Monday Musings: Opening Up to a New Week

Yellow flower (that's the technical name!), taken at Home Depot on Sat.

Good morning, lovely flowers!

Ahem, yes, I am talking to you…

It's Monday.

And that means a new week…

For me, I see the start of a week as a new opportunity to be intentional for how I want to be and what I will focus on.

For the focus on part, I do a self-summit each Sunday, a term I've adopted from Christine Kane, and plan out my week in advance.

For the how to be part, I adapt an idea I picked up from the excellent e-book Zen to Done by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits: I write a word or two mantra for how I want to be each day.

I see the how-to-be/mantra piece as being what I choose to open myself up to.

Sometimes I forget that I get to choose.

Right, right, I remind myself, I'm deciding how I will be in this moment.

And you get to decide, too.

This week, you could choose to open up to wonder. Or fun. Or peace. Or contentment.

There are a million choices to be made. But I suggest you choose the choice that makes your heart sing with delight.

Unless you are a sadist.

Then you could choose those drearily familiar choices of worry, pessimism, doubt, self-loathing, and negativity.

I've certainly chosen those in the past.

But they've never really served me — or made me feel very good.

So now I focus on choosing things that feel really good — and feel lin alignment with the nature of the universe.

The universe is always choosing expansion, blooming big, opening, growing, shining, and allowing.

And these are much, much better choices for me, too.

For myself this week, I am choosing to open myself up to flow.

It's the first of week of summer break with my daughter, and I'm seasoned enough as a mother to know that there is always some adjustment for both of us as we settle into a new routine.

So I am choosing flow. Flowing like a river, moving with ease and grace along the contours of this week, circling around any rocks and rippling along a current.

Flowing like a flower as it opens to bloom.

Tell me, what way of being do you choose to open up to and be this week?

Flowering Fridays: My New Role Model

Meet Ms. Spirea, a bush in my front yard

My new role model is, um, a bush.

Ms. Spirea Bush to be exact.

Have you two met yet?

No?

Well, let me introduce you: Spirea is well-loved for its ease of care, numerous blooms and the fact that it can thrive in really crappy soil.

If you experience overwhelm, stress or worry, you'll want to get to know spirea better, too.

(And not just because spirea — sometimes called meadowsweet — is used as traditional Native American herbal tea to treat fevers, stomach disorders and more.)

I have been marveling at the sheer volume of blooms she is producing now (thousands!), how long the blooms last and how all of this happens with such ease.

I have yet to see the spirea bush go into a sugar-binged, screaming-crying meltdown as she births all these blooms into being.

(Which is what I do when I have a meltdown.)

But, not Ms. Spirea. She just trusts and allows. And viola, she's blooming all over.

Like this:

I am loving that right now there are a lot of things blooming in my life (new book/web project, expansion for the Inspired Writer, a possible move, to name just a few).

But my unconscious default, up until now, is that I would stress over how all these various seedlings were going to get enough water, love and care to grow up big and strong.

Or I would have a limiting mindset that said I couldn't possibly have this many seedlings — I should chose just one or two to cultivate.

Or I would fret about having just the right conditions to put my seeds into the ground.

The bottom line was in my Eeyeore state of worry and gloom, I would expend a lot of time, energy and swirling that could have gone into being present and doing the next action that is needed.

Thanks to Ms. Spirea, my intention now is all about ease, trust and allowing.

Thanks to her example, I have been moving through the last few days in a way that is so refreshing.

I have a general sense what needs to be done. (And truthfully, I know in a very detailed sense, too, as I'm a major list-maker.)

But rather than try to figure out how I am going to bloom everything in my day, I'm just allowing and doing what needs to be done next.

So much more ease in this way for me.

So much less stress.

So much more potential for lots and lots of blooms to come into being.

And paradoxically, so much more gets done.

Kinda of like Ms. Spirea.

Tell me, which flower is inspiring your life right now?

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.

Inspiring Me Today: Wordsworth's Meadowflower Quote

More flower loveliness from the Baha'i Temple in Chicago, May 23, 2009

How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?

Because the lovely little flower is free

Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold.

— William Wordsworth, "A Poet! He Hath Put His Heart to School"

If we could trust down to my very root that we're completely free.

Totally utterly free, even in our rootedness.

How bold could we be in life? What boldness would we bloom into? And how beautiful would it be when we bloomed from this bold, free place?

To me, this quote sums up my BLOOM BIG philoposphy: how we are free to create our world, how we can be rooted in the gift of that freedom, and how we get to put whatever seedlings we desire into the world…and through trust, faith and boldness, the most amazing flowers can emerge.

Or, as Wordsworth concludes much more poetically in this poem:

And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree

Comes not by casting in a formal mould,

But from its own divine vitality.

Tell me, where in your life are you committed to being free and bold so your biggest bloom can emerge?