Nourish your heart, your self, your life, your relationships, your body, your creativity, your spirit, your soul, your world.
Nourish love.
Nurture your heart, your self, your life, your relationships, your body, your creativity, your spirit, your soul, your world.
Nurture love.
Love.
Just love.
It all comes back to love.
Late Saturday night, feeling distracted and unsettled, I picked up the remote and started clicking through tv channels.
I was stopped by Austin City Limits on PBS, James Taylor singing and jamming with his band.
My heart immediately lightened as I listened to the music.
~~~~~
You’ve got a friend.
It’s the early 70s and I’m riding in the backseat on the long drive across the state to drop my brother and his friends at a church retreat before my parents and I spend a few days exploring Jekyll Island. I’m too young to join the teens at camp – our five-year age difference puts my brother in high school while I’m only in elementary school.
I want my brother and his friends to think I’m cool and interesting, but I’m shy and tongue-tied. As usual, I’m the invisible little sister. The quiet one. The weird one.
I listen to the radio as the road unfolds in front of us for hours.
Music is one of my best friends.
~~~~~
It’s our song, she tells us as we sit around the table at Pizza Hut. One of our songs, I mean. He said it reminds him of me, and I said it reminds me of him. And it does, It really describes how we feel. We make each other smile, you know?
She’s talking about James Taylor’s Your Smiling Face. We’re in high school, a group of girlfriends out for pizza and a movie. The rest of us nod knowingly. We’ve seen our friend and her new guy, the two of them smiling and laughing together, their blond heads close.
I love the time spent with friends but the high school years are difficult for me, for many reasons, and I’m not-so-secretly looking forward to the next phase.
~~~~~
It’s 1987 and I’m in grad school, immersed in writing a paper that’s due the next day. I study and work best with music blasting and my thick hair piled on top of my head, which means the radio is blaring in the 1-bedroom off-campus apartment I share with my black cat. I move back and forth between the typewriter on the old wooden desk I refinished several years earlier when I was a freshman in college, and the papers and index cards spread all over the floor.
Coming around again.
Carly Simon’s latest song is playing and my body sways to the music as I sort through notes for the paper I’m writing. I moved out on my own when I was 20, living in a tiny apartment in my hometown, finishing college and working various jobs. But grad school is my first time living in another state, away from family, moving there alone with my sweet kitty.
I have a blond-haired guy of my own now, we’ve been together for a few years, and things are rocky with us at the moment. But although my romantic life is shaky, my social life in general is full and fabulous to an extent like never before.
Do I realize that I’ll always think of my grad school time – even decades later – as one of the best times of my life?
~~~~~
I love this movie, I say to my husband as we snuggle on our couch watching Sleepless in Seattle on video. It’s the mid-90s, we’ve been married for several years by now, and we recently left apartment living to purchase a house. I didn’t marry my blond-haired guy from earlier years; my husband’s hair is dark-almost-black, one of the few physical indications of his Creek ancestry.
Carly Simon sings In the Wee Small Hours while Meg Ryan, as Annie, gets out of bed during the night and goes downstairs, her thoughts on Tom Hanks’ character, Sam.
I nestle into the cushions even more, cozy and content in my own home, with my own love, watching the movie.
~~~~~
The songs on the Tapestry album are embedded in my life’s personal soundtrack. They are interwoven with my years, part of the literal tapestry of my life. I played my LP so much it was scratchy; I played the cassette so often it was worn.
I think of those songs, memories of decades flashing through my mind, while I watch James Taylor sing on the screen.
I feel his music lift my spirits even more. And not only that, the music grounds me. It brings me more fully to center, more completely into my body.
Even as the memories pass through, I can feel myself in the present and enjoying the moment.
Enjoying the music.
~~~~~
By the end of the show, my mood was in a much different place than when I first picked up the tv remote.
Music can do that.
Music is powerful.
And so are memories.
For the past few years, I’ve chosen a word of the year. Or – to be more accurate – a word has chosen me each year.
New Year’s resolutions never really were my jam. But when I heard about the word-of-the-year as a way of choosing a word or theme to focus on and incorporate through the year, it resonated with me.
The words always seem to choose me, coming to me and fitting inside my bones with a knowing of this is my word. It usually happens when I’m not consciously thinking about a new word-of-the-year. And the words have always shown up for me sometime during the period of mid-August through mid-November… along with a strong nudge not to wait until the calendar year begins before I put the word into action.
(Not that these words aren’t in action at other times anyway. But the word-of-the-year gives that theme more emphasis in my life – and my experience has been that the word, the theme, shows its light side and its shadow side as it teaches me, gives me its medicine, roots into my being.)
I carry all my previous year-words with me, as they continue to work magic and healing, as they continue to offer me lessons and guidance, as they continue to be important reminders and touchstones for me.
Nourish.
Clarity.
Integration.
Sovereignty. (The word with me this year, 2015.)
Several weeks ago, in the middle of watching a tv show and not consciously thinking about a word-of-the-year, all of a sudden I knew what my 2016 word would be. And just as surely, I knew I wasn’t meant to wait until 2016 to embrace this word, this theme.
Replenish is the word that has chosen me this time.
When I google the word, these meanings come up:
fill (something) up again
recharge
freshen
restore
I’m already incorporating the word – replenish – into my life, on all levels. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. In my work, in my play, in my self-care, in my health, in my time.
My commitment is to replenish myself and my life. To fill the well. To recharge and restore.
In every area of my life.
And as I do, I’ll continue to embrace previous words of previous years, because they’re important too. Nourish. Clarity. Integration. Sovereignty. (And so many other words that are important to incorporate but haven’t appeared as my word-of-the-year.)
Replenish.
Is there some area of your life that needs to be restored or recharged? Do you need to fill the well? Do you need nourishment and replenishment?
If so… what can you do today that would help replenish you?
Do that – whatever it is – if you can.
♥
Ginger Simpson White 