Looking Forward to Looking Back

January 2021

I haven’t been blogging, obviously. It’s been more than a month since I posted. Now January is over.

January 2021 has been overwhelming. There’s just been a lot. Warnock and Ossoff being elected in Georgia. A violent insurrection occurred in Washington, D.C., and next to nothing has happened to the folks who participated in that. Some of them are still sitting within Congress’s walls, acting like they didn’t mean it.

I arted a lot during that time. And I journaled in my private journal. But it felt like too much to write about.

In the midst of the more complicated feelings, I was also working on a painting. Because while I’m angry as hell about the insurrection, the hypocrisy of how the white traitors were treated versus the Black Lives Matter movement have been across the nation, (not to mention a goodly number of other things that are “normal” in American culture) I want to hold on to loving my fellow human beings. My deepest gut tells me we can heal from these terrors with love.

But that doesn’t mean that love isn’t messy.

February 2021

Now I’m looking forward into February. With all of the hard emotions that have been coming up with the political environment and Covid, some of my healthy habits have gone to the wayside. (As they will sometimes do.) I lost momentum with my morning practice. I had been getting up early, which I define as before 7:00 a.m. After 8:00 has become the norm. And sleeping that late makes me feel yucky. Like I’m just wasting life. So I want to reboot the habit.

Along with not getting up early, meditation and my daily yoga practice disappeared too. I want those back as well.

I stuck in there with journaling. And, as you can see above, my art habit stayed pretty healthy. I’ve also stayed on pace to bike 2021 miles this year. The good with the bad.

I’m adding a variable to the equation: I let my Netflix account expire. I waste a lot of life with watching shows. I plan to fill that time, instead, with practicing learning foreign languages. (I’m working on French & Spanish in DuoLingo right now.) I also want to read more. I want to create more and do better with getting my different offerings out to the world. I want to continue to help teachers organize around their unsafe working conditions. You might see a few more blog posts.

I might end up caving and renewing the subscription. Watching something while I’m eating will be my biggest hurdle, I think.

So I’ll be working to being a little healthier. As with nearly everything, it’s a practice.

I hope everyone reading this is staying healthy and as well as possible.

Blog Title

This song came to mind for this blog’s title. Over the Rhine is one of my favorites.