want your business to grow online you should have a blog, but so far, blogging has had nothing to do with these things for me personally.  However, nowadays, I write the weekly blog for the business of one of my clients, and I've seen how it can be a whole different animal.  And once I get my new site up for Illuminated Manuscripts, I will be blogging regularly there for the sake of promoting my business.

Even though this blog has faded into the background of my life and there is little chance that will change in the foreseeable future, I know from time to time I'll still post here even if no one's reading it, because it's become for me a way to track and tell and change the story of my inner life.

If I hadn't watched Julie and Julia it's hard to imagine that my life would be as rich as it is today.  So there's a lot to be said for fluff.  For instance, milkweed is fluffy but plays several important roles: it remedies poison ivy, insulates, repels pests from plants in its vicinity, removes warts, and serves as the sole food source for monarch butterfly larvae.

But I guess some curmudgeons would consider butterflies "fluff" too.  Too bad for them.

Money-Time

My green year is winding down, and in this last portion of it, I have turned my attention toward the last green-related item I wanted to work with this year:  money.

Money has always been a bit of a bugbear for me.  When I was a teenager I rejected my comfortable middle-class upbringing and decided I was "anti-materialistic," i.e., anti-money.

I got over that quite some time ago, but the truth is that I've never been good with money.  It tends to slip through my fingers alarmingly quickly, and my overall financial life has been very much feast or famine, and utterly chaotic. 

So I've been working with a book called The Energy of Money, by Maria Nemeth, which approaches money from a spiritual viewpoint and guides you through a series of exercises to help you become conscious of and heal your relationship with money.

I'm still stuck on Chapter One, in which you are supposed to write your money autobiography.  She provides a whole long list of thought-provoking questions to help the process.  I shouldn't say I'm stuck, really, because even though I'm moving through this process very slowly, I AM doing it.  It's eye-opening to say the least, and so I'm taking the time to really process what I'm writing.

One thing I've realized lately is that as I've been with money, so I've also been with time:  confused about where it all goes.  Which, of course, brings to mind that saying, Time is money.  I never really understood what that meant, primarily because both time and money were such abstract concepts to me that I couldn't really comprehend either of them on a practical level.

But I get it now; it means that money comes to you for time spent earning it.  Duh.  Conventional wisdom might see this as a one-to-one correspondence:  If I work so many hours, I will get so much pay.  If I have a "bad" job, the pay will be low and if I have a "good" job the pay will be high.  But frankly, I think it sucks either way, and I believe it can be different.  In fact, I know it can.  There's a sort of momentum that can be created around money that brings a greater and greater return with fewer and fewer hours.  I've seen it in people I've written about for my Taos News column, Innovators & Entrepreneurs, and I also just know it intuitively.

Recently I was browsing at one of my favorite websites, mythinglinks.org, and I came across a very interesting  page about money.  The author of the site, Kathleen Jenks, laments that in terms of earning a living, "it's been unsettling to face the fact that I've lived most of this lifetime feeling like a racehorse hitched to a plow."

Reading this really bummed me out, because I can relate.  I also recently interviewed a woman for my column whose work life as a freelance writer and a teacher parallels mine.  But she just started an online business (her website is journalsandnotepads.com), and she talked about how different this is from freelancing, where you're selling your TIME.

That conversation got me thinking about starting my own online business, but that's a story for another day.  The significance for this discussion is that it was yet another pointer to my need to focus on my relationships with time and money.  I began to think that perhaps a budget would not be such a bad thing after all.  And while I've always been okay with schedules, I haven't been disciplined enough about them when I'm working at home on "my own" time.  So I decided that thinking of a schedule as a sort of time-budget might be a better idea - to trick myself into sticking to it, essentially.  I've decided  that the planner I get for 2012 will have the hours of the day in it so that instead of just making a list of what needs to be done each day, I can actually schedule all of it.

I also signed up at Mint.com.  I had read several very good reviews of it, and then came across another one recently that finally convinced me to check it out.  And I have to say, I LOVE it.  I honestly cannot overstate how much this tool is helping me at last to really grasp my money situation and how to manage it.  It's like when you look at what appears to be the chaotic blur of a stereogram and then finally see the image, and go, "Oh wow, yeah," and your eyes relax.  For the first time in my life, I have made a balanced budget that is realistically based on what I actually have coming in, and I can see exactly where all of my money is going.

This is both relaxing and and freeing, which is ironic, considering how long I resisted budgeting because I felt it would be so stifling.

It's an interesting side benefit that budgeting my money is helping me budget my time as well.  I'm currently writing an ebook for a client who pays me an hourly rate.  It's up to me how many hours a week I put in.  What I've been able to do is put into my Mint.com budget the amount of money I need to make monthly working on the ebook, and then figure out exactly how many hours a week I need to put in to make that happen.  Cake! 

All of this has resulted in an incredible feeling of awakening and empowerment in these areas of my life.  I realize now that I've always let money and time just kind of happen to me, but I'm increasingly feeling like I'm in the driver's seat.  Money and time are tools, and while there will of course be unexpected things that happen and certain limits beyond my power to change, overall it's possible to exercise control over how I receive and use them, and in doing so, the mysterious result is abundance.