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Days of Gratitude for Out of the Mouths of Babes

Can you blame me for taking a break from posting this week?
I am just barely digesting the riot of light that we stirred up last Friday evening.
The authors of Out of the Mouths of Babes: An Evening of Mothers Reading to Others and An Anthology of Babes: 36 Women Give Motherhood a Voice captured the audience
at Dewey Historic Hall in Sheffield with their open hearted, brave readings.

I will be posting photos here all week and you, my dear reader, can capture a
bit of the glow of this event and just how it landed in all of our lives.
I appreciate all your good wishes and your own creativity which inspires me always.

I had the great good fortune of my friend, poet, artist and delight, Sou McMillan traveling from
Wooster with her husband to be with us on Friday night. Not only did Sou contribute to both the blog series and book, but she cast her editorial eyes on pieces of the book as I wrote it.

“I get by with a little help from my friends”. Thank you Sou. Here is a post at her blog.

This friendship includes art making and book writing and fun having.

The Berkshire Festival of Women Writers has a steady line-up of events this month. I will be at Kripalu on Thursday to hear Julia Cameron speak. The anthology is on sale in the Kripalu Gift Shop or here on LLD at this sales page.

Happy March 5!
xo S

Heading Home

I have been here for a few days.

#goodmorning #wellfleet #happythanksgiving all! XoS

And I will be driving home with time to think about the ‘journey of life’ taken with family, whether family of origin or of choice. But the inner activity of an oyster, sand in to pearl is much like what happens when you rub elbows, garlic and laundry with people you love for a few days running.

I am grateful for space.
I am grateful for the wealth and health of this planet, so many resources, so much love, so much potential.
I am grateful for you, my readers of the Laundry Line for taking the moments you do to wander in and read.

There is so much taking shape here on the Laundry Line.
You can keep up with the revolutions of laundry and love by subscribing to this site.
You will be the first to get my fancy doodle newsletter by email, if you desire it.

Until then, drive safely and well my friends.
With love,
Ever,
S

Nancy Jean Burns: Keeping Track of Gratitude

tuesday nov 20, 2012
by Nancy Jean Burns

i’ve been keeping
a gratitude journal
for awhile now,
even though i’m really
not that sentimental,
it’s a survival tool
for keeping afloat,
so every morning
and every night
my yellow spiral
notebook hears this
kind of thing:
apple crisp, rowboats,
bathtubs, painting
netflix, river rocks, keb mo
ginger tea, lessons,
leaves, letting go,
d minor, iridescence,
creative problems, work,
space and time, having a body,
breath to breathe, sea changes,
purple velvet curtains
teal, aquamarine, magenta
figs and persimmons
all my people,
always reading glasses,
and always my husband,
being in this now, together.
when i tell him every night
he’s made it on my list again,
he smiles for the honor
of being right up there
with my reading glasses,
he knows how much
they mean to me

Happy Wednesday Laundry Line readers.
Nancy’s poem set the tone for my day today and I am so grateful she agreed to share it with all of you here.
How about it-

let’s keep a gratitude journal here on the Line for the next few days and just post three gratitudes in the comment section below?

I’ll start:

1. I am grateful for Nancy and her words and the pause she allows for gratitude every single day and her husband on the list.
2. I am grateful for the sunshine and all the people in the lives of my children who talk to them and listen to them and bake bread with them. This Village, I thank you.
3. I am grateful for color, for the frozen kale in the garden this morning and the green ferns in the woods brightening with the sunshine.

You?

xo,
S

PS Dance break here, thanks to Kitty Cavalier.

Independence Approach #7 Fire Fly Sessions: On lighting the way for each other.

It is Sunday evening now and my fingers are itching to make art.
This is the last night of open readings at the International Women’s Writing Guild summer conference at Yale.
All evening I listened to women spend three minutes each, revealing their souls.
Poems about dead husbands, blind dogs and champagne corks captivated.
Tears ran over the tale of a newly christened Mariner catching costly fish.
Tears ran again and again in joy and solidarity, in sisterhood for courage.
There are women here who think because they haven’t published anything, they are not writers.

Thank you to Charles Dedic my junior year English teacher at Escanaba Area Public High School, for I have written daily since 16 years of age and diligently. But, I too only shyly have added the moniker of writer and now blogger to my title.
Claiming my voice has made all the difference.

I am about to share something I wrote with you today in the class of my cherished colleague, Jan Phillips, who told me last year, well she told the whole class, but I always feel she is talking directly to me-

‘Our lives are our art work’.

Today after viewing Jan’s newest video Women, Wisdom and World Change about evolutionary thought, which features interviews with my long time She-ro Dr. Jean Houston, Barbara Marx Hubbard and with Jan, we had a span of quiet time to write.

This is what came to me.

I write. I make art. I am raising myself as I raise my children to know that caress of the sun, to fell the press of moss on foot, to sniff the baking apple and to tell the story from inside a decision to make joyous.
This is no small task.
No one believes that what is joyful can sell.
I do.
No one believes that the ordinary is extraordinary.
I do.
My prayer, the way I live my life, is to create and live the vibrancy of the first breath of morning and the glow of Orion’s belt at night.
My prayer, the decides to all day long, to put my attention here here here back in to the lap of this mother, this person who feels pressed to express.
I live so I will not be forgotten, if only by two people who laid their heads down on sun dried pillowcases each night to dream in a house not rattled by anger or want. Because I know in raising them as citizens of this home, they become citizens of the world.
They will see pain and know that confidence of moving towards love.
This I write.
This I invite.

Good night.
I am off to get gluey.
S