Greetings My Sweetbird Soul Family, In this ‘new normal’, it’s hard to know who to believe, where to turn to and what we need to do sometimes at any given moment. It really has been a ‘wait and see’ for all of us. For the world. I call this the dark night of the soul. Not because it’s awful, but because there is no going back to the familiar and we have yet to see the future. I feel like we have one feet in each side of the past and future. Can you surrender to the outcome that you don’t see coming? This time can be looked at as a collective chaos, or it can be seen as an opportunity. An opportunity...
When I was a little girl in second grade, I found a fuzzy caterpillar one day on the playground. I decided to keep him as my pet and put him in my little fish shaped change purse. I put a little grass in there to feed him as I figured that would do the job of food and zipped up the fish. I remembered the little guy about a week later when I found the fish in my desk. I unzipped the fish lips to find something really scary. Much to my shock, the caterpillar was gone and there was just a bunch of fuzzy white threads wrapped up in a corner! It scared the hell out of me whatever it was and I quickly zipped...
I don't know about you, but I have been rearranging everything from the closet to the vegetable drawers, to the underwear drawers. I feel like the quarantine has caused us all to reshape our lives. To go through and literally reshape EVERYTHING. The world hit a big pause button, and I'm sure like most of you I felt busted flat in Baton Rouge. Totally alone. But then it hit me, I really wasn’t alone. I had my Sweet Bird family to call on. Literally. So after my little pity party I began the curiosity of who my customers really are and day by day, threw out the anxiety of the bad news, turned off the TV for good and got to work. ...
“Grandma, how do you cope with pain?” “With your hands, honey. If you do it with your mind instead of relieving the pain, it toughens even harder.” “With your hands grandma?” “Yes, our hands are the antennae of our soul. If you move them; knitting, cooking, painting, playing or sinking them into the ground, you send care signs to the deepest part of you and your soul lights up because you’re paying attention to it. Then signs of pain will no longer be necessary.” “Hands are really that important?” “Yes my daughter. Think of babies: they start to know the world through the touch of their hands. If you look at the hands of old people, they tell you more...
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. When WWII ended, my grandparents pooled their money together and eventually bought a beach house on the Jersey shore. It was there I learned about storms. I would marvel at the old whaling prints on the wall that my Grandfather collected, like the image above by Percy Dalton. Men in rough seas in nothing more than a dinghy it seemed. I could hear the waves many nights from my bed, the...
