Crafting a Beautiful Life

I have been struggling with insomnia for a little over a week now.  I wake up like clockwork at 3:30 a.m.  I do some thinking and then I try to discipline myself to do an exercise a friend told me about that really does help me sink back into sleep if I work at it:  I subtract 7 from 100 until I fall asleep.  It is so boring, inevitably, I drift off before I can reach 65.  It helps that I am terrible at mental math. Scientifically speaking, it works because it accesses the dull, logical part of my brain, not the part that is feeling everything. 

Last night while I was in the thinking stage, I thought maybe I would just write a bit about what my life looks like these days because it is changing.  It always helps me to come back to my blog and see how much things have changed in my life after a certain amount of time has past.  I'm blogging this for my own benefit more than anything.

So this is how I am spending my life right now:

Three days a week I get up and go the gym. In January, almost inexplicably, I started running for the first time in my life. I will be writing more about that soon.

On Mondays and Thursdays, I spend a couple of hours at Stacie Bloomfield's office, otherwise known as Gingiber LLC headquarters.  Stacie is an enormously successful and incredibly hard-working Etsy seller who has grown to the point of needing some contract labor to help ship her orders.  I have so enjoyed this and learned some things that I will be writing about too.

On Tuesday nights, I am leading an Experimental Collective focused on using used items to help others.  So far, we have watched "The Story of Stuff,"  an excellent overview of consumerism in America.    I will definitely write more about this as we physically disseminate a huge pile of "stuff" that has been donated by Vintage Fellowship for the exercise of learning to be better consumers, better donators, better philanthropists, better citizens of the world.

I am currently a tenant in two flea markets: my booth at the Fayetteville Trading Post is being used by the Experimental Collective to generate cash for our experiment, but it does have quite a bit of my stuff in it still as I am phasing out this booth from my sole responsibility. I also have a space at the 410 Vintage, where my idea was to sell off some of my large mosaic projects.  So far, it hasn't been a big money maker.  I'm going to give it another few weeks and see if it takes an upswing.  Flea markets take time, though, and I'm not sure I want to keep spending it there.  The jury is still out on this.

I am still operating my Etsy stores selling vintage in The Classic Butterfly and mosaics at The Mosaic Butterfly.  These are still a big part of my life and a great creative outlet. 

I also spend a portion of time at Heartwood Gallery where I display my smaller mosaic works (because of space limitations.)  I really enjoy working on displays in the whole gallery and that seems to be my best contribution to this collective of artists.  

Another small side project right now is assisting my good friend Holly Shacklett as a substitute helper in her organizing business.  She has a business partner, but sometimes she needs some extra hands, and that really satisfies a part of me that like to make a real, tangible difference. 

Robb and I have begun to collaborate on a podcast.  This tool for promoting his book is a really fun way for us to open the conversation up to other people to tell their stories of transition and transformation.  So far we have interviewed two really interesting guys and continue to work out the kinks of technology.  This project really excites me because it allows people in on something that Robb and I are good at....talking to one another about the things that we have devoted our lives to.   I will definitely be writing more about this too. 

It seems at times that I am too busy.  But the truth is, that these things take up as much time as I let them.  Recently, l came to the conclusion  that my life was missing a big rock in my big jar of pebbles.  It's easy to fill up my time on Facebook or Pinterest, hovering over my online stores and the promotion that is necessary for them, and other really secondary things. I have made some big realizations in the last month thanks to my activities. Doing things has helped me learn things that I wouldn't know otherwise.  I look forward to sharing more about that soon.  But for right now, these are some of the things that I am devoting my time and energy towards.  I am really fortunate to have the freedom to weave my life this way, but it has also been very deliberate.  Exploring what you want out of the life you have been given is important work.