On the Lee of the Stone

A Catherine Noon

The old year passes
Not mourned, but booted out
With steel toed boots if necessary.
And yet, we pause, and reflect
Back on the year-that-was
And we realize our privilege
In being able to take such a pause,
In having the luxury of a full belly
That allows us to reflect on higher
Needs of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Much has happened,
Much over which we will ruminate.
But for now, for tonight, this night,
This eve of what is to come,
We must hold fast to the truths that we’ve come to know:
We are resilient.
We are partnered.
We are stronger together than we are apart.
We are not alone.
Our strength comes from our community.
We are waking up,
And we are seeing the portal through which we can walk.
We refuse to lie down,
We refuse to fall into the hole in front of us.
But we shall transform and come through the portal,
Stronger, more resilient, more woke, and more aware.

Happy New Year!

Artober, and the Power of Putting Your Focus In a Specific Place

A Catherine Noon

I decided this year to participate in the Instagram art festival #artober. Simply put, the idea behind these kinds of challenges is to practice your art on a regular basis – sometimes daily, as I’m interpreting it, but not always. You could do #artober weekly or even, if you chose, monthly. Posters put pictures of their art on their Instagram feed and follow others who are doing the same.  That can be a lot of fun because you get inspiration for other pieces and meet a lot of really interesting artists in the process.

There are prompts, but I don’t always use them.  As you can see from this post, I chose to go a different direction. The prompt for this day was “Ecstasy,” which didn’t really speak to me. I happened to listen to a broadcast by theologian and scholar Starhawk about power, and voila. My piece.

I decided on Day 3 to play with faux calligraphy, which uses a regular fine-point pen to draw calligraphy, rather than relying on a nib for the characteristic thick-and-thin.

I do my pieces on the fly, and don’t overthink them. That’s one of the key pieces to a challenge like this that works for me: go fast, don’t think, don’t edit, just make.

I also use hashtags connected to my art, such as #calligraphy, #fauxcalligraphy, and of course, I tag each piece #artober and #artober2020.

What about you, Dear Reader? What are some of the things on which you’re choosing to place your focus?

Welcome To October – 31 New Days, Autumn To Savor, and Two Full Moons

A Catherine Noon

Well, it’s October, Dear Reader! I’m not sure how it happened either, but here we are. 31 fresh new days, two full moons, and #artober.

Why #artober?

Because art for art’s sake is good for you. Putting your focus on something other than the dumpster fire is also a good thing.

If you decide to play, please share your IG handle with me in the comments.

If you want to watch along, go to Instagram and look for the hashtag #artober and follow artists you enjoy.

Okay, but what is #artober?

It’s a daily art challenge designed to help us get back into the habit of daily art practice. I’m doing mine probably mostly with calligraphy, but I go by the seat of my pants so you could be in for anything. I’ll be posting it on my Instagram @a.catherine.noon.

What other ideas have you come up with to keep your focus on your creativity and off the dumpster fire? I’d love to know.

Self-Care September – Everyday Bodycare

A Catherine Noon

Sundays are a good day for pampering, and if you’re in the States and have the luxury of tomorrow off for American Labor Day, all the better!

Here’s what you’ll need:

  • Cornmeal
  • Honey
  • A warm shower
  • A half hour to an hour

 

Optional:

  • Music (something calm or spa-like would be perfect)
  • Candles
  • Essential oils or a room spray that you like
  • A warm, fluffy robe
  • Slippers or warm socks

 

Start your shower and let the warm steam fill the bathroom. Start your music and candles, and spritz your room spray. If you have essential oils, you can drop 5 or 10 drops in the back of the shower to create an aromatherapy shower for yourself.

Set the cornmeal on the edge of the tub or somewhere outside the shower where you can get at it. Also get the honey and set it close by.

Instructions:

  • Put about a teaspoon’s worth of cornmeal in your hand and add enough honey to make a paste.
  • Start at your feet and rub in a circular motion. Pay particular attention to your heels.
  • Then, moving up the calves, continuing in a circular motion, massage the skin.
  • When you’re done with your thighs, rinse your skin.
  • Then starting with your hands, move up your arms toward your shoulders. Pay attention to your elbows.
  • Rub circular motions along your stomach – in a counter-clockwise direction around to the left.
  • Get what you can reach of your back – or, have a friend help. 🙂
  • If you have long hair like I do, the thick goop will make a mess in your hair so you may want to put your hair up for this or just keep it out of the way as you’re working.
  • When you’re done, wash your body and make sure you get all the cornmeal off.
  • When you get out, use a light moisturizer and then wrap up in a warm robe with slippers and rest.

 

If you try it, I’d love to know how it goes for you! Please share with me in the comments.

 

Self-Care September – Foody Friday! (Yes, I Know, It’s Sunday…) – Menu Plans!

A Catherine Noon

Sorry for falling out of flow with my schedule, but Friday turned out much busier than planned. I’m back to share some ideas about menu planning with you.

It’s very easy to get into a rut with our weekly shopping and making meals. Instead of letting that determine our reality, it’s helpful to get intentional about our daily round. What we eat daily is what becomes our body. We know that, but putting it into practice can be challenging.

What works for me is to use my favorite cookbooks and pick meals from them that I’m familiar with. I use those as a generic palette to choose my weekly meals around, and then plug in other things like vegetables and pre-biotic foods.

If you need a good starting point, I hope you find this useful: Menu Plan. It’s a word document that uses tables, and I print it out weekly and put it up on the fridge.

Here’s how I make it work for me, though: I don’t just plan the week, I make notes about what worked and what didn’t. This is how, for example, I figure out when particular meals take too long to prep on nights when I have other commitments. For those nights, we’ll put in, say, tuna salad instead of roast pork.

We also plan large meals once a week for Sundays, typically, depending on our hiking schedule. That lets us drag out all the old favorites: roast chicken, pork loin, mashed potatoes, and all sorts of goodies. Don’t forget desert – with a little planning ahead, pies and fruit crumbles aren’t difficult to make.

What’s your secret for your daily round? What works for you?

Self-Care September – Social Media Trackers!

A Catherine Noon

Picture of cat in front of fan with caption, Using Technology to evenly and efficiently distribute cat hairs around your home.

To What Do You Pay Your Attention?

It has been said that attention will be the next most sought after commodity. In the modern world, we have FAR too many distractions. From doctors and psychologists to technologists all warn of the dangers of too much social media consumption. Problems ranging from confirmation bias to truncated attention spans and an inability to concentrate are all blamed on our addition to scrolling.

It helps to recognize the word “pay” in that question.

Attention is a limited commodity. We only have so much of it before we become fatigued, get bored, need to rest or eat, or have other responsibilities intrude on our time. When we’re thinking about what we do all day vs. what we want to be doing, it’s a useful mental tool to recognize that attention, like money, is something we pay – and that once it’s gone, it’s gone. Unlike money, where we can theoretically make more of it, attention is something that can’t be gotten back.

I challenge us to track our social media consumption.

Again, there’s an important word in that statement, this time, “consumption.” Just like a steady diet of junk food and soda makes us sick, a steady diet of junk media clogs up our brains and makes us sick. So what if we were to take the bull by the horns and really work to curtail that scrolling? Is there a way to help technology help us?

Indeed there is, and it’s called a social media tracker or monitor.

Available on both Android and iPhone, many are free. The one I use is called QualityTime. It gives me daily reports on what apps consume the most of my time and is directly responsible for me removing Facebook from my phone altogether. I just don’t need the negativity in my life, and I don’t want to waste the amount of time I was spending on the platform. I’d rather be making something and writing books.

Here are some other suggestions:

  1. Moment, available on iPhone.
  2. Forest, available on Android and iPhone.
  3. AppDetox, available on Android.
  4. Offtime, available on Android and iPhone.
  5. ShutApp, available on iPhone.
  6. SPACE, available on iPhone.

 

It’s worth noting that there are multiple apps that help us to accomplish the goal of scrolling around less, which should tell us that many people are – rightly! – concerned about it. Social media addiction is of growing concern to mental health practitioners. Even the venerable Mayo Clinic has sounded the alarm, stating that 25% of youth are addicted to phones.  The mental health impacts aren’t just on our attention, either: it’s been linked to increased rates of depression. anxiety, stress, and poor sleep. In fact, they state that it’s even more concerning than substance abuse.

Your Challenge, Should You Choose To Accept It:

Download one of the tracking apps and use it this week. Use it without judgment, just with openness and curiosity. What is your most-used app? How much time do you spend on apps? What would you like to be doing more of?

And I think you’ll find, as I did, that there are many benefits to becoming more intentional about our social media consumption.

Tomorrow, join me for Foody Friday and see what I’ve got up my sleeve for you!

Gone Visiting!

A Catherine Noon

Image of author Delilah Devlin's website header with hyperlink to her site.

I’m back at author Delilah Devlin’s blog today, and I have a question for you:

Why Weave?

Self-Care September – Writer Wednesday | Journal Tools – Future Visioning

A Catherine Noon

Future Visioning

I’ve been keeping a journal for almost as long as I’ve been alive. I started with one of those silly little ones they give small girls with a dopey lock that doesn’t really lock and only about a paragraph’s worth of space for each day. Such constraint! I’ve tried all sorts of things in the intervening years, settling on my trusty Strathmore 400 Series 9 x 12″ spiral bound journals with the hardboard cover, because I can use it anywhere – on my lap on the bus or train, on the ferry, in a park, at the beach, in my office, on my balcony out back, in my car… (Dr. Seuss anyone?)

There are many, many different ways of keeping a journal, too – from the straight up “Dear Diary” type of chronicle, to bullet journals, listing, the unsent letter, and all sorts of methods in between. Today I want to talk about Future Visioning.

What Is Future Visioning?

Future Visioning is between creative writing, narrative non-fiction, and journaling. It’s a way of spending time in our minds, fleshing out what we want to create and making it real to our creative brain. Like writing a book, we create the setting and characters and see how they interact. Like narrative non-fiction, it’s telling a story about real or imagined real events. Like journaling, this is meant to be private: between ourselves and our imagination, and not for the eyes of anyone else.

How Do You Do It?

I recommend setting a timer for ten or twenty minutes. Grab your favorite journal notebook or a keyboard and fresh document. It’s up to you whether you prefer to type or write by hand. I prefer (and recommend) writing by hand because there’s something kinesthetic that happens when we do that, but use what works best for you. If you’re not sure, they both and keep what method you like best.

Then, write down what you’re wanting to create. Let’s say our statement for today is, “I am a prolific author.” So I’d start by writing that at the top of my page. Then I take a moment or two with my eyes closed and breathe deeply. I imagine what does me being a prolific author look like? I imagine it’s this time next year, on a Wednesday afternoon, and I’m on my balcony with the birds singing. When I have that image clear, I open my eyes and begin to write.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and the sun is out. It’s not too hot outside and the breeze feels good. I’m so pleased because I’ve finished my blog posts for the day and I just hit “send” on my newsletter. Our next book is ready to be uploaded, since I just got it back from our book packager. This will be our sixth book in the series and our twentieth book overall. My body feels calm and grounded, and there are no butterflies in my stomach. Writing is so deeply satisfying, and I’m so grateful that I finally allow myself to do it.

Let your timer be your guide, and just focus on getting the picture as clearly as you can in your mind, and write down what you see. Try to incorporate all five senses. What are you seeing? What does it feel like in your body to be in this new reality? What are you hearing around you, and from others in your orbit? What are you thinking as a result of your new reality? What in your life is easier?

We spend so much time complaining that it’s easy to think that’s the only thing we can do. But with a little creativity, we can use our journal as a potent tool for positive change.

Tomorrow, join me for our first September Challenge!

Self Care September – Theme Reveal

A Catherine Noon

Calligraphy of words that say Self Care September - Focus on what we can control

I don’t have to tell you that this year has been challenging. Between the pandemic, learning new terms for windstorms like “derecho” (which is a land hurricane, if you hadn’t heard it before, and occurred in Iowa and left devastation in its wake), the fires in California, not one but two hurricanes in the Gulf, shootings and protests and rioting, it’s a wonder that any of us can sleep at night.

Which brings me to my theme for this month: Focus on what I can control.

I can’t fix the weather, and I’m not a doctor so my job as regards COVID is to stay healthy and stay out of the emergency medical system to the extent that I can – which means, wear a mask, social distance, and avoid travel. I haven’t really left the house since March other than to walk, go to the community garden, and essential shopping – and I’m stir crazy!

Which got me thinking: I can’t be the only creative, highly sensitive person out here with these challenges! I suspect there are a lot more of us than any of us realize, partly because when we’re overwhelmed we don’t communicate as loudly about our personal reality as we might during times when things aren’t falling down around our ears.

And thus, the image at the top of this post. Did you know, there’s such a thing as “faux calligraphy?” Here’s how it works:

  • Write out a phrase or statement, leaving extra space between the letters than you normally would.
  • On the descenders of the letters, draw a second line next to the line of the letter and then color it in – I used the same color for my letters but you could get really fancy and color in the spaces with different colors, even using a colored pencil!
  • When you cross the “t’s,” be extra intentional and make a wavy line. You could even add flourishes if you felt called to.
  • Voila. Calligraphy. Who knew it could be that easy?
  • If you try it, please link me to your Instagram or other place you share your images; I’d love to see!

 

And in the meantime, tell me in the comments – what does “self care” look like for you? And I’m not talking here about mani-pedis, necessarily. I’m talking about really caring for yourself. What does that look like?

And be sure to come back throughout the month while I share some ideas, challenges, and suggestions so that we can make September a great month together. And on September 3rd, I’ll be back over at Delilah Devlin’s blog for a guest post – watch for the link to come visit with me!