This year especially, as we’ve transitioned the kids to learning from home (and in combination with changes to my work-from-home business), I’ve noticed this sense of “never-enoughness” with my time:

I didn’t spend enough conscious time with the kids.

I didn’t have enough time for myself.

I didn’t get enough time for the work I wanted to do.

And when will I make enough time for my partner?

Spend enough. Have enough. Get enough. Make enough.

Is this all about scarcity of time? Is this all about how time becomes currency? And, is it possible to reframe my experience of time?

I recently signed up to receive business advice from a local group of volunteers, many of whom are retired from their own small companies or freelance work.

Aside from some possibly out-dated advice about marketing, I left with this feeling of unease in my belly.

My mentor suggested I eliminate anything from my website, my marketing, and my work that is not directly related to selling my copywriting services. Because that's what makes money; that's what prospective clients want to see.

And he is right. That's how a business makes money inside our current systems. Pick one thing, preferably the most lucrative, and “optimize” that thing until you can’t anymore.

And yet.

My work for other people, while I enjoy it immensely, is not the only thing I’d like to highlight - on my website or otherwise.

When I say “alignment” I’m talking about the process of ensuring that what we do and what we value is a cohesive experience. ALIGNMENT is the ‘lining up’ of your life, your work, and your day-to-day experience with what your Soul holds most valuable.

You can (often) determine what you value by noticing what you’re doing now… and what you’d like to do next:

• Does your life right now line up with what you value?

• Do the dreams you hold line up with what you value?

• Do you know what you value?

THE PROCESS of aligning your actions with what you value requires your Orientation toward what you want and what you believe - and then your (regular!) Calibration toward those things.

an artist residency in motherhood - “a self-directed, open-source artist residency to empower and inspire artists [writers] who are also mothers,” created by Lenka Clayton

the (original) purpose -

My reasons for adopting the Artist Residency in Motherhood framework are these: to embrace working and creating within my everyday life; to redefine the “limitations” of motherhood, work, and creating by earning a sustainable income for my family - and enjoying the process; to explore my relationship with schooling, education, learning, and teaching by unschooling my kids at home and deschooling myself within our shared life.

Following my hard “break-up” with graduate school, I want to create my own education at home and inside motherhood - while also sharing the process and the results publicly.

One of the many, many reasons "non-negotiable" daily habits fall flat for me is that, my daily life is forever changing. ⁣
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Partly because my babies are forever changing.⁣
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For awhile the baby was up really early in the morning; now the girls stay up late jumping in each other's beds. Which means, sometimes we sleep in, sometimes we have a breakfast picnic outside... and sometimes we let an early movie salvage a hard day. ⁣

The purpose of RITUAL practice is often to signify a change from the everyday experience, he said.

This happens with “coming of age” rituals, holiday traditions, marriage ceremonies, baptisms (all sacred ceremonies you find within different religions and spiritual traditions).

But this also happens with things like bedtime prayers, journaling practice, and morning routines.

Because, put simply: a RITUAL is something you do in patterned intervals to mark an important change.

I’ve been in the “regularly anxious and overwhelmed” category since I was a kid.

Overwhelm is so familiar to me by now, I often know the cause, and even the solution! But somehow, it’s still incredibly hard to escape.

Probably because, I’m trying to escape… v. stay long enough to move through it.