When a friend suggested I should sign up our Circle as part of an “O at Home” project aimed at women’s gatherings, I found all kinds of reasons to NOT do it.

I suggested the friend take on the task, since she was enthusiastic about the idea.

I fumbled at the fact that it did not seem a good fit for our evenings of deep conversation.

I worried that an afternoon of oohing and ahhing over “stuff” would take us away from our core purpose as a Circle of women focusing on leading lives that made a difference in the world.

I turned my attention to other things but the friend was persistent.
“It would be really great publicity for you,” she said, stopping me cold in my tracks. That idea had never occurred to me.
I thought I’d better sit down my bag of objections and look at it again. Could it really give Something Yet To Be national visibility? Did I WANT it? How could this small group of close knit women, less than 20-strong at the heart of it, rise to the occasion IF such visibility created a larger demand? Wouldn’t we be biting off more than we could chew?

And I heard my husband’s voice in my head. “Janet, it’s just a sweepstakes. You probably won’t get picked. What do you have to lose? Ten minutes? Not a big deal. Just do it.”

Except…. It was terrifying to think about an Oprah-sized launch. Being an inch worm was familiar but the soaring eagle? No way.

Bald fear lived underneath all the objections. So, I picked up the piece of paper and typed in the website, gulping and holding onto the imagined words of my husband , “Just do it.”

Pam Slim,Escape from the Cubicle Nation,wrote in a November post about The Diné, what the Navajo call the crystal fire, the spark of life that keeps your body moving, that allows all your organs to work together in glorious harmony so that blood gets everywhere it needs to go, and food is digested and muscles and bones move when you tell them to.

It made me think of that OTHER crystal fire, the creative impulse, the soul, the breath of life. It is there all the time, all we have to do is reach out our hand and it is there.

So before I hunker down on this cold, wintry day and begin compiling all those boring pieces of paper for the accountant, I will light the three white candles on the table, say a silent blessing on the world, and move with ease and grace into the space of shuffling papers, taxes, and mundane realities. It is so much easier when I remember the sacred spark that lives in me.

This is a time of the year that I cherish the weather channel, because I can SEE the times of sunrise and sunset. I grin like a fool at seeing the daily gift of one more minute of light.

At the end of 2010, as I began settling into my "new" office, I decided to reflect on years past as a first step to learning my intentions for the new year soon to arrive. I decided to take down the six maps that had been created during the intensives of Something Yet To Be. I spread them on the floor and just noted the words that jumped out at me. Mostly they were PARTICIPANT'S words and I wanted to see what they might tell me about how I BE in the world.

The sea of words were typed and then copied and placed into a wordle that created a lump in my throat. Gratitude and amazement wrapped like a warm woolen cape around me.

All I can say is Thank you to all the generous women who have given me the grace of their trust over the last two years.

If you would like to see it, click on the related link below.

My dreams the past two weeks have been VERY vivid and intense. They have been forcefully telling me about some thing things that are going on in the subterranean reaches of my heart, mind, and spirit. It is stuff that was not apparent by looking at the skin of my days or the hours in my body.

As the weather turned suddenly frigid this week, it felt like a good time to burrow in for a spell. I lit the candles, admired the tree, picked up piles of reading material and (true to my mother’s old habit of painting for the holidays!), bought a gallon of Mark Twain House Brown for the floor in my emerging office.

This afternoon, a message from Dr. Deb Kern via e-mail reminded me that the Solstice is coming. She outlined activities for the three days before Solstice and for the three days after. It made special sense to me this year. While the seasons in our lives usually change more slowly than the seasons of the earth, there are those times when life seems to be a whirl spinning out of our control. It isn’t quite that bad for me, just sort of busy and distracted from what really matters.

If you are in a time of change – or just need a few days of being intentional about the darkest days of winter – Dr. Deb’s outline might be just your cup of tea. If nothing else, take it as a reminder to pay attention to the world outside your little corner.
And remember: The moon doesn’t need us to do anything for her to shine her soft light on all of us. She just does…. Now isn’t that the best kind of gift?

To read her article...

Dr. Deb Kern

It was one of those days… For some non-specific, intangible, catalyst free reason, the wires of communication between me and my husband were sparking – and not in a good way. He said something that should have been a simple statement, a sort of feather thing sent out with a little puff of air. But that puppy landed hard.

He said I don’t seem happy.

And I was stunned into a profound, “Say what???” Then I asked what would it look like (to him) if I were happy. Figured I was not doing it, whatever it was, and wanted to know how he would know it if he saw it.

Back and forth, round and round we went, getting deeper into that hole of “this cannot end well” known by married couples everywhere. At some point, the discussion ended and we went back to “normal” life. (And I will confess, I was still bewildered by the exchange.)

But life called and we shifted.

That evening, I went with some girlfriends to see “The Glow Project”, a movie I had read about a year or so ago.

Driving home, I GOT it, the thing my husband could not find words for in the man vocabulary. He meant I have not been glowing as much lately. There are a whole bunch of normal middle-aged life things that have been factors. Add in a summer of high heat and humidity, an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico and an economy that is stuck for the foreseeable future….. and well, you get it.

Being stuck on the train of shoulda/coulda/woulda, I was not quite Chicken Little with her frantic “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.” But I had lost something that matters a lot to the man who holds me very dear. My inner glow of peace and contentment had faded to a barely visible ember.

I can’t quite tell you how it happened, but that hour in the darkened theater, listening to the stories of 15 women who thought they had lost their glow, I found mine was burning brightly. I came home refreshed and renewed and reminded that, yes, I still have it.

And my honey saw it right away.

If you or someone you know, needs a glow adjustment, visit:


Glow Project