putting on my adventure hat

leaving today to hike half dome with my friend liz. i've been looking forward to it all year and can. not. wait. yosemite has always been a special place for me and getting back up that mountain is exactly the adventure i need right now. send me good (and safe) thoughts. it will be my first post when i get back... : )

human emotion is beautiful

i recently stumbled upon one of the most beautiful and intriguing websites i've ever seen. you can read the mission below, but if you are in the mood to witness something remarkable today, are in the mood to discover how beautiful and connective the range of human emotion is, go see for yourself.

Mission

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

- Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar May 2006

i will

read this. everyday. forever.

someday majorca

i took these photos 4 years ago in the magical city of palma, majorca. time to start planning another visit...

things to do this life #133

breathe in. breath out. repeat. lying in this chaise (far right), at les terrasses, ibiza, spain

bloom

it is such a beautiful sight, watching sienna come into her own. i know she is only 3 years old, but there, in those moments when i secretly watch her in her very own world, it's like i can see into her future. i suppose every mom with young children wonders what their kids will be like when they are older; wonders what they dream, what they will become. i so enjoyed watching sienna on this particular morning. imagining all the promise yet to bloom.

happy 31st birthday adam

we celebrated adam's 31st birthday a few weeks ago and i am just now posting photos from the night. it had been a long time since we had thrown a party like this. what happened to us? we used to have these kinds of shin-digs several times a year! somehow we've let the stresses of life and parenthood get the better of us. no more! adam and i throw a pretty damn good party if i do say so myself. i filled the house and yard with candles and laterns, welcomed guests with champagne and raspberries, set up a red wine station at the kitchen island, a white wine station outside on the back patio, and (my favorite) a mojito station in the "secret garden" in the side yard. it was a beautifully warm sacramento summer night, and we felt so blessed to be able to celebrate another year of adam's life under the stars with such great friends.

the cleanse

after several weeks of over-indulgence, i decided to press the re-start button.

actually, the decision wasn't that premeditated.

the day after Adam's party, i was enjoying one of those perfect mornings. laying in the grass, staring at a cloudless blue sky, wind blowing the chimes and trees, and relishing the lovely company and beautiful energy of our dear friends kawami and mahsea. they had just completed a 21 day cleanse and were talking about their experience. of course i had a million questions about what they ate, what they didn't, what they missed, what they didn't, how they felt, why they did it, how it changed them, and on and on. what i was most intrigued by was this notion that the purpose for them was as much (or more) a spiritual endeavor as it was a physical and/or nutritional one.

so - it was one part curiosity, one part conviction, and one part boredom with my current state of eating affairs that led me to start on my own journey that day. i remember feeling both excited (i love challenges) and scared (i hate failing). i knew this was one of those challenges that 100% succeeded or failed on the back of my own will power and mental toughness.

no sugar, no salt, no caffeine, no dairy, no meat, no flour, wheat, gluten, no (gulp) alcohol. no problem! (would be my motto)

that evening, i started getting practical. ok, let me start planning! i already eat decently well, so this shouldn't be too hard...what will i eat....hmmm....

hmmm...

well, for breakfast i just have coffee anyway, so...oh

huh.

and at lunch, a little hummus and pitaaaoh...not that either

it was the first night and i was already starting to panic a little. then i remembered what mahsea said about not thinking of it in terms of what you can't have, but what you're allowing your body to enjoy. and also about not stressing and obsessing. so i put myself on chill and decided i would just get out of my own way and let this process start.

decisions became fairly easy after that. i created this salad for lunch (and also my 1 main meal of the day) that was completely satisfying! i could eat this every day and not miss a thing. coming down off of the caffeine and alcohol and sugar was the hardest part. i didn't realize the kind of serious attachment i had to those things. in fact that was the most interesting part of this process, just noticing the body and the mind's reaction to going without those things. thoughts of food constantly coming to the surface and not trying to control them, but just be aware of them, notice what those feelings are. i learned so much about myself and the role food was playing in my life.

when you no longer rely on caffeine to bring you up, wine to mellow you down, sugar to relieve some immediate stress, you are left pretty exposed. you have all the same stressors and tiredness and anxieties, but none of tried and true tools; your familiar fixes; to alleviate them. i definitely hit some pretty raw points during the 10 days. emotions that i would normally wash down with a nice cabernet were left to wreak their internal havoc. but that was all part of the learning; awakening, really. i began to understand the spiritual component of this equation. the power of being able to tap into something within me that would be a substitution for all of those crutches i had been leaning on before; a substitution that left me feeling whole, not hungover : )

i stumbled upon so many bits of inspiration and encouragement during this time. Kawami and Mahsea were so nice to send me a mantra that they had found helpful during their fast. And when i mentioned to a friend that i had adopted this new way of eating she said in an email,

"once you release all that no longer serves you, you become an open vessel for all the abundance you deserve."

such a wonderful thing to say. the realization that i had been filling my body with things that really didn't serve me was true. hadn't thought of it that way, before. truly eye-opening.

and the one i'll hold on to most, i came across on Oprah's blog post on the final day of her cleanse:

"I used to say thanks before a meal out of perfunctory habit. Now I consider it true grace to be able to eat anything in a world of increasing food shortages and starving people."

its true. i used to stand in the doorway staring blankly in to a pantry filled with a million things, wondering what will i ever eat...

now i'm just feeling gratitude that everyday, i have wonderful food to nurture my body with. and trying to make choices that will serve me well.

after 10 days i found that i couldn't get quite enough protein and carbohydrates to give me the energy i need to fuel my running (both the sneakers on pavement kind and the picking up kids, giving baths, reading stories kind). feeling tired all the time is fine if i lived a simple life in an ashram somewhere and only needed the energy it might take for me to sit in meditation all day, but i'm in the craziest season of my life - and the purer, more conscious, more placid (read: running on fumes tired) version of me just couldn't keep up with the demands.

all in all i am glad i tried it, as there is no unlearning the things that i did during those 10 days. lessons about conscious eating; about gratitude; seeing my real issues for what they are and how i choose to deal with them. i believe that this is just the beginning for me. certainly not something i choose to permanently sustain (right now), but i could see myself starting each month off in this way. keeping the door open to that...