My mother on her roof last year

Viewing the annular solar eclipse.

San Francisco, May 2012.

Gratitudes + things that are making me happy

income

the colors of hydrangeas

cooking sometimes for my love

she calling me her best friend

coffee with soy creamer

a milk crate for the back of my bike

nights when I sleep well/enough

Star Trek: Voyager

views of the ocean and the Bay and my city

Gratitudes/things that are making me happy

• gifts of flowers

• being able to text for free now with my Sydney sister (Belle's got a new phone finally and international iMessaging is free, wheee)

• when the favorite wine of a terrible(ish) person turns out to be a terrible wine

• carrot-beet juice

• the view from Fort Funston

• the little collie that sometimes hangs out at the office I clean, and the way he nudges the back of my leg with his nose for attention

• meditating

• going out with just the right people on just the right occasion

Evening, window, lover

Brianna and Remington. Berkeley, June 2013.

(This is one of my favorite pictures of this year; I sorta wish I had taken it on a better camera.)

A tickle beneath my skin

A quiet restlessness and curiosity, a feeling like I am growing, or have been and now need a new skin. I need to change a few things up. I need to do something different. Something new or something again. Some things, differently, new and again.

I am pondering:

*What is good and lovely in my life right now?

*What am I hungry for more of? 

*What do I want less of, what am I feeling ready to let go of? 

*What practices/habits/relationships that I have let go of do I want to revive?

And I am listening carefully to myself so I can shrug off the things that I only should or could want. (A "real" job, muscle tone, to be more organized and ambitious with my online presence again, a more versatile wardrobe, etc.) The kind of discontent that comes from standards set by external sources is usually a consumerist urge. It is not the healthy, growing kind of itch and will not mature into contentment if I work to satisfy it (and working to satisfy it will not be satisfying) — it will just persist and maybe even grow larger. "Good enough for me" and a turning to focus on what is truly interesting and energy-giving is the antidote for that.

Read in June 2013

Titles link to the pertinent Goodreads page — feel free to add me as a friend.

1. The Stranger, by Albert Camus, trans. Matthew Ward

2. Dracula, by Bram Stoker