Last week I flew home for 5 days, turned 37 while still in the air on the way back, and had surgery requiring general anesthetic.

Anyone who knows anything about energy and change would now tell me to be still and let all of that integrate into my cells.  My body feels sore and strange, but my brain is straining to write and create and get on with the process of a whole new year of my life.

I’ve decided to spend today gently working on a dream board and a gentle plan for my year ahead.

In the most recent Circe’s Tribe call (I highly recommend Circe’s Circle!) Jamie asked about the conditions that we need to flourish. This is a perfect question for me today as I feel like I am well placed to begin my fresh new year.

In the past, making vision boards always made me irritated and disillusioned because the things weren’t showing up and I got depressed when I tried to be positive and bad things still happened over and over and over.  I read and meditated a lot about this and I have finally realized that instead of being specific on my vision boards about things I wanted, I should focus on my ultimate goal because I know that the Universe/ God/ Goddess/ the Divine (whatever feels right to you) actually has bigger better plans than I can possibly imagine.

What if me putting big things on my vision board was actually limiting the amazingness that could be??!

So I think that in order for me to flourish what I really need is the ability to get out of my own way.  When I set my compass and my vision for happiness and joy and connection (which is what all of the things I want actually represent) and I try to make decisions that will bring me closer to those things rather than push them farther away, and I have faith that what is coming is better than what I could imagine, I feel a lot better.

Following Jamie’s lead and calling it a Dream Board rather than a Vision Board has helped too – it’s not about what I want, it’s about how I want to be.

What else do I need to flourish?

• Beauty. I need it like I need water and sleep!
• Sleep/ water/ nourishing food. – I’ve been eating no sugar for the past 2.5 months and I feel 100% clearer and gentler on myself. It has been life-changing. (I’ll post about that later this week.)
• For me I also need an element of the sacred in my life. It’s the bit I didn’t realize/ didn’t allow/ didn’t embrace for years and years, so I am stretching myself and letting that really growl and stretch and grow within me. I don’t have a template or a mentor to show me my way – nobody I know of is doing what feels right for me – so I am trying to embrace and integrate what is showing up for me and let it come out.

Here at the beginning of my 38^th year, I have finally accepted that flourishing is such a personal state that it isn’t until we allow ourselves to embrace all of ourselves and accept it and let our freak flag fly that we can move into that flow. The only resistance we have to it is our own.

What do you need to flourish?

(Can anybody tell me who to give credit for this picture?)

“Beautifully crafted words have the power to captivate the mind of anybody.” – Sam Veda

There are poems, quotes, collections of words that haunt me. I read them once and they take up residence in my head, echoing through at the strangest times. I’ll simply be walking along a street and a specific line or phrase will come to me, repeating itself until I have to whisper it aloud or stop a moment and think it clearly.

This is one of those poems. I have shared it before on my old blog, but it wanted to be shared again. I hope that whoever it is who needs to hear it comes for a visit.

When she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

Some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious…
We’re all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

We’ve all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

-Tony Hoagland, from ‘Grammar’

“After all, what would the world be like without Captain Hook?” – Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman)

I have a nemesis.  I have chosen her carefully.  Allow me to explain:

Today ended up being a very quiet day.  We started with a late breakfast and ended up – as I hope other people occasionally do – watching ridiculous Sunday television.  The Three Musketeers was on: the one with Charlie Sheen sporting a mullet and Keifer Sutherland before he was Jack Bauer. Best of all was Tim Curry’s performance as Cardinal Richelieu.  Mark and I often judge a movie’s appeal on the quotableness of its lines – and Tim Curry, with his, “All for one and more for me,” provides ridiculous entertainment.

It did get us talking about the best movie villains.  Alan Rickman in the atrocious Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Glenn Close as Cruella in 101 Dalmations, or even Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future movies.  Fabulous villains in the proper sense of the word, not just bad or evil or scary but properly fun, very quotable and always dastardly and compelling.  In Ocean’s Eleven, Basher says, “It will be nice working with proper villains again.”  And we secretly agree.

Does every story need a good villain?  Does every hero or heroine need a nemesis?  Is Sarah Ban Breathnach right when she says that it is “simply not an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons?” Are the hard and scary parts of our lives as vital to our story as the sunny ones?

I myself have a nemesis.  It may seem crazy to think of her in this way, but when I do our interactions cease to stress me out. Instead of letting her get to me as she used to, I now look at her with amusement and a certain level of comic detachment.  In my head I am looking at her with narrowed eyes, tossing my hair back and getting ready to do battle.  I imagine her with her red cape flapping behind her as we circle each other with purpose.  She is as silly to me as the best of the fabulous villains. By letting the energy out of our interactions I get to live that moment when Sarah says, “You have no power over me,” to an inappropriately crotch-stuffed David Bowie in Labyrinth. Doing this sounds silly, but it means that I get to decide who the heroes and the villains are in my life.

So just for a moment, try seeing the world around you as characters in your own movie.  Try seeing the people who drive you crazy as ridiculous partners to your hero or heroine self.  Who is the Vader to your Luke or the Hook to your Pan?  Then delight in knowing that they have no power over you.

And know that the heroine of this particular story is going to win.

xo