“I celebrate myself and I sing myself.” Walt Whitman

Writing in a journal is a holy act of self-love.  It is deciding that our thoughts and our lives are important and rich enough in which to dwell.  It is creating a space to listen and to understand the voice of our deepest selves.  It is going deeper and deeper to discover our personal wells of inspiration and strength.  It is a communion of our inner and outer worlds.  It is an act of bravery to find the truth–the beautiful and the ugly–of ourselves.

“My primary relationship is with myself- all others are mirrors of it. As I learn to love myself, I automatically recieve the love and appreciation that I desire from others. If I am commited to myself and to living my truth, I will attract others with equal commitment. My willingness to be intimate with my own deep feelings creates the space for intimacy with another.” -Shakti Gawain

It is clear, and it becomes clearer to me every day, that my own happiness and well-being grows in proportion to my awareness of love.  As I grow wiser with the years I gather, I understand better that love is not a reaction, but an action.  It is not enough to offhandedly say, I love summer, I love chocolate, I love my husband, though it is good and true to realize these things.

When we take time to notice the love in all of the little moments throughout our days, we can begin grow love as much as we grow plants and flowers in our garden by giving them attention.  When we love the little things–the way the snowfall sparkled Monday night like being caught in a glitter storm; the way fresh ground coffee smells in the morning; the way I feel when I write an essay or a chapter and every word seems to flow perfectly to say exactly what I want to say; the way winter air feels on my face when I am skiing through the woods; the way Paul brings a cup of green tea to me when I’m taking a bath.

There is so much to love every day of our lives.

So why do we find ourselves at times ruminating about what is not going our way, or what is bugging us or who is bugging us?  If there is so much beauty, so much to love in every moment, why do we choose to let our minds rest in the shadows of what we don’t have or what we are not yet?

I don’t know.

It’s taken me all of my 37 years to begin to understand that the cultivation of love is a practice.  It’s an act of recognizing our thoughts and bringing ourselves back toward the lightness and miracle of being.  Writing is a profound way to intentionally bring these thoughts to the fore.

This morning at South High, we wrote about what we love about ourselves and our lives.  I wish you could have seen the faces of the students when they shared what they had written.  As each student took their turn to give voice to that which they love, their smiles lifted their faces.  As they spoke about love, they sat up straighter and their eyes sparkled. It was a testimony to the power of simply honoring all of the beauty and joy of life and living.

Why Write?  Reason #3: We write as an act of self-love.

As far as we know, we have this one life.  And we ourselves are the ones who will carry us through to the end of our days.  So why not decide to focus on the beauty, the joy, and the miracle of being ourselves on this Earth, right now?

Writing Exercise: What do you love? Beginning with the words, “I love…” write about everything you love about yourself and your life.  Don’t think too hard.  Just keep coming back to the words, “I love.”  You may do this for five minutes or for twenty minutes.  It doesn’t matter.  Just pay attention to how you feel before and after the writing. Notice how this simple exercise has the power to elevate our moods and bring to our awareness of all of the gifts we possess right now.

Enjoy the writing…

Right now I am sitting in Anodyne coffee shop on the corner of Nicollet and 43rd St. in Minneapolis.  I am seated in the corner, looking out the window at the guy across the street shovel the walk in front of Midwest Cycle Supply.

The air is warm–about 31 degrees–so the snow is sticking to the trees, brown and white-shadowed branches and twigs reaching into a white sky. It’s magical, this place where we live in a snowglobe, where 31 degrees in October is ghastly, and in February is heavenly.

I want to remember how it looks, how it feels right now.

I want to remember how it feels to be 37 years old in this moment–listening to the din of many conversations and laptop keys clicking and coffee cups clanging and Bob Dillon playing overhead in this coffee shop, trying to feel my way through this essay as I write on my laptop.

This moment, here now, and never again.

Lucy just turned three and still sucks her nuk and wears a rats nest in her hair because she hates to have it brushed.  Oliver wears his batman underwear around the house pulled up to the high heavens, and keeps his new light-up Transformers shoes next to his bed so he can see them when he wakes up.  The house is a mess with wooden dolls and stuffed animals and plastic dinosaurs and uncapped markers and parts of the Princess and the Pea tea set from Grandma Sue littered in every room.

These little things that we think don’t really matter, that we take for granted, that we just want cleaned up and put away–these are the little things that leave our memories first as Time rolls forward.

But it’s these little things that decorate the landscape of our days.  It’s these little things I want to remember.

Some day too soon Oliver will grow out of his Transformer light-up shoes and we will bring them in a box along with the tea set and the wooden dolls and stuffed animals and donate them to the ARC.  And in that box will also be their 3T and 4T shirts and pants along with the princess dresses and dangerous plastic princess shoes that Lucy loves.  Right now.

Some day, all of the things that make messes and drive me crazy, all of the little articles of clothing I’ve folded a hundred times, will have moved on, barely remembered.  Barely remembered, that is, unless I write them down.

“…How Frank had wished that now could last forever and how their father had said forever was but a trail of nows and the best a man could do was live each one fully in its turn…” –p. 338 of The Horse Whisperer

It’s the ordinary things that make a life, yet it’s the ordinary things that we think are too ordinary to write about.

So why write?

Reason #2: We write to remember.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” -Anais Nin

The one constant in life is that everything will change, everything will cease to exist as it does now–it’s that very fact of life that at times threatens to launch me into depression.  Life.  It’s the only thing we know, yet for all of us, someday it will cease to be.  How do we deal with this fact of our existence? How do we release our grip and just let life flow through us?

The only way I know to harness life, to hold on to the moments a little longer so I can let them go, is to write. It is the way I deal with the transitory nature of life without going nuts.

If I can’t have it forever, at least let me be able to visit it again, some other snowy February day, perhaps, in some coffee shop when I’ve earned more wrinkles and gray hairs, when Oliver and Lucy have long grown out of plastic toys and stuffed animals.  Let me rememeber, if even for a moment, how it felt to be sitting here, at 37 years old, in this coffee shop watching the snow falling, knowing my family is at home, healthy and together.

Let me write so I can remember this moment, right now.