courage works

how did i bring in 2016?  in the same ways i want to live it:  i read elizabeth gilbert's book "big magic" about creative living without fear and i emailed thank you notes to famous people.

(or, rather spent most of the time looking up how to contact the famous people and then writing them.  i didn't just want to send out another "tweet" or "like" into the social media universe.  those have their place, but i wanted them to get an honest, old fashioned email which is more difficult than it may sound.)

you see, i was grateful to elizabeth gilbert, oprah, and brene brown for their ideas. i didn't write with the expectation of a reply, though it would be fun to hear from them (or from their people's people's publisher's office coffee errand person...)

because my thanks started with a link to brene's interview of oprah:  courage works interview

and it continued with an article i read on the plane in oprah's latest magazine about how to really be present for people without over-identifying or absorbing, so as to be truly helpful.  (i tend to want to fix things which conveys intense emotions that are not as helpful as my heart wants to be, so the article helped me practice what to dial down and what to dial up in the form of some new and better ways of truly being there for others that actually work!) this also gave me the idea to ask others what were some of the bravest things they'd ever done.

while at the getty museum in LA, i saw, among many beautiful collections, what i thought was an extremely courageous photography exhibit called "scars" with big--and i mean larger than life-size--healed wounds that people allowed to be shared through pictures.  we all have scars, right?  on our bodies and in our souls?  visible ones from jumping too far from a tree when we were little (what kid doesn't like to tell how they got an owie) or the removal of a mole...to the invisible scars we get in the search for meaning, love and belonging that, if we're honest, are how we all grow, learn, fall down and get back up again.

everything about courage seems to point to vulnerability; the more willing we are to open ourselves up, the braver we can become...here's to getting out and doing more of what makes us sparkle!