I’ve been really lax in my blogging lately.

If I’m honest with myself I’ve been really lax in just about everything over the past month or so. I could probably justify it if it was just here since this is my personal blog, and the one that’s supposed to be just for fun.
But even the blogs and sites I maintain to earn income from have been ignored lately. And I can’t really put my finger on why that is.

In the old days I would have beat myself up over this and pushed even harder. But it’s a new month, the start of my favorite time of the year,and I’ve decided that it’s okay to accept the fact that my mind and my body needed a rest. I owe a big thanks to Shileen Nixon for pointing out that yes, it really is okay to stop and reboot every once in awhile.

After my bike ride this morning I just sat in front of the window, breathed in the damp morning air and thought about mornings that felt and smelled just like this at the cottage when I was a kid. :)

It’s so nice to have the option of stopping and taking a break when I need it. But break time is over now, and I have a new and more compelling motivation to get my act together and create even more success for myself. (Sorry, that’s all ya get for now — I don’t want to jinx it.)

Anyways, the main purpose of this ramble is just to say that I’m back and re-committed to posting more, both here and on the other sites as well.

Thanks for being here!

There’s a lot to be said for recycling beyond the environmental and decluttering benefits. You can learn a lot about yourself too in what you’ve collected over the years.

Last week started out great and I had big plans to get a ton of writing done, and a handful of websites updated. And then things started happening that I needed to pay attention to. Looking back now, it seems that all of it was headed toward one goal … to teach me a lesson about myself.

The first thing that got me taking notice was that my son’s computer finally quit on him. It wasn’t unexpected, but the timing couldn’t have been worse for him since he couldn’t afford to replace it right away. So rather than leave him without, I decided to clean off my laptop and give that to him. Going through all my files, seeing what I’d written over the past few years, and especially what I’d bought in terms of ebooks and courses was a real eye-opener.

Self-realization #1 – I am officially a digital packrat … There’s stuff here that I forgot I’d bought, never read, and a lot that I bought with the intention of using it and never took action. My mind has been going a mile a minute lately with ideas for articles and blog posts, ebooks and videos and all kinds of other good stuff I can create.

While I was burning all the files off the laptop onto DVDs for storage, I decided to start going through some stored boxes of paper files and see what could be taken to the recycling centre. And this is where self-realization #2 really got my attention.

It’s no secret that I have self-confidence issues. But every once in awhile I get the tar kicked out of me by the Universe, and I’m reminded that this wasn’t always the case and that I do have talents and abilities that are worth sharing.

In the bottom of one box I came across some tear out copies of book reviews that I’d had published when I was an undergrad. I started reading and was struck by the realization that I’m a pretty decent writer when I want to be.

In another box, I found an envelope full of old check stubs and bank statements from when I first started this internet marketing gig way back in 1998. They were a good reminder that I was a pretty decent affiliate marketer and newsletter publisher at one time as well. I’d totally forgotten about those days in the wake of the lean years. I’d let my lack of self confidence convince me that I didn’t have anything to offer that could compete with the “gurus”.

Seeing the evidence that yes, I did know what I was doing at least once in my life gave me the motivation I needed to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again. (I think there’s a song about that somewhere!) I’ve been agonizing over how I was going to make my writing habit pay for itself, and it seems that I’ve been worried for nothing. I did it once before, and I can certainly do it again… only better this time. :)

And to do that, I’ve decided to set myself a goal of writing 5000 words a day. Between journalling, blogging, and all the article and report-writing that I do on a daily basis I figure I must be pretty close to that now. I just haven’t had the confidence to post a lot of what I write because I’ve always worried about whether people will like it or not. I still haven’t figured out where and how much I’ll post every day, but I’ll definitely post the word count here at the end of the day.

There’s one more bonus that came out of giving my laptop away…. I now have an electronics-free writing space where I can scribble to my heart’s content.

All in all, despite the stress of the situation, it’s been a good week. :)

Photo Credit: Septober

In my quest to find myself, one of the things I do from time to time is pick up Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and just read bits and pieces of it. I’m sure that’s not the way you’re “supposed” to read it, but it works for me and I usually get what I need from whatever page I flip it open to. Sometimes I get it right away and sometimes it takes awhile to sink in. And then there are the times when it really smacks me in the face when I’m doing something else. That’s what happened this morning.

It was reasonably sunny earlier this morning and so I decided that I would go out and take some pictures. It’s been dreary all week and I’ve been miserable trying to work all week in the dark. Needless to say, by the time I got ready and got outside it was starting to rain again but I decided I’d go wandering anyways.

This is where I ended up starting from:

It was nice enough in the park proper, but I really wanted to get closer to the water. So I hopped back in the car and drove around to the bottom of the hill. (Yes, I know I could’ve walked it, but I don’t do hills when I’m alone since at this moment in time I’m a fat lady with a heart condition. I might’ve got down the hill just fine but there’s no guarantee I would’ve got back up it without help.)

When I got down there I realized just how boring the paved path looked, and it still didn’t get me close enough to the river, which is where I really wanted to be. The cool thing is that there’s a dirt path that runs parallel to the paved one, and there’s a lovely little sloping path that takes you down to it.

And as I was wandering down the dirt path snapping photos, I thought about Tolle’s words and realized that what he had said was staring me right in the face:

“When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It won’t even be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad) anymore since everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter. …

“The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. A New Earth, p. 194-195

And that’s what I noticed this morning … new life growing out of dead and dying plants. The green of a baby pine tree showing through the grey even on a cold November morning when nothing green should even be poking its head above ground.

Even though I wasn’t in a forest — in truth, I probably wasn’t more than 20 feet away from the paved path and could hear people jogging and walking their dogs above me — you could still feel the difference, the hidden harmony and sacredness of something that had been left untouched. For that moment I could actually forget that I was standing in the middle of a city.

I’m not even sure at this point if I’m doing more than rambling here. It just struck me at the moment when I came back up onto the paved path to head back to my car that it really was a perfect example of man-made order and natural, chaotic order side by side.

Thanks for reading!
Have a wonderful day :)