Blogging, not blogging

I’m getting good at blogging about things other than the book Have 5he Best Year of Your Life aren’t I?

It’s nearly 10pm again. I blogged recently about listening to your body. Today my body didn’t let me listen to it; instead it kept sleeping. I didn’t really get up until after midday, and the timing was perfect because a man arrived to check the electric meter shortly afterwards.

This evening I went to my local independent cinema to watch You Me and Him which is out now – go and see it! It ended with a Q&A with the director, so I didn’t get home until after 9pm. Result? No time to blog, except about why I’m not blogging…

The good news is I’m not wide awake after so much sleep this morning, which means I’ve probably caught up on the sleep I need.

Revisiting the Seasons

Sometimes I get busy internally. Today I journaled and ended up spending an hour writing out all sorts of stuff I had not faced and realising a lot of things and while it didn’t look like I was doing much, emotionally I feel put through the wringer. Then I had work.

With all that going on, there wasn’t time to do anything worth blogging about – and even if I was prepared to blog about the stuff that came up today, I need time to process it. I was a little out of it at work, looking back.

So, instead, an update on a previous activity. Keeping track of the changing seasons.

I found a whiteboard and added something it most weeks. I filled it up, but took a photo before wiping it clean and beginning again:

For the birds

Today’s activity:

…learn how to identify three or four of the most common birds you may spot in your garden, local park, or hovering over the grass verge as you race down the highway.

I already know the local birds: robin, jackdaw, pigeon, dove, magpie (my favourite, obviously). My grandmother’s love of birds came to me through my mother. I know many British birds. I am good at sounds too; I can tell a magpie is near by the calls, identify a blackbird by the warning they give when a cat is around (and the sound of a garden for me is the blackbird song), tell the difference between a pigeon and a dove by the sound. I even found that I have learned the call of a red kite, just from living in an area where they fly overhead. Given they were all but extinct when I was a child, this was a magical thing to realise. (The call can be heard if you follow the link)

However I do not know everything. I pulled out this book from my shelves:

I would like to be able to identify swallows, swifts and house martins. It isn’t the season for them, but they’re not uncommon in the summer and it would be good to be able to tell the difference when they do return. So that’s what I am going to do.

It’s good to be able to blog before I get tired. I am still feeling listless/apathetic, but today’s activity is one I can do, so I will focus on the positive.

Writing

I have been writing most of today. I stopped to do the dishes, and to cook (finally! Last night I got as far as slicing bread and eating them on their own – it was good bread) and I didn’t really surface until after 10am, because t mostly I have written. Fiction, new fiction I mean, straight out of my brain, sort of, as it was a scene written from another point of view, but mostly new words, well, regular words in a fresh order, then I began going through things I wrote over the past year. There’s some good things there, and I lost track of time. So nothing to blog about really, but still, it was good to re-read old pieces and see the good parts of them. A real boost to my mood. I don’t know how long this exhaustive low mood will last, but today was better than yesterday, and I am determined to keep blogging, even if it’s not about the (un)usual activities I set this blog up to chronicle.

I have set up a new category “living” to remind me that even if I don’t blog about what I planned to it’s still worth blogging, if only to keep going. I have also learned how to delete spam comments.

Edit: Apparently this is my 💯 blog post. Well done me 😃

Little Miss Naughty

Today, do something naughty

Short but sweet…and open to interpretation, I ate one of these:

In case you don’t recognise the title it’s after one of the series of books I grew up with. If I have done this right there should be a link on the image below

…and there is, it should also be aligned to the centre…

…but isn’t.

Christmas Break

I have blogged every day for the last 75 days, but after the day I have had, I realised I cannot blog today. I am taking a break for a few days in order to fully enjoy Christmas.

All the best for the season… back soon

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

Review

Today’s activity involved 5 pages of journaling looking at my thoughts and beliefs and I don’t want to share them just now, so I will just use today’s post to blog about the week.

I missed one day, but Thanksgiving is a reasonable excuse. 🦃 A couple of days were harder – the focusing on taste, and doing things with Love, but they got me focusing on things that I don’t always think about and I gave them a go.

I looked back over the blog and have tagged every activity post with its category (Grow, Explore, Expand, Receive, Give, Connect and Commit). Over these 7 weeks of blogging I have missed 5 activities out of 49. – 10% That’s not terrible going. I hope to do better, but am not about to beat myself up over it – it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. I have made myself blog every day and I am proud of that.

I haven’t skipped activities in any particular category – I have missed two Give activities, and 1 each of Expand, Explore and Grow. If I was missing out on one category above all others, I would be asking myself why. Though if I miss another Give activity, I will have to do some serious journaling… but I am committed to the journey of having the best year of my life.

Nature corner

Today’s activity is to begin a nature corner in your home. I already have a couple of places which feature nature in amongst other things. I suppose I can call them altars.

The first is on a bookshelf, around an angel glass, a glass I painted years ago into which I put the little gifts the Angels sent – little hearts and feathers and shiny coins. I have stones there, even before recognising my paganism, I collected stones. I also have my pewter Discworld figures there, among the others:

My second alter is on the mantelpiece. I only have 3 1/2 rooms, but I have a mantlepiece.

This is my official altar, where I keep my “alicorn” and the oracle cards I am currently working with. The last few years I put the advent calendar there too, but I am not sure where it’s going to fit. Today, visiting my parents, I looked around the garden. The garden gave me apple leaves, and scarily unseasonable catkins, which I added to the blessings/offerings already there: Blessings sounds wrong, but they are closer to that than offerings. I don’t really do offerings, but the word fits better. Spiritually meanings can get confused sometimes, a word tat fits is closer in meaning to another word entirely.

I still haven’t really shared this blog with anyone. I am a Spiritual person, in that I follow Spirit for the highest good, but I couldn’t define Spirit for you. God or Goddess would have a similar meaning. I suppose, except they don’t, quite. I want to be more open about my Spiritual side, but I can’t help thinking it would be easier if there was already a word describing what I am. Pagan is close, but it misses out important facets of my spiritual life. I use oracle cards, and work with Angels and Faery. I am highly intuitive in minor ways, but wouldn’t consider myself psychic. I am a mixture of things. This blog, this best year of my life (so far) is part of my journey to describe myself. It feels like I have done the discovery, though there’s still more to learn, now I am trying to figure out what exactly I have discovered.

Massage

Today’s activity was giving myself a face massage. The book went though how to do it. I want to try and memorise this, because it is simple, but I had to keep stopping to peer at the book on what to do next (Peering because I took off my glasses to do the massage).

I bumped into a friend today and mentioned this blog. I haven’t actually told anyone in person before, just mentioned it on my Instagram account. For the first time I am thinking about people I know actually reading this. It’s odd, I felt the need to blog about these daily activities, but somehow, despite people occasionally liking posts, I have been putting this out into somewhat of a void. So far no one’s left any comments and it’s easy enough to press “like” I suppose the next step will be to actually tell people I’m blogging…

Later that evening

Divine timing or just irony? After all that to find a black and white film to watch, I looked at my schedule and saw that I had one to watch this evening after all. Not exactly a slower pace though. – October 1917 A classic film, and interesting to see. No flashing images as such, but the cutting was so quick it had a similar effect and I had to look away at one point. The music was familiar to me ( I grew up listening to Shostakovich – IMDb link purely because I was already on the site) Seeing the images with the music was something else. It’s obviously being shown because of the centenary of the Russian revolution, but watching it on bonfire night, with a background sound of fireworks going off was particularly effective!

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Earlier I forgot to type up my thoughts on how this week has gone. The seasonal eating is something I am still working on. It’s harder to cook around a migraine attack. I’ll cook more next week. I found a celeriac & beetroot recipe earlier today. I have eaten seasonal food all week – just not as I intended. No forward planning, but apples every day from my parents’ trees (not as grand as it sounds – we have two, 1 red, 1green. 🍎🍏)

I want to do more with the affirmations I created. Samhain took over the evening otherwise I would have. I will definitely be returning to them (if the book doesn’t prompt me to first) I feel less guilty about not completely doing Thursday’s activity now I know I was pre migraine – I am impressed I got as much done as I did.