Are you mothering with soul?
How would you know if you were?
A gorgeous new card deck helps mothers slow down, take a moment for themselves, and find a deeper connection to soul. My friend, writer Elizabeth Marglin, has just released The Mother’s Wisdom Deck, co-authored with Niki Dewart and with lovely illustrations by Jenny Kostecki.
I’m not a mother but I have great respect for women who are. Bringing up children is a full-time job and most mothers are also working outside the home.
Elizabeth gave me a copy of The Mother’s Wisdom Deck to share with you.
This is a gorgeous and inspiring deck. I wanted one even though I am not a mother.
Whether you’re a mother or not, you’re probably bringing mothering to something. I’m birthing my novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach, after a 12-year gestation period! When I pause to reflect on the whole process, I realize that yes, I mothered this project with soul. It’s the pauses – and using a deck of cards helps us slow down – that give us the true sense of soul.
Leave a comment below about how you are mothering with soul. On Sunday, May 13th, 2012, I’ll choose a comment at random for the winner of a copy of The Mother’s Wisdom Deck.
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers and to all mothering efforts.
Books for Creatives
Read This: Creating Time by Marney Makridakis
I’m excited to recommend Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney Makridakis.
This is a very clever and useful book that invites new ways to be with, think about, and mold time so we can create more.
More about the book.
Enjoy my video review.
Book Review: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This may be the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.
The descriptions of the Alaskan landscape, flora and fauna, weather patterns and animals were so beautiful. I never thought I would be eager for that place, but Eowyn’s prose was so lovingly rendered and gorgeous, it made me want to visit Alaska again.
The characters were well-wrought and absolutely lovable. The mysterious snow child and her roots in fairy tale offered just the right amount of magic and mystery.
I loved the beautiful surprises that came near the end (trying not to be a spoiler!). So delightful.
So sad and beautiful at the same time.
I highly recommend this book, in case it’s not already obvious!
I met Eowyn at the Tattered Cover’s annual Authors Meet Readers event, and she was a total dear. As a fellow bookseller-turned-author, I enjoyed our conversation about a life among the stacks.
View all my reviews
Make Your Creative & Graceful Return
When you come home from a trip of any length, you’re not the same person. You’re just not. It’s impossible to go out into the world and not be affected.
If you’re like me, you want to make the most of what the world has given you. You embrace the gifts of the journey – new possibilities, insights and confidence.
But it’s easy for all that to slip away into the ignorosphere – that place where your ideas and possibilities exist but you don’t do anything about them.
I’m just off the plane from Paris – actually two trains, three planes and two busses, not to mention airport shuttles.
I’m still in motion. It’s like that feeling you get stepping off a moving walkway, still cruising but off-balance while you try to integrate the new pace.
But I’m happy to be back in the office and using my tools from my e-book The Graceful Return to get my footing. In this week’s newsletter I want to share what I’m doing to cull the juice from my trip to Paris.
It would be easy to pull an article together from the e-book, and I often do that. But this time I’ll share what I jotted in my journal on the way home.
[Read more…] about Make Your Creative & Graceful Return
Earning Your A
Writers and other creative types are often notoriously hard on ourselves. Yes, I got published, but they didn’t pay much, you’ll hear. Or, sure I got a show, but it isn’t a solo show. Dissatisfaction is the bane of the creative’s existence.
It could be said that dissatisfaction drives the creative type to keep creating. If we were perfectly content with the world, we wouldn’t have to make anything new, would we?
Yet, this cranky perspective can also keep us from really enjoying the process of producing art. In The Art of Possibility, Benjamin Zander shares this exercise for banishing the ‘not good enough’ demons that haunt us. It’s called Earning Your A.
[Read more…] about Earning Your A