Colleen Leonardi

Sock Monkey Sweetness

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We have a dear friend who loves sock monkeys. We've always thought it such an endearing quality in him. So when our dear friend and his dear wife had their first child, a sock monkey baby blanket was in order.

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My Mom and I were lucky enough to find plush flannel sock monkey fabric at our favorite fabric store in Columbus, Sew to Speak. Really. If you love fabrics and you live in the Midwest you must make a trip to Columbus to visit this store. It's stunning and leaves you feeling like a kid in a candy store. 

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But back to the blanket. My Mom finally finished it before she left for her summer sabbatical. It's waiting for our friends to come and claim it when they visit later this summer. It's the softest, sweetest thing. And it's large enough that it just might become a throw for the whole family, something to leave in the living room to jazz it up.

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I made sure the fabric and construction was such that it's easy to clean and throw in the washer. My Mom hand-stitched the corners and sides and then we did darts on the inside, hand ties I think she called them. So as you rub your fingers along it little strands of embroidery thread reach through and add another hand-spun texture to it. 

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We had so much fun making it. And we're also glad it's done and can finally be delivered to the little baby of the sock monkey fan.

Dear One, can you see how these little sock monkeys can't wait to meet you and play with you and be your friend as you grow into the world? May your days be surrounded with sweetness and may our blanket be one of the many sweet things in your life. xo

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Being in the Bittersweet | Three

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Everything is green now. The blossoms have become something they call leaves. I look up at the sky through the trees and see verdant wings emerging everywhere. I remember that these wings are known as leaves and that I like leaves. I remember that they provide shade, smell good and stay with us all throughout the summer season. I remember that come fall they'll transform into a spectrum of fire colored things. It's this memory, of the fire in the green, that makes me miss the blossoms less and love the leaves more. 

My Mom has left. She is down south with family for the summer. And so it is. 

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It was as she was preparing her things to travel that we found out our cat has cancer. Bink is a beautiful cat with green eyes and a mane of hair that belongs to something wild. Years ago my husband's friend found Bink and Bink's sister in the woods at Hocking Hills. She gave Eric Bink and kept Bink's sister. Eric has pictures of Bink when she was a kitten in the palm of his hand. He used to put her in his pocket. She looks like some kind of animal sprite from an enchanted forest, all puffy and little and cute. 

Now she is 14 years old and celebrated her birthday recently. Now she is dying. Her illness and passing has overwhelmed any feeling of sadness I might feel for my Mom leaving for the summer. Her lingering death has, in a way, made my sadness that much more expansive and grounded at the same time. 

The last time I dealt with death in this way was when my grandmother was dying of cancer. I was young. I didn't know what cancer was. And I don't think you do until you or someone you love has it and loses parts of themselves to it. I find myself grieving some of my grandmother when I grieve for Bink. The storehouse of sorrow is like one big lake in me where many memories live. 

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I get through my day, sure. But it isn't without tears. I'm a walking sob. We savor her purrs, her meows and her wide-eyed stares. We give her what she wants. We make her happy. The tumor keeps growing and her ability for happiness, for comfort and satisfaction shifts. Suddenly we don't know what makes her happy and we have to learn all over again. She has to show us as she stumbles and slows down and looks up at us. 

When she licks my hand I feel the heat in her tongue and wonder how anything so alive can also be dying. My friend has a dog who has cancer and has exceeded the expectations of the vets, living beyond the time-frame they gave her to live and getting along fine being the happy dog she is. When I told my friend about Bink and she told me about her dog she said, "It reminds me that being sick is not being sick." 

I know what she means. Even though Bink is carrying this ball of cancer cells in her belly she is still the light that is Bink. And what a lesson it is to watch her and be with her each morning in our kitchen and see her and have her see me. For it's in the seeing that I feel how there is green in her and green in me. And right now being in the green is good enough. It has to be. 

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Yoga for the Creative Class: Do Your Yoga

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Do your yoga, which is another way of saying do your thing. Never had this become so clear to me, the connections between being your creative, searching self and doing yoga, than in a dharma talk with yoga teacher Doug Keller at Yoga on High last weekend. 

I love dharma talks. And Doug gives really good talks. He actually talks for two hours and cites all sorts of sources and has a thesis and touches on philosophy while still keeping it light and engaging with anecdotes and stories. He started with the history of Hatha yoga and its transformations over time, but then he said something like, "When you join your focus to a discipline that is yoga," and I was hooked. 

He told the story of a yoga teacher he knows who told his students that sometimes yoga for him is taking a walk. That's his yoga practice for the day. The teacher's students were flabbergasted. That's not yoga. That's just taking a walk! How could something so simple as taking a walk be a true yoga practice? 

Well, I'm with the yoga teacher. Sometimes I take walks, a breathing, walking meditation, and that's my yoga for the day. In this way yoga becomes whatever works for you, whatever discipline you focus your mind to for a period of time, as Doug said, whether it be washing dishes, gardening, helping your grandmother walk down the stairs, playing with your grandchild in the living room. That's your yoga. 

Where does creativity come into this? Well, what I realized for me personally is that my studies in yoga are what have allowed me to do the creative work I do. I edit and write for a food magazine, make dances, teach yoga and choreography, keep a blog - all of this is my yoga. And I'm able to do all of this because I practice yoga and all it contains. 

Doug spoke to this idea so eloquently over and over again. He talked about how your work in this lifetime is to live your dharma and how "your own dharma is your sacrifice" to the world, your personal offering to humanity. He talked about how the yogis of old were rebels in society. They realized that "in order to write your own destiny you have to step outside of the box." (Writing your own destiny and stepping outside of the box is what creative people do, again and again.)  

And he parsed out the layers of the personal transformation that can take place when you begin writing your own destiny:

\ Layer one: Affirmation where you confirm, "This is who I am."

/ Layer two: Purification where a "cleaning away of the ideas that keep one from having that experience" of affirmation of self takes place. "As you peel back the layers," he said, "there's that divine spark... that moment of grace."

\ Layer three: The breakthrough where you open to your true nature and heart.

/ Layer four: You move that true nature and heart out into the world to interact with others into "living a life of compassion because it's the truth." It's your truth. 

These layers can unfold on both the micro and macro level. A yoga class can mirror these steps, or a life can mirror these steps. Either way you must commit yourself to cracking the shell of ego and ideas of who you think you are and what you think you want in this lifetime to open to the breakthrough - your true nature, your heart. 

"To be truly passionate is to be a yogi," Doug said.

Isn't it when we are the most creative, in the act of making something we love for ourselves or someone else, that we are truly passionate? What are you most passionate about? And how can you join that passion to a discipline, a focus? How can you practice being passionate? 

Do your thing in this world. Come back to the mat. Come back to your life. Come back to yourself. Just come back, again and again.

Don't spend too much thought on who you think you are. Don't worry about the labels "artist" or "entrepreneur" or any other label you've acquired in this lifetime. They're like broken wings, those labels, keeping you from flying towards your truth. 

Practice passion. Come back. Practice more passion. Come back. Practice even more passion. Come back. Flow with your light, not against it. 

That is doing your yoga. And a big, bright namaste to Doug Keller for helping me see that on a Friday evening in May.  

(If you want to hear Doug's talks, hop on over to his website where you can find multiple audio CDs for purchase. His voice is so soothing and he is so smart. If it isn't clear by now, I highly recommend his teachings! Namaste.) 

The Pinkest of Peonies

In a Forest of Books

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There is a place in Columbus, Ohio called Acorn Bookshop. It's a real bookstore. I've lived in Columbus for seven years and never knew how real of a bookstore it is. It's like a real forest, full of lots of different species of plants and animals and spaces for solitude carved out here and there. It's a watering hole for the reader and writer alike. It's a sanctuary. 

Yes, bookstores are disappearing at a rapid rate, becoming like phantoms in the brain for those of us who can remember having more of them. So are forests. For me, the two are equally special and soothing. There's a schism, though, because to have books you need paper. And we've reached a point where we're running out of trees to have enough paper for the printed word. 

This shift screws with my sense of values often because I want both forests and bookstores to be around forever. They help me feel human. 

I felt my human in the Acorn Bookshop, certainly. How does a bookstore do it? When I walk through a forest and see all of the flowering trees and leaves growing I wonder if each blossom and leaf has a soul. And I feel the same way when I go to a bookstore and walk up and down the aisles. Does each book have a soul? And as those book-souls exhale into the air around them do I inhale something of their fragrance so that it mixes with mine? Is that how my soul becomes enriched?

Yes, when I walk into a real bookstore I feel the air come back into my lungs. It reminds me of when I dance and I feel my breath in my body, so steady, so sure. Acorn Bookshop brought some breath back into my body, so much so that I felt light the rest of the day. I had no idea I needed to feel that light, which is another way of saying I had no idea how heavy I was actually feeling. 

They had old books from my childhood like A is for Annabelle by Tasha Tudor and a complete collection of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies books. They also had an old copy of The Peterson Field Guide Series to Wildflowers. I purchased that one and have been wandering around what woods I can find looking for wildflowers ever since. 

And they had beautiful, thoughtful gift cards and cool postcards and New Yorker cartoons taped to the shelves here and there and rare copies of very old leather bound books, like what I photographed above. 

Later that afternoon, as I lazily sipped tea at home and learned about wildflowers, I listened to a program on "To the Best of Our Knowledge" with Stephen Long about how to read a forest and David George Haskell about his new book The Forest Unseen. I felt the schism of forests versus books in my brain, of not wanting to lose more trees and forests but also not wanting to lose more books and bookstores.

I admired the illustrations of the wildflowers. I felt my age moving in a quite finite direction. I felt how delicate it is to be a human or a book or a wildflower. Delicate and finite, indeed. 

Being in the Bittersweet | Two

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It's done. The move is complete. The boat has stopped rocking. We've found some ground for now. 

When I woke this morning to write this post I made a pot of earl grey tea. Before making tea and writing, though, I went for a walk. And while I was walking I found a cracked robin's egg on the ground. I scanned the trees to see if I could spot the nest. And there it was, high up and small and open to the sky. 

So a new robin has come into the world.

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As I write that I'm reminded of how yesterday when I went for a walk before the final stages of my Mom's move I saw a dead cat. That's right. A dead cat, not in the middle of the road, but placed ever so delicately in a neighbor's front lawn, legs out stretched with its furry cheek pressed into the damp soil like it was napping in the fresh grass. Perhaps the cat had decided to lie down the night before while some form of fatigue and disease overtook its body. Perhaps it was then that it decided to stay put, close its little kitty eyes and rest into whatever was causing it to slow way down into its final stop. 

And so a kitty has left this world. 

When we were moving yesterday I was certain everything would go well. Others who were helping us were not so sure. What about the time?! I can't believe we're doing this. How did we do that! I need a drink. But I knew things would work out. That sense of ease in me was not cheap nor free. I've been working a long time to cultivate reserves of stability in my life. I like to think those reserves served not just me but everyone yesterday. That by virtue of all the oars in me willing our way through the waters of moving day I helped lead our boat to higher ground. 

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And yet unease was present too, often in the same instant, for me. It spiked when I was among the dusty corners of the apartment. (I'm highly allergic to dust.) But also just in seeing all of my Mom's stuff being taken away and stuffed out of sight, her belongings some aspect of her that has been forced into hiding for the summer while she takes a sabbatical and travels. It was the robin being born and the cat passing away. It was light and dark on a Sunday afternoon. 

By the end my Mom kept saying, How did we do that? I don't know how we did that. I smiled and said, We did it. So let's celebrate the fact that we did it. Let's cheer on the camaraderie we managed on a Sunday afternoon among the dust bunnies, slippery steps and uninspiring drives back and forth from the storage unit. Let's light a candle and laugh together over pizza. Let's be in the bittersweet together. 

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As I write, there are lilacs blossoming. This is the time for lilacs to blossom. And there are certain kinds of birds making nests that won't be making nests three months from now. This is the time for making nests. And there are apple blossoms giving off their fragrance in the park, despite the last rainstorm. This is the time for apple blossoms. And there are strawberries revealing their red heads for the hands of a child to come and pick and savor in some kind of strawberry pie or strawberry shortcake. This is the time for strawberries. 

And there is also the certainty of uncertainty. This is the time for the certainty of uncertainty.

To that I say - Let's be in the bittersweet together.