We’re on it all, baby!
Travel
The Friday Sky: Lerici, Italy
From the hotel parking lot
Overlooking Il Golfo dei Poeti, the Gulf of Poets, so called because so many poor poets were thrown in here as punishment for being nerds.
JK! I haven’t looked it up yet, but hopefully that is not the actual origin of the name.
Ciao!
Inking my summer vacation
Arthur and I are bound for Europe tomorrow, to enjoy two and a half weeks of burning hot Mediterranean sun; explaining our vegetarianism in broken Italian, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian; and attending the weddings of two lovely and sophisticated women we do not know well.
I’ve been nose to the grindstone for the past few weeks preparing to basically shut down my freelance biz for the better part of August. Woo! I also tasked myself with the related duty of finishing my last journal and buying a new one to start on the trip. Last Friday, I done did it!
Goodbye, old friend; hello, new… friend
I always feel way too smugly satisfied when I retire a finished journal (do you know how much genius is in there??), but then I’m always proportionately humbled when I realize how daunted I feel when faced with all those brand-new, blank pages.
I guess parts of Europe are at least marginally inspiring. So here’s to jump-starting the new spiral guy with quotes overheard at smoky outdoor cafes, stories about making out in the shadows of really old churches, and old-school overnight train tickets pressed between the pages.
When clients go to Mexico
My dear friend and longtime client Elena is leaving NYC on a pre-dawn flight to Mexico tomorrow to embark on the 10-day silent meditation retreat that will usher in a bold new “oh-my-god-what-is-happening??” chapter of her life. I would say congratulations and good luck, but I don’t want to trip up her whole not-speaking thing.
Since we met a decade ago, I’ve known Elena by turns as a diligent, fair-minded, and hardworking coworker, partner in shenanigans, and small business proprietor. She thinks about almost everything deeply. She makes sumptuous vegetarian meals on the fly. Over the years, she’s handed down a grip of her classy clothing to me, which I hope made beautiful space in her closet with the same proportions as it filled the ghastly gaps in mine.
Recently, Elena decided to take an indefinite break from her glamorous Upper West Side life: she parked her baby blue Piaggio scooter in storage, sold most of her other belongings, and put her successful nutrition coaching practice on hiatus. Tomorrow, she’ll touch down in Mexico, and after that, it’s off to work on a veganic farm in the southwest. After that? I’m pretty sure she’d say your guess is as good as hers.
The fact that I realized today that I should probably retire Elena’s testimonial from my website (for now) is the least important part of this story, but it did make me want to tell it, so that’s cool.
Godspeed, Elena! You’ve got chutzpah, and I love ya. Just remember: Wild Women Don’t Sing the Blues.
Essence of Self: not just a spa in New Jersey
I chanced to peep a sign reading Essence of Self across the street from the Ringwood, New Jersey Park-n-Ride this past weekend, on my way to my first solo writing retreat. My first thought was “Awesome name!” My second was, “Hey, maybe it’s also significant…”
I decided to go on a weekend writing retreat by myself because: a) I’ve heard from many other writers that they’re super beneficial, b) I wanted to earmark some time to work specifically on the personal writing endeavors I’d lately been neglecting (namely my journal and a story about a guy I met who hands out these funny business cards), and c) I’m smitten with the idea of one day embarking on a longer-term silent meditation retreat, but know I don’t have the cojones yet. Baby steps!
What I found following my sunny 36-ish hours at the pretty amazing Castle at Skylands Manor (yes! I stayed in a Castle!! somehow, it wasn’t expensive) was:
- A renewed appreciation for the sound of water bubbling up from a fountain
- A renewed appreciation for my busy, wonderful life in the city
- A reminder that bug spray season is here
- At least 10 new big-ass journal pages had been filled with tightly-spaced handwriting
- The realization that even if the only book I ever publish is a self-bound volume that describes years of my travels and social life in unnecessary detail, I’ll still be very happy (because that’s apparently the kind of thing I love to read)
All in all, time well spent. Now, back to the incessant ice cream truck jingles and sooty windowsills of my home in Williamsburg!
Fellow scribes (or anyone): Have you gone on a solo creative-type retreat somewhere? What was it like?
Crunk & White’s Elements of Smile
HT to my witty boyfriend for coming up with the perfect editorial in-joke to accompany this Facebook post commemorating a super-fun bloggers reunion I just attended in Portland, Oregon:
Celeste, Becky, and I met a couple years ago writing for the blog Idealists in Action (here are some of my clips).
Today, Celeste is a mom to two beautiful girls and still manages to write her face off (and spearhead the occasional amazebees cash mob for a beloved neighbor that turns into viral video). Becky is a writer and marketing diva at Portland Community College, and I think she’s taking a woodworking class. And I, well, you know what I do.
The three of us had a ball writing, editing, and generally klatching together, and I’m so glad I got to see them for approximately 2.5 more seconds while briefly visiting the west coast.
Onward and upward, ladies! With any luck, life will see us crunk and smiling again before too long.
So into it: Record Store Day in Hudson, NY
The sign said it all: had a blast last Saturday at John Doe Records and Books in beautiful Hudson, New York.
Me too
April Greene 