September 11th, 2009

9.11 Reflections

This is not a post about the controversies, conspiracies or theories about the event.  Nor is it a political perspective or tribute.  But it is about what 9.11 represents for each of us.  Days like these make us all reflect on who we are and what is important.

In light of the shadows and sunshines that potentially haunt and enlighten us, let us all return to what really matters in our lives.  Let it bring gratitude to the ingracious and clarity for the lost.

One thing that it has shown is that life is precious.  Remember your dreams.  Open your hearts to the possibility of fulfilling them.  Laugh.  Dance.  Dream.  Love.  Fully experience life as if today were the last but dream of a potentially beautiful tomorrow.  Life is truly magical.  If you open your eyes to experience the feel of warm sunlight or a cool breeze on your cheek, you might awaken to how truly magical life can be.

Read about how a few bloggers (John & Sherry from Young House Love and Deb Ng from Freelance Writing Gigs) were influenced by the day.

I hope that this day will bring all of you healing, hope and love for better days to come.

September 8th, 2009

New Project in the Works

I’ve been working hard to create a professional site solely for my writing. While I’ll be continually updating it to showcase my writing samples and creating posts about writing itself, I’ll still be keeping up with 2inspired and not2shabby.  (By the way, not2shabby’s having a giveaway and the contest ends tomorrow.  If you haven’t already entered, click here.)  If you or someone you know is on the hunt for an experienced writer, please pass on my new website.  Thanks in advance!

September 3rd, 2009

Do You Have the BALLS?!

All this talk about fear has gotten me scared.  I mean COME ON after reading a handful of articles about writer’s who ate only raw food or fast food for a month, or worked in an Alzheimer’s care facility, I started to ask myself, “Do I have the balls to be a writer?”

What does it take to be a writer?  What does it take to do anything we dream of doing for that matter?

Sure there’s talent, skill, experience, luck…Wait, I just watched Oprah today and ventriloquist Terry Fator said luck had nothing to do with his recent multimillion dollar contract with the Mirage Hotel in Vegas. This sucks because I was really hoping to at least get 1 out of 4.

But seriously if it ain’t luck and I’m too much of a chicken to eat tasteless food or take care of Alzheimer’s patients, then what good am I?

If you’re asking yourself the same questions and are thinking “what’s the use in trying,” I’d say think again.  Sure there may be hundreds of thousands-even millions-of people trying to do what you do, but there is also no one else in the world like you.  The best way to transform your dreams into a reality is to find something you are truly passionate about and don’t stop trying.

When I think back on my life as a young girl from a small island, I never would have believed that I would one day travel to Italy and Greece or see my name in a book or a magazine.  I’m sure you have your own story too.  We all need to believe that we were put on this earth for a purpose.  That our individualities, our quirkiness, what makes others think we’re weird, is all part of what makes us unique.  Let’s celebrate that instead of spending time hiding it!

Oprah has said countless times that we should embrace who we are and be good at that instead of trying to be someone else.  I agree and think that courage comes when we let go of the crutches that give us a false sense of security, a pseudo protection from the world.  We need to let go, risk failing and falling hard to grow, hope and dream.

When I was in middle school, probably my most hated time in life, all I wanted was to be like everyone else.  Now in my thirties, I am a cheerleader for my differences.  The more different, the better!  That’s why I think that although I might not have the courage to do any great feat, I can write because I can do one thing right-believe.  Belief in yourself can get you everywhere.  Although you need to talent, a bit of luck and experience to push you through, you can’t go very far unless you believe that you can.

So here’s hoping that with every new endeavor, you carry a stroke of luck, a gift of talent and skill, that you befriend courage and hold belief close to your heart.  That, my friend, is the balls you need to get you through any scary obstacle toward your dreams.

Athens

September 2nd, 2009

Cover Story is Up

I’ve been a busy bee these days trying to follow my dreams.  One of them has been my long held desire to write for a magazine.  Although I’m still climbing that never ending hill, I’m trying to enjoy the journey.  Here is one fruit of my labor. (Sherry from Young House Love taught me this cool trick: Now you can click on the photo to magnify the image so go ahead and read away!)

Eucalyptus September Issue

Eucalyptus Sept Issue pg2

Eucalyptus Mag pg3

September 1st, 2009

How to Beat the Fear Monster

Yesterday I spent my jet lag haze scanning the aisles in a nearby bookstore.  My target?  Books on writing.  I’m always surprised by the lack of how-tos for writers in a bookstore.

But I digress, in the two shelves that I did find I was surprised by the flurry of book titles dealing with fear.  (The Courage to Write: How Writer’s Transcend Fear and The Writer’s Portable Therapist, to name a few.) Is writing a scary profession?  We don’t risk our lives daily like stuntmen or hold the lives of men, women and children in our hands like doctors, so what’s with all these books on fear?

Then I started having visions about my Hawaiian vacation back home.  Sneezing through dust filled binders stuffed with old papers, I was perplexed by what I saw. Wordy prose, unsightly grammatical errors and lengthly text swallowed my thoughts and points.  The attack of the too much word monster strikes again.  It’s what haunted my old homework assignments and what still gets to me now.  What plagued my work was a lack of confidence that the words could speak for themselves.

Why is writing so scary? Like anything you do which involves having your heart on the line, there is a huge risk of your heart getting broken.  When you put yourself out there, there’s a chance that people won’t like what you have to offer (fear of rejection) or that you might not be good enough (insecurity).  The best cure for either is to build up your self-confidence.

If you are a writer or a job dreamer, counterattack those fear episodes and transform seemingly indestructible obstacles by becoming the confident, self-assured person you want to be.  Author Ariel Gore of, “How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead” uses a superhero alter ego to take over tasks that mere mortals can’t do.  Singer Beyonce Knowles uses ‘Sasha’ another alter ego as her stage persona.  In the November 2005 issue of Vanity Fair she said, “I always held back in Destiny’s Child, because I was comfortable in a group and felt that I didn’t have to do anything 100 percent, because there were other people onstage with me. I would not lose myself or go all the way.”

This quote similarly represents what I went through as a writer.  I often held back because I wasn’t comfortable putting it all out there.  I thought that I had to beef up my prose with difficult words and phrases to cover up the fact that I wasn’t a good enough writer.  This way if people rejected what they read I could just say, “Well I wasn’t really trying anyway.”

The fear monster took over my words and ended up controlling my life.  It took me two degrees and a decade later for me to trust what I always knew-that my lot and love in life was to be a writer.

The real question is, “What is holding you back from living the life of your dreams?”  You may think it’s money, talent or time but what might be lurking under these is fear.

Hawaiian Flower

August 25th, 2009

Life's Haunting Questions

What makes a life?  Is it the things we do?  The places we visit?  The people we know?  Or is it comprised of what we neglect?  The choices we didn’t make, the path we didn’t take?  The older I get, the more I am a witness to life’s greatest pleasures and pain.  It’s who we are and who we become despite the challenges we face and in spite what life throws at us.  The thing is-how do we accept what isn’t working in our lives and tranforms them into butterflies?

Life comes and goes and we can choose to embrace all of it-the happiest moments and the most difficult or we can stand in front of it and pretend none of it exists.  When it comes to life’s thorns, do we let ourselves experience the pain or cover our wounds with a band-aid?

August 22nd, 2009

A Thoughtful Question

In my last post, I talked about the return to simplicity.  It was inspired by my desire to return to Hawaii.  I’ve been living on the mainland for about 7 years with time in Oregon and California and everytime I go back I feel a difference.  It kind of feels like I’ve lost chunks of time in my life, as if I traveled through a time machine and when I returned home everything changed.

The first time away I was in my early twenties and summer was 3 months of going out with friends and dancing until the next morning.  Then after I graduated college and moved home for a few years, friends coupled up and settled down, planting their roots in corporate jobs.  I, on the other hand, felt like I hadn’t had enough and left again.  Somewhere between my mid and late-twenties everyone got married and I still had little desire to plunker down.

My dog got older.  My grandmas got older.  And this time around everyone’s on the third leg of the race with babies and kids and I still wonder, “Have I done enough?”  And will the pockets of time missed here become gigantic gulfs of missed memories one day that I will regret experiencing?

Have you ever asked yourself the same question?  Are you stuck in a job you hate?  Feeling in a rut?  Life happens whether we jump or not.  I guess the real question is, “What are we willing to sacrifice to live the life we are living?”

August 19th, 2009

The Return of Simplicity

Do you remember the time when only doctors and dentists owned pagers and cell phones?  When needing to get in touch with someone was an actual emergency?  Before iPhones and cellphones and laptops, iPods, and Kindles peppered coffee shops and bookstores, interrupted meetings, lunches or shopping trips.  Sure it may have been a lot more boring, but boredom inspired imagination and creativity.

I have fond members of those so called boring times.  It’s when paper boats were made on rainy days, large cardboard boxes became my box car and catepillars were caught in glass jars as we waited patiently for them to transform.   Today feels like more than a hop, skip and a few years from that time.  We’ve progressed technologically but at what cost to our sense of simplicity?

As you may have already guessed, I’ve been taking a little break from my blogging.  Maybe once every other day instead of every day.  The reason?  I’m actually on vacation in Hawaii.  But before you get all jealous of me, I have to preface this by explaining that I am from Hawaii.  Okay still envious eh?  Well it’s pretty hot and humid here and all I have been doing is sweating!

On the positive side, I have had ample time to reflect on my life.  Whenever I come home, I am reminded of a slower paced existence.  Yesterday I spent the day with my dad.  He drove around the island.  We pigged out on local food, sweet island tea and shave ice and I sweated out the fat and sugar while we road around.  As I sat in the car watching the world pass me by, I grew suddenly sick.  What was I doing?  Shouldn’t I be doing something?  Doesn’t my blog need to be written?  Shouldn’t I be tweeting?  Will I lose my beloved followers if I suddenly disappear?

Then, we stopped at a beach.  As I walked in the soft pudding like  sand, my slippers sunk in and the waves ran over them like warm hands pulling me in.  I walked slowly, waved at two local guys on a boat passing me by and I just exhaled.  Simplicity was back and I wasn’t going anywhere.

At that point, I lost my dad for several minutes.  I walked in circles until I eventually caught up with him and watched as he used his net to haphazardly pull up fresh bait for his fish.  Time passed and I kind of got lost in the moment.  It was quite meditative and more natural than doing any type of forced meditation.  I have to admit that I enjoyed doing nothing.  Doing nothing had a purpose.  It provided me with a renewed sense of what it means to be alive.  And it got me thinking-how many of us go through life feeling behind, like we’ll never catch up and in doing so miss out on the precious moments of our life.  I don’t think life is supposed to be about how much we accomplish or the things we need to do to succeed.  I think maybe it’s the kind of moments that sneak up on you, when you least expect it, when you are doing “nothing.”  Those are the times that remind you to take a step back, breathe, sink your feet in the sand, and remember the importance of simplicity.

August 18th, 2009

Playing Limbo With My Life

Have you ever been stuck with one foot in the door and the other one behind holding you back?  Well I have!  In fact, I had a friend once tell me in impatience that I need to learn how to make decisions and stick by it regardless of the outcome.  But deciding what to do when you can’t predict what will happen next is a doozy of a decision.

I was in limbo, for example, going back and forth like a tennis ball when desperately contemplating whether I should stay at my job or leave.  My indecision left everyone dizzy.  Some days I was all for it-screw that job I’d say!  Other days I thought, “Well if only I could tough it out just one more day.”

The same crazy back and forth decision-making process throws me for a loop everytime.  Should I quit?  Should I stay?  Should I move?  Should I stay?  Basically I’m asking, “Should I go or should I stay?”  Yes, stability, sameness, similarity (the 3’s) are all about feeling (here’s another one) safe.  I know where I am now.  I know who I’m dealing with now and I have some sort of pseudo control over what I am going through.  But if I take that step and drag that back leg forward and jump, will I be making the biggest mistake of my life?  Will I one day regret this move?  Will I one day ask myself why I couldn’t have been comfortable in my comfort zone?

The scary part is that there are no answers.  There’s no guidebook or instruction booklet like a recipe that you can follow word for word or a person, place or thing you can hold responsible when everything goes up in flames.  Perhaps, that’s what being human means.  Having the courage to know what we’re jumping into and jumping in anyway.

Although I’m still swinging back and forth in my decisions, I’m learning to enjoy the ride.  It also helps when I realize how many big jumps I’ve already made and far I’ve already come.  It’s kind of like taking a hike up a steep mountain.  You may not know what’s ahead or if you’ll even like it, but you can turn around and see how far you’ve already come.   And in that, you can keep treading ahead, stronger and wiser.

It’s all about listening to that quiet but clear voice.  The one that gets smothered by the “what if’s” and “shoulds” of the world.  I think we all know what we have to do.  When we listen to it, we make that big leap a whole lot smaller.