Occupy Your Life

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Slowing down and embrac­ing the spa­cious­ness of the un-scheduled moment has been an increas­ingly impor­tant and elu­sive goal over the last few years as I expe­ri­ence too-regular cal­en­dar over­whelm and a daily Sisyphean bat­tle with my in-box.

Thomas Merton artic­u­lates the prob­lem per­fectly in a quote I’ve used here before and will no doubt come back to again:

“The rush and pres­sure of mod­ern life are a form, per­haps the most com­mon form, of innate vio­lence. To allow one­self to be car­ried away by a mul­ti­tude of con­flict­ing con­cerns, to sur­ren­der to too many demands, to com­mit one­self to too many projects, to want to help every­one in every­thing is to suc­cumb to violence.

More than that, it is coop­er­a­tion with vio­lence. The frenzy of the activist neu­tral­izes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capac­ity for peace. It destroys the fruit­ful­ness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wis­dom which makes work fruitful.”

To begin to redress the vio­lence I’ve been doing to my soul and restore the ten­der roots of my own inner wis­dom, I’ve decided to begin this new year by re-claiming some­thing I’d almost for­got­ten — the weekend.

No small thing as — slowly but def­i­nitely — the week­end seems to have migrated from rest-time to work-time in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. Turning the tide appears to require a per­sonal dec­la­ra­tion of some kind, a stance against the cul­tural pres­sure to over-work. Therefore, I have ordered home deliv­ery of Sunday’s New York Times and hereby pub­licly pro­claim that I can no longer be relied upon to read email over the week­end.

Yes, you heard that cor­rectly. I’m embark­ing upon a “occupy my life” cam­paign in 2012 that kicks off by fully occu­py­ing my week­ends, so unless we have arranged oth­er­wise, you can pretty-much fig­ure I won’t read any­thing work-related after 5pm Friday until Monday morn­ing. With the accu­mu­la­tion that’s sure to have piled up by then, you may not even get a response til Tuesday!

Even God didn’t work 7 days a week.

Originally posted by Amy Lenzo on www.BeautyDialogues.com

Brene Brown on The Power of Vulnerability

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The feel­ing of fear is often much big­ger than the things we think we are afraid of. You know that old say­ing that it’s the fear itself we fear. We have become mas­ter dis­trac­tors from what we really feel, intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing and label­ing and sweep­ing under the car­pet those big dark scary things inside our­selves. Those things that we are cer­tain will be judged, pun­ished, out of con­trol or just too big to han­dle. Read the rest of this entry »

Global Advocates Share Collective Voice to End Violence Against Women

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This year at the 2nd World Conference of Women’s Shelters, there was no short­age of energy and enthu­si­asm, and cer­tainly no short­age of women. Representing 96 coun­tries, 1,600 indi­vid­u­als par­tic­i­pated in work­shops and inter­ac­tive dis­cus­sion ses­sions in an epic net­work­ing event, hosted by the National Network for Ending Domestic Violence at the Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center in Washington D.C.

The con­fer­ence included an impres­sive list of speak­ers and pre­sen­ters, atten­dees and spe­cial guests. All types of roy­alty, from HRH Princess Mary of Denmark to Reese Witherspoon, and even for­mer U.S. President, Bill Clinton, made speeches and added to the col­lec­tive spirit of the crowd with mes­sages of sup­port, unity and hopes for a brighter future. Survivors and advo­cates alike came together for this spe­cial 4-day con­fer­ence to meet fel­low advo­cates and to speak about a global human rights issue — vio­lence against women. Despite the diver­sity of back­grounds, the women (and a hand­ful of brave men) were united by a sin­gu­lar pur­pose: to live in a world devoid of gender-based vio­lence. Read the rest of this entry »

a nice horizontal line A sanctuary where the body can rest and the soul can reveal itself.

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