by Kat | Apr 28, 2025 | General, Words
Greetings Fellow Word Guru’s!
I have written this post “earlier” (last week) as I am in Erie on vacation right now. April… our fourth month with our word and hopefully we are finding our feet firmly on the path with our word. Or, are you like me, struggling a bit this month? Either place is absolutely okay! If you’d like to share, you will find the link up at the bottom of this post!
Holding space is an act that is at once totally present and totally invisible… — Harrison Owen
There is a fine line for me about blogging… a duel between being real and crossing over to being too real.
And so the above quote fits my life perfectly this month as I am working through some health struggles I am struggling to stay present with myself and doing so “invisibly” for all intents and purposes.
And, sadly, it does not make for great blog fodder.
But one thing I found incredibly interesting was the idea of holding space for myself! I am sure I don’t need to tell you that most women are not good at doing this. We put ourselves last every day. Our focus is on everyone around us and if we have any time left, we might feel guilty about using it for ourselves.
FYI this tendency does not go away when your kids are grown and on their own! I am admitting here how uncomfortable it is to hold space for myself… to be focused on what is best for me first.
So, come along with me as I share with you my struggles with giving myself some extra space this month.
I decided after visiting the third doctor last month that I needed to take to heart their thoughts on slowing down. Pre-Frankie I spent a good bit of uninterrupted time most mornings practicing a “loose” meditation. Loose being the key component. I struggled with the eyes shut, focused on your breathing, being quiet kind of meditation. My meditation focused on writing some in my journal, reading some poetry… all with my eyes open and my focus was on what I was doing. Frankie has gotten a bit better about the length of time he can “be still” but me? Well, that is still a work in progress!
But I realized that in order to slow down, I needed to, you know, actually slow down. So I have been doing some focused, eyes closed, think about breaths in and breaths out meditation. Whew, even with a guided meditation those times during 7-10 minutes feel like an eternity! And I am not sure I am achieving a “zen-like” calm, but I am going to stay the course.
I also have “rewatched” the Suzan Colón’s medKNITation class several times. Suzan’s voice is the most soothing thing on the planet… I have also started reading her book, MedKNITation, slowly. I am doing some knitting while I allow her to direct my focus so I am doing something, but right now it feels a bit “calmer” that my struggle with other types of meditation.
Is this a “sudden” fix? No… or perhaps the better response is… not yet. But I am persevering… and giving myself the space to find comfort in the process.
I see the idea of holding space for myself to be an ongoing “project” for myself this year. I think this is the foundation of Yutori… “the conscious act of slowing down…” and I am going to keep at it until it feels natural.
Thanks for joining me today as we support each other as we work through our year! I will be back here next Monday, May 5th!
Header photo by Pixabay
As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!
by Kat | Mar 31, 2025 | General, Words
I would like to welcome you all to the monthly check in with our words! And I am hoping that you all had the best month with your word! At the end of this post you will find the link up to share your post!
Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge. — Eckhart Tolle
This quote very much sums up my month with Yutori. It has been a month of changes… and so many questions. From simple questions like: Why can’t I keep my desk clean? to more difficult questions like: Why am I experiencing health issues?
Most definitely “my plans” for the month were tossed out the window early and “life’s plans” took over and dragged me along for the ride (and yes, sometimes that included me kicking and screaming!)
It has been a month where each step finds a new hurdle… and I am not a very good “jumper” of hurdles. I am more the go around the hurdle in the avoidance method but these are ones that cannot be ignored. Sigh.
Somewhere last week, I lost entirely all my “making mojo” and as such I am severely behind on my days of stitching and the 100 Day Stitch Book. I have not picked up my knitting in the same amount of time… I just don’t have the brain-bandwidth right now to focus. So I pulled out an old project… the mitered square ‘blanket’ and surprisingly… and it felt exactly right for me in this moment. The simple knitting of a small square block, building on the blocks before it is reminding me that this knitting… like life… progresses in much the same way… one bit built on all the other bits. The perfect reminder of how my new hurdles need to be addressed… one bit at a time.
One block after another… comfort knitting, FTW!
In the chaos of this month, I also revisited my dear friend, Rilke. I needed his assurance to “live the onslaught of questions” and in reading Rilke, I found some new tidbits that have been easing my days:
“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
and
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
And so I am reminded that navigating hurdles, exasperation at messy desks, and the loss of making mojo are the stuff of life. And that stuff of life … and the things to come… are already taking up their spaces, both physical and mental and what I need to do is simply believe in the process. And perhaps allow myself more space to sit quietly and just be with myself.
Header photo by Akil Mazumder
If you wrote a post about how your word showed up for you this month, please leave your link below. It will be open until next Sunday, April 6 to accommodate you for whenever you want to post about your word!
by Kat | Feb 24, 2025 | General, Words
Dear February… for such a short month you sure are feeling incredibly long!
Yes, this month I began to work on what I have now confirmed will be the most challenging aspect of Yutori…at least for me… the embrace of silence.
Never miss a good chance to shut up! — Will Rogers
Truer words were never spoken… sigh. Back in the day I had a boss who shared a “sales tip” about silence… “he who speaks first… loses.” I was not comfortable with the silence then… and not much has changed since then. Silence is challenging for me.
But I tried to approach it from a different angle… listening more… and by listening, I mean actual, active listening. (not “reactive listening“) Big news… this was as much a challenge in my house as settling in with silence.
However, I did make some big changes to my “normal routine” and while it was still a struggle, it did get a bit easier. The Biggest Change… no audiobook in my ears for any walks with Frankie… instead be focused on listening to the change in the sounds around me. As you might imagine, my very early walk with Frankie is almost completely silent… no cars, no birds, no planes (we are in a flight path of the Pittsburgh Airport) and it is just the most amazing time… the only sounds are the ones Frankie and I make as we amble along. It has become my favorite time of the day… we even heard what I think was likely a coyote early one morning… something I would have missed if a narrator was talking in my ears! No other walk has the same silence… the noises of the day are companions as we amble along… kids shouting, cars coming and going, so many planes (which have their own hilarious quality… Frankie is fascinated by them and he watches them as they soar over head as they prepare to land at the airport!)
There has been a marked increase in birdsong as February has inched along! I can listen to “territory wars” from a plethora of birds! I am thankful that the birds are reminding me that spring is coming… and they are preparing for it by picking the perfect spot to “claim” as their own for nesting season!
I reinforced my return to “morning quiet time” … at least on the mornings Steve is not home… sigh. Quiet with Steve home is a challenge. But I have managed to stretch quiet mornings 4 days a week to a magnificent 40-50 minutes! My journals are reflecting this really excellent silence… now it is not totally silent… I can hear the hum of the refrigerator, and the furnace, and, most recently, the wild wintry winds… companions to the scratch of my pen as I write.
I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. — Chaim Potok
I still have miles to go on finding comfort in the silence, but I have made what I hope is a good start and that start will, hopefully, be the foundation I build on as the year progresses!
So I ask this question to all of you who are examining what a word might bring to your days… what did you learn this month as you contemplated your words?
As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below!
by Kat | Jan 27, 2025 | General, Words
Welcome to all of you who are focusing on a word for the year… I hope that your January start helped your settle your feet on the path of your year and even it the path is bumpy now, I know it will smooth out soon! The link up is at the bottom of this post!
January with a new word is always my favorite month of the journey! It is normally a time that I spend looking up definitions of my word and learning about the basics of my word. I also make a bit of a list based on those definitions of where I’d like to go with my word … yes, my ideas of where the word and I will go. Please note, this is generally NOT where the word takes me, but in my nature to control the narrative… I do try.
But…
There is no definition for Yutori in the English language so my beginning was bumpy right from the start. I did, however, find a “definition” on the inter webs:
yu • to • ri (noun) The conscious act of slowing down to allow me to savor the world around me. The refusal to rush. No talking(!!) Just absorbing the world around me with no goal except to look and (most importantly for me) to listen.
Then I wrote down a list of Yutori Ideas that flowed from this rough definition. Things I wanted to explore, try on, perfect… sort of.
The biggest “aha” for me from this list was this:
Stepping away from the urge to multitask.
Yeah… that is a thing I do all.the.time. My life is one long multitask. I am not sure multitasking is a thing I should be proud of and this year, I plan to find out how it feels to NOT multitask anything! To savor a task… for the task itself.
Second to stepping away from multitasking is for me to find comfort in silence. I don’t need “a background noise” all the time… but I always have “a noise” going to fill the silence. Case in point… I can’t just sit and knit quietly, I need to either listen to an audiobook or watch television. Why? I don’t know… perhaps this habit is the result of needing a sound to “drown out” my tinnitus. However, with my hearing aids in, I do not notice the tinnitus at all… so the need for noise is not tied to that.
However, I noted that I do not listen to or watch anything when I am stitching. The stitching is the one activity that my entire brain is engaged with… I can’t listen and remember what I listened to when I stitch. And I love the silence of those minutes of stitching.
My list has a few other things, but my biggest takeaways were these two items. If I can conquer them… I will have achieved something big!
January… it’s a tremulous start, but I will take it!
What about you? How did your January go… was your start rough? Or smooth?
by Kat | Jan 3, 2025 | General, Words
As I said here, it is so sad that English words can be so lacking…
However, I aim to remedy that this year with my word choice! (or did this word choose me??)
I discovered Yutori last July when I was spending some time thinking about companion words for time. Of all the words I considered… most were not as symbiotic as Time & Space, which I found were almost always coupled together.
Time is a definite thing but space… what does that mean really? Outer space? Inner space? Personal space? Make space for…? Giving someone space? You see where I am going here… space is this unknown element. And I wondered how you could couple something so very definite with something seemingly boundless…
But in a rare moment of serendipity… the next “doom scroll” session I had on Instagram halted me in my tracks. A post giving homage to Yutori… with the most beautiful description of this Japanese word. And imagine my surprise when this post echoed the first a day later. (I know I should not be surprised… the algorithms are always at work and, for once, it was a good thing to have “them” paying attention!)
That led me to a quick Google search of Yutori… and I found this beautiful video with the most amazing explanation of what Yutori is in Japanese… a concept of space being both physical and emotional. A way to use space to stretch time. Making space (and holding) space as sacred. Yes, please!
A bit more Googling and I was reminded of this episode of On Being with Naomi Shihab Nye. She talked about Yutori as well! (Really, this conversation is just so moving… it is absolutely worth a listen or a relisten!)
I am very excited to spend a year with Yutori as opposed to saying I am going to just contemplate space, which seems a bit lacking. My hope is that in contemplating Yutori… I will have a new (and better) understanding for all the spaces in my life.
And… in the manner of Yü Chou… I am picking up my seed of time and taking a deep breath and continuing!
But, my hope is that YOU will decide to join us this year… contemplating a word over twelve months can be so much fun. It can be enlightening. It can be inspiring! I think that the hardest part is picking a word… but really, any word will do! Want more fun in your days? Do a quick search of the synonyms of fun… pick one and jump in! Want to learn about something? Pick a related word and begin your journey!
Perhaps you fear that 2025 will be The Year Without Joy… well you can make your own joy by making Joy your little word!
Perhaps you want something specific … take this test from the WaPo to find a word! (I have gifted you the article, read on with confidence!) (and if you are interested in the “other nudge word” article mentioned, here you go!)
It does not have to be hard! Really… you cannot pick a bad word! (Trust me, I have tried… I always have gotten something out of my word!)
If you want something more structured… let me know, I have some suggestions for you to get yourself started!
If you want word suggestions, let me know and I will gladly help you!
Carolyn still has her “how to get started” information on her website. She really helped me hone in on how to make my word work for me!
But, I think what is best about contemplating a word for twelve months… is the companionship of other people doing the same. I have learned so much from what they share each month.
Finally, there will be no change to the day we all share our progress… I will follow Carolyn’s schedule and will have the link up on the last Monday of the month.
I really hope you decide to join us!
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to email me! I would love to help get you stared!
See you all back here on Monday! (is it just me or is everyone confused on what day it is? I have been off all week but I hope to get back on track and be here in a timely manner on Monday! Ha!)
