Dead Heart
It’s been a long long week. I’ve been breaking my all my own rules and been busy busy busy. Up early and out ‘til late. On Monday I didn’t see Rowan at all, except sleeping in his bed at the start and finish. Tuesday I woke him up and put him to bed. Thursday I saw him for a few minutes early and got home so late I didn’t even bother to look in on him before crashing into a heap on my bed. Holy “slip sliding away” Batman!
At the beginning of the week I had proposed for myself a week of tears. Ha! Or as Elvis Costello once sang:
I get so angry when the teardrops start
But you can’t be wounded when you got no heart
Which is hyperbole of course, and yet I think the Chinese nailed it when they created the character for the word busy: one part dead, and one part heart. Ack!
So it wound up being a week of busy, with big overtones of my father, who looms awefully large in my tearless condition as well as my thoughts all week long, not least because this is the week leading up to Rowan’s 4th birthday, and there is a lot of hubbub and busyness leading up to that:
Last minute plans–concerns about the weather, what to put in the piñata, and the infamous Lion Cake–and of course when it rains it pours and so clients of all sorts start calling me up for yoga, massage, health counseling; and being me I say yes and stay out of the house the whole day and generally succumb to the clank of busyness.
Confession #2
All of which leads up to the other motif of Monday’s Motivator: the confession. On Monday it was the confession of tearlessness, and Mark Silver, the big-hearted guru over at Heart of Business even chimed in during the week with his own weather report, thunderstorms and productivity. For me it was a desert and now time for a new confession:
As much as I know how to eat, and make a living counseling people how to eat, well depending on the week I eat in a more healthy nourishing way, or not. I like bacon and eggs. I like lamb and beef. Grass fed of course. I like yogurt and cheese and chocolate. I really like chocolate, which is strange, because I never really used to. Not until I did my nutrition training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
And that’s when things are good. As I wrote in a song of my own years ago, during one of my “phases”:
I live on coffee, I live on cream
I live on candy from the health food store
Sometimes it seems like a horrible dream
Breaking my own rules
And then it can degenerate from raw cashews and dried mango slices to Pringles and Lindoor Truffles. Ack. I don’t know what it is about Pringles…I don’t ever buy any other commercial swag junk food…and I can always tell when I need a course correction by the tube of whatever those things are made of suddenly appearing on the floor of my car. Oops!
So for me Spring Cleaning isn’t another example of purity (ha!). It’s a requirement because of my all too human frailty! Which leads me to make the public announcement that I am now offering The Art of Spring Cleaning as a free introductory 75 minute teleclass, with background, breakdown, how to’s, and a Q/A session that will extend beyond the scheduled time as needed.
I’m offering that up next Tuesday at 2:30 pm EST–which is lot’s of different times in lot’s of different parts of the world–7:30 pm in London where Naomi lives, 11:30 am in Portland where Mark and Havi live, 1:30 in Chicago where our President used to live, and some time or other in your town where you live–accessible with this neat little thing we are so happy the internet exists for–the Universal Time Translator!
And I digress. Remember.
- Overwork.
- Poor food choices.
- Pringles.
All the stuff we do to tax our bodies, weaken our systems, blunt our effectiveness, and set ourselves up for breakdown, or mild “I don’t want to get out of bed” style depression.
And the antidote for that: The Art of Spring Cleaning.
Join me on Tuesday. It’s free! It’ll be fun. It’ll be educational. And we’ll learn something new about ourselves, and our strengths and weaknesses.
Update: Tthe call has been recorded… sign up above and you’ll get the recording!
Chas
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
GirlPie 05.16.09 at 6:13 pm
I’ve been so booked with clients this last several weeks that your post sounded familiar (but it’s eating at the keyboard rather than the car here), that I suspect I could use your call and love the price — but I’ll be with a client Tuesday — and every day well into June — so I’m wondering if you’re recording the call? I’d sign up now and retrieve later to hear while I sleep. Just wondering — thanks!
chas 05.16.09 at 6:38 pm
What a smashing idea! Subscribe and you’ll get the recording a day or two after the call! Happy to hear that you are busy…and saddened at the same time. Will we ever find the happy balance?