bringing in 2011.

this year has been: celebration, nourishing traditions, arm balances, falling in love with a great guy (thanks adam!), breathing into it and watching it all change, my first gallery show in almost 10 years, riding my bike everywhere for the first 11 months and now my prius (and my bike) for the last month, blue-green algae, coming home to peru and finding it so lovely and seeming like it remembered me, micheal franti at wolf trap, lots of practice for the sake of practice, produce boxes from timor and the cooking that came out of them, stability, gratitude for old friends and excitement for new ones, abraham hicks (live once in orlando and recordings) helping things make more sense, arrested development, sweating it out, writing it down each morning with a lot of consistency, pachamama, india in january full of ritual, growth, and things i still can't explain but left an opening, love-o-rama, this blog, ayahuasca's wisdom showing me again that i am just love, novels that delighted me (still life with woodpecker), confused me (the wind-up bird chronicles) and that broke my heart (a fine balance and 1000 splendid sons) finding my groove teaching yoga and photographing pets, community acupuncture, art classes at nova that left me humbled and hungry for more, jellyfish halloween costumes, the artist way, the broken bells, five weddings (two ethiopian ones i photographed, three of dear friends), unexpected cultural exchange (i.e. ethiopian weddings), 101 cookbooks, flirting with playing the piano, family beach week, still not being crazy about hosting parties, seeing wendell berry read, horse photography, getting better at saying no, restorative yoga, great conversations, bootleg kombucha and the beginnings of other experiments in fermentation, spaworld, iyengar more in the beginning of the year and now more ashtanga, a puppy in the family (welcome monk!), krishna das and mc yogi, outreach yoga in spanish, moving in lots of different worlds, acroyoga and thai massage, the joy of getting out of town, mary oliver and hafiz's poetry, my 10 year high school reunion, letting go of trying to control other people (and picking it up and letting it go and...), the march for sanity, and this crazy saturn of mine returning.

wow, that seems like a lot when i write it all down. it's been a seriously full, big, changing, fun year and it only felt right to close it out in pittsburgh with some of my favorite people in the world that make me laugh so hard it hurts (it sounds cliched but it's true with them).

and conversely, we opened up 2011 together! i'm not hugely into resolutions but here are a few things i hope to do in 2011:

--take and post a photo a day
--say no more often to the things i don't want to do so i can say yes to the things i love to do
--take a retreat for myself (maybe a meditation retreat or a trip to the beach)
--drum at the drum circle
--attend a yoga journal conference
--make my personal photography/art website
--show my photography again
--learn how to use my scanner and start posting some of my illustrated journal collages
--practice more ashtanga
--take a yin or restorative teacher training
--start giving thai massages professionally
--give a yoga workshop
--make more collaborative art
--spend more time hanging out with people i love without a motive, plan, goal
--take an artist date each week
--read something i've written publicly
--read: the satanic verses, love in the time of cholera, how to be an explorer or the world (do the activities for this one)
--start sprouting my grains and further explore the wonders of fermentation
--photograph and post more of my cooking explorations on this blog
--read great books, watch inspiring movies, take advantage of the galleries in dc
--play more, have more fun, create more, take it all less seriously

these don't feel as much like resolutions to me as much as things that are ready to start coming into my life which i am making it a point to allow. i had other ideas but if i felt a sense of stress when i started to write it down, i decided not to include it. i want this to be my year of playfulness and creation so that has to start now.

happy 2011! thank you all for supporting me throughout this past year and into the new one. i look forward to all kinds of creative explorations and revelations and surprises and that good life stuff. i am leaving for kauai with adam on thursday to visit some dear friends and i couldn't be more excited about it. i'll try to post while i'm there but for sure follow my flickr feed for photo updates of the trip.