This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.
A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.
I’m here as a kind of halfway house—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.
All of the things are blooming. Have you noticed? June is here. The Cecil Brunner rosebush is magnificent this year--an explosion of flowers so heavy that its top has fallen away from the white wall of the little city cottage where Lucia is made, and is spilling toward the alleyway. There is a lesson here for me, in expectation and fruition...
Sunday, April 9, 2017 - Daily Notes, From the Editor (550 words). Whoa, April is intense. Burgeoning. This thing we call Spring is aptly named. To the untrained eye, new growth appears suddenly, but if you have been paying attention you know: this all started long ago.
Happy New Year! Oh, the plans I had for ending 2016 with a neat bow, a perfect email, and an announcement of a new offering I've been working on for early 2017. Out the window they flew sometime in the last week while I struggled to balance heart work with paid work, dreams with reality. Instead, I woke this morning unfinished. Like I always do...
I am experiencing something in my personal life right now that feels stressful to my body, my nervous system, and my brain because I associate it with big fears. Old patterns of thinking loom large. Even though the truth is that things have changed, and even though the likelihood is strong there will come a positive outcome this time, still I find myself ruminating on what might go wrong…
“Fearless is so not part of it. If you’re fearless, there’s something wrong. The fear part is how you know you’re close to the truth. It’s how you know you’re close to something that matters. If you’re fearless, you’ve probably done it a thousand times.”
April 15, 2016 - Daily Notes
This week, I met Lucia's design advisor, Karly, for dinner on a sailboat. She swung through town and in exchange for her creative work had been offered a few nights' stay on a 32-foot floating beauty. She invited me to come for kale salad, wine and to talk Lucia.
It was Tuesday and it was raining. I was exhausted from waking up at 5:00 a.m. to help support one of my clients hosting Hillary Clinton for an Equal Pay Day event in New York. My job was to be a scribe; to watch the live broadcast, listen carefully, and quickly write a press release re-capping the event.
That work, my day job, is what enables me to continue going with Lucia right now. It also requires my full attention most weekdays. Pivoting from that headspace into the softer heart place from which I can write, speak, plan, manage, envision and create Lucia does not happen on a dime.
It stopped raining so we decided to go for a walk through Golden Gardens, the beach next door to the marina. Climbing out of the boat, Karly asked, "So, what's your plan for funding Lucia from here forward?"
Karly has a way of asking direct questions. I have a way of not being able to give succinct answers. Her question hit the center of my tired brain and I could feel the stem where fear lives rile up. The electrical charge moved out into my limbs and then back in again where it squeezed my gut enough to send my defenses straight up. I squirmed.
"Or, do you not want to talk about that? We can talk about something else," she said.
The only thing I dislike more than fear is letting it have its way. For my 34th birthday my parents gave me a card with a photograph of a small kitten sitting in a giant food bowl labeled "DOG." The kitten's wide eyes revealed terror, determination and optimism all at once.
"We can talk about it, sure," I said solidly, as my big leather boot stepped off the boat onto the concrete dock.
"I don't know yet and it scares me," I heard myself say. What ensued was an hour-long exploration the whole uncomfortable topic. No hard or fast answers appeared, but I did hear myself speak truth. I listened to Karly's ideas. I stayed in the bowl.
Good advisors, I think, are not people who have all of the answers. They do not always have more experience than you. Good advisors are the people who care enough to ask you the hard questions.
Karly fed me gourmet chocolate when we returned to the sailboat and gently steered our conversation back to design, editorial, and the only slightly less terrifying topic of my love life.
That kitten in the dog bowl is not fearless and neither am I. But the idea of making friends with the dog--of figuring out this puzzle and succeeding--is more exciting than it is fearful. So I keep going.
I must. You must. We all must. Fearless is so not part of it.
xo
laura
