There's A New Girl In Town

...and I am feeling good! What conjured the theme from Alice I am not even sure but it has been in my head for the past week. Then it occurred to me that maybe it is relevant to my life--I am sort of "new." When I started blogging here I was focused on my first NaNo novel and poetry. Since I started the blog my mother died, I blogged less and the usual ups and downs that are part of a human life. Recently, I changed my diet and started doing more yoga so my outward body started to change, but it is the inside that I am more excited about than anything else. I am very body and soul, very concerned about who I am on the inside and the things that surround me. I am spending part of the day working on the house--haven't been around very much and it needs a really good cleaning. I am seriously thinking about a home yoga practice to supplement the outside yoga practice that I do, I think that yoga should be an every minute thing. This summer I am set to do more yoga and writing, I am intent on focusing which is something that I do not seem to do a lot of...I have a very fast mind which I love, but sometimes if I do not pay attention I lose things. Slow yoga seems to be the way that I want to go. I had a really great Iyengar yoga class, we worked very slowly toward a pose that I did not even think that I was going to be able to do, but I did it. I liked the slowness that led me there.
Had dinner with a writer friend last week and she told me how much she liked my writing--it really meant a lot to me since I have rarely thought about how my writing touches anyone lately. Not that it has become robotic by any means, but I have been doing it so sparsely I forgot its power and I am glad that she centered me.
Another writer friend helped me to open my eyes so to speak, to realize that everywhere I go and everything I do can be fodder for the next story. In the past few days, it has been not friends, but strangers and new experiences that have inspired me. The connections that we make with other people and the things that we learn from them never cease to amaze and evolve me. Every day I feel like a new girl and it feels good!

Happy Snapshot

I am sitting in front of my MacBook and I just felt happy. Maybe it is my morning Yogi Pure Green Tea and lemon with maple syrup. Maybe it is the bellydancing class I am going to have, maybe it is the article I was reading on Care2.com, I do not know but I felt so happy and grounded and immediately found myself here where I have not been for such a while--here. I have been on Twitter a lot, I am a big fan of Twitter, there are so many bits of information there. I am a Gemini after all (my birthday was Sunday), and that is our trademark--to want to know a little bit about everything!!! I am an information junkie, my e-mail is half e-mail alerts and info and a portion coming from friends... No it is pretty even, but there is a lot of information in my box and I love it that way.
I feel happy and it is a great thing. I kind of really believe that happiness is like a snapshot. I am usually in a good mood, but at the same time I do not think that one can exist in a persistent happy state. It's too hard, but if you are happy enough it comes over you like waves continuously. You feel it come over you even when you are not having a happy moment and it makes you smile and it puts everything into perspective.
Ahhhh!!!!!!!

My Dark Place

A rat just went by on the platform where I am standing waiting for the
train, and I was less scared than usual. Maybe because I know that this
post is about just that...said rat was just on the tracks in front of
me, looking for food, looking hungry, crossed an oncoming train without
getting killed. The thing with rats is they just understand they
are hungry, it is not being fearless but an instinct for
survival that eclipses fear...
I started working on very dark pieces of fiction. My first writing
endeavor was a haunted romance and now I am writing the same sort of
thing now but from a very different perspective. I was very young writing the first
endeavor, and innocent--I am still innocent I like to say
but aware of things that are not. I described the plots to
some of the things I have been working on to friends and since they know
me to be a romantic for the most part, they were astonished at the
ideas brewing inside me. Even I wondered where the darkness
comes from, but if I am writing I really do not care what
manifests, it is something that needs to be expressed, something
that drives me and that is good enough for me. I was in enough writing
classes in my life to know that if it is coming from me there is
nothing wrong with it and there is a market for it somewhere.
I like darkness, I was having a conversation with a man who was
telling me he would never tell his wife something that might put in
her mind anything that would make her betray him. He said
even after as long as they had been married and living together, that
he could not trust her one hundred percent and I said that you cannot
trust yourself one hundred percent. You can surprise yourself with your thoughts, your
actions. What I have been writing has surprised me, pleasured me. I
embrace my dark place...

Happy Sunday

One of my friends inspired me to a brilliant writer's challenge and I am excited about the endeavor for this morning. Then I thought about the blog which always feel natural and organic to me, easy as a Sunday morning. Sipping decaf green tea with lavender and rose petals feeling very happy and elated, nerves not even slightly elevated with the impending Super Bowl.
Better really start loving the tea because it almost that time of the year for me to give up coffee for Lent which is in a week and a half. Friends know how much I love coffee and were trying to inspire me to give up something else. It is almost as hard for everyone else for me to give up coffee as it is for me, but there is a secret...As much as I LOVE coffee there is something freeing in giving it up, in embracing other things. I kind of consider myself a culinary adventurer and am willing to try anything so I have discovered that you can find love in foods you previously did not like. If you keep having the same things how do you find that out?
It can even be like that with writing. I used to chain write poems when I was younger and then I started becoming obsessed with fiction and the poems started to go south, but now I write them again almost daily the way I used to. Feels good to exercise the muscle, and to write fiction as well the way that my friend told me to. I was with my writer's group yesterday and I was listening to the other writers and that is the thing about writing...I am not sure if it is an art or a form of release or self therapy or expression but it is something that you do and you need to do it. I am thinking after this post that I am going to do my daily freewrite which I love to do now inspired by one of the other writers even though I am unorthodox about it, but I do not think you can really be unorthodox about writing, otherwise I would have stopped this blog a long time ago if I had thought that I had to have rules about it. I never like rules if they do not serve a purpose. There is no purpose in writing to me other than to get the words down on the page, the expression, the release, the transformation.
Okay a lot of writing to do before I leave the city for the day! I love day trips out of the city, I think they make me appreciate it more. New Jersey and Connecticut are as rural as I have been though and I am not sure that that is really rural but it is a different mindset. You have to be in a car everywhere and as a New Yorker I am always on foot, and according to my pedometer I take 1 to 2 mile walks almost daily which I think is a very good thing because the temptation to take a bus or a train is a constant thing. But like with writing, when you are done walking and you reach your destination, you feel very good.

Happy and New

Alone last night, the way I like it on New Year's Eve. I like to be by myself before the end of the year, be reflective. I do not believe in resolutions, I think everyday is a powerful tool for change and resolutions if you need to make them, and I think that we all do because there is always something that has to change or I feel I am not growing, not evolving.

I liked the comments on my last post about food and the changing of my eating habits. I was on one of the food communities I belong to and I told someone who was trying to give up sugar that if you eat different types of foods, you start to crave different sorts of things. I do not believe in taking anything out of your diet, but I also do not believe in eating the same things all of the time. I am constantly changing it up which is easy for me as a Gemini!

Just finished an AMAZING cup of decaf organic green tea with lavender and red roses. I feel very alive and very vital. Have been reading a lot about passion and desire. On the cover of New York Spirit, there is an article about how passion and desire can keep your stomach flat detailing how you can keep your belly flat by how you feel about what you eat. There was once a really great article in that magazine that I read years ago and lost the issue (weep) about when you have feelings for another person that you should pay attention to where you feel the emotion: you heart, your head, your pelvis, stomach--which chakra? By paying attention to that it is a giveaway about what you needed from that person. Maybe I can Google that? If I find it I will post the link here the next time I blog. You can Google anything, right???