I think many of us spend a fair amount of our time waiting, myself for sure included. Waiting for the sun to shine so we can be outside. Waiting for something uplifting to happen to elevate our mood. Waiting for a friend to reach out to make plans to get together. Waiting to run into the right person at the right time for the purposes of connection. Waiting for joy to find us; for happiness to fall into our lap; for the stars to align in the creation of the perfect day; for the weekend to do X, Y, Z; for whatever current upswell of frantic activity we presently have to be over and done with. I think many of us are hoping that we can just sort of spontaneously fall into a good life.
I don’t think it’s a conscious undertaking. I think many of us operate this way without knowing it. It’s a learned pattern of behavior, instilled in us on the sly by our collective culture. Intentional, purposeful, choiceful living is a worthwhile endeavor to put our time, energy, and effort into. Because the thing about routinely waiting around for something good to happen or someone good to text us is our well-being is not in our own hands. The quality of our day – of our life – is out of our control, and we’re at the mercy of whatever just happens to happen, or doesn’t.
I’m not at all suggesting that spontaneous living or spontaneous joy isn’t a thing. Of course it totally is. What I am saying is maybe it’s worth considering actively investing in the things and people that are most important to us. Maybe it’s worth figuring out what our biggest values center around and what our highest priorities are, in order to make conscious decisions about how we live our life. Maybe it’s worth making a few more plans about how we will actualize what we really want in life.
joy
Do What Spurs the Heart
Just as we need mindfulness trainings in order to help us develop skillfulness of mind and body, we need heartfulness trainings in order to help us cultivate connection of heart and spirit.
Based on the word patterning of the Five Mindfulness Trainings in the Plum Village tradition, here is my first attempt at a training of the heart:
Aware of the many hardships of being human, I am committed to finding ways to bolster and nourish my heart. I am determined to practice self-care, rest, play, and water seeds of joyful living. Knowing that time is precious, life is short, and energy is limited and ever-changing, I will contemplate the necessity of keeping my heart strong, for the benefit of myself and all beings.
Perhaps more “Heartfulness Trainings” will follow and I will craft a few more. In any case, this feels like a good start. The Five Mindfulness Trainings don’t just target the body and mind, of course. They involve and evolve the heart, too. But in the way I am looking at things currently, I think it’s helpful to make a distinction between trainings of mind & body and trainings of heart & spirit. Isolating them for the sake of investing in their development can lead to deeper levels of engagement and insight.
My strong sense is that what many of us are looking for, interested in, and/or desperate for is a resurgence of heart. Ways of living and being that activate, engage and nourish our spirit. Alongside working for pay, household upkeep, and tending to kids and family, it is possible to also invest in the well-being of our spirit and enlivenment of our heart. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it won’t take some figuring out. I’m not even necessarily saying we should. I’m simply saying it’s possible. I’m also saying it’s probably a pretty darn good idea.
A few things that leap straight to my mind when I think of actions that can help spur the heart and feed the spirit:
Continue readingWhen Sadness Attends the Dinner Party
Just as one would be hard-pressed to know I have a nerve condition called CRPS for which I am on disability for simply by looking at me, folks are unlikely to know my husband Mike lives with depression. I suspect that even those who have heard him share openly about it, which he often does, might still have a hard time thinking it affects him (or me) very much, based on how open, engaged, and warm-hearted he is when they see him. All of which he truly is, by the way. Alongside his friendliness and care and powerhouse presence geared towards others, however, is the fluctuating but constant companion of depression.
Mike, by his own admission, has 2 primary modes of operation: on and off. When folks see him, he’s in the on position. The majority of the time I spend with him, however, is when he is switched off. Another way of saying it would be Mike is on when he’s in work-mode and off when he’s in home-mode. His capacity for being on when he’s not working is limited. Despite the beneficial growth-work he’s done and continues to do around allowing himself the space and grace to find acceptance for his depression while simultaneously not sinking into its depths (which has been incredibly valuable), it casts a long shadow on his spirit.
When I first thought about turning the above two paragraphs that I penned in my paper journal into a blog post, I wondered what my angle would be. The answer arose pretty readily. Sadness. On board for me right now is the feeling of sadness. (PSA: Sadness and depression are not two different words that mean the same thing. It’s really important to understand the difference.) I’m sad he lives with this affliction of mind, heart, and body. I’m sad that even though he can touch into feelings of happiness, the ability he has to do so is incredibly compromised. Depression nearly always has the upper hand. I’m sad that depression robs him of so much energy and joy and the capacity to function in healthy ways. I’m sad that such a kind and wonderful man has to live with such a hard plight of the soul.
I also feel sadness for some of the concessions I need to make, in order to partner with a man who lives with depression. While I have learned how to adapt to it in ways I deem are genuinely skillful and beneficial (both to him and to me), there are times when it’s a strain and feels like a burden. The ways in which I negotiate around and with his depression doesn’t eclipse my great love for him, but it does at times grow tiresome. I experience bouts of weariness with it. Bouts of sadness.
I don’t mind telling you I far prefer feelings of anger than feelings of sadness. Anger has also been easier for me to work with in terms of holding, investigating, and unfurling it. Anger is a flash feeling, whereas sadness lingers. Anger also carries a certain sense of empowerment and agency, whereas sadness makes me feel vulnerable and shaky. (I’m not at all stating this is how these emotions are, but simply how they are, in general, for me.) Anger gives me the illusion of control. With sadness, the illusion is stripped away. I’m also able to give myself more grace when it comes to experiencing feelings of anger. With sadness, while intellectually I know it’s an emotion that is part of what it means to be human, when it’s activated in my mind/body system, there is an internal program running that says sadness means something is wrong and in need of fixing. For me, sadness is much more uncomfortable than anger.
Continue readingKeeping the Practice Fresh
As mindfulness practitioners on the path of practice, I reckon all of us experience moments, days or periods of time when our desire and/or ability to practice wanes in energy. I can’t imagine any practitioner over the long-haul of practice not going through slumps of zeal or interest from time to time.
This post is inspired by the question a dear friend of mine asked me recently: How do you keep your practice fresh? It’s a really good question, and a good topic for regular self-reflection I think.
Anything routine has the capacity to become dull and lifeless, if we don’t regularly invest in nourishing the spirit. Goodness knows more of us are prone to being head-driven than heart-centered. But it’s precisely the heart that needs to be in play, if we are to keep our spiritual practice active, fresh, and strong. Otherwise there’s a solid chance we’ll lose steam at some point, and maybe quit our practice altogether. Or perhaps even worse: we’ll keep practicing but it will be a bore, bother, and chore. I don’t know guys. I think going through the motions auto-pilot style might be worse than an end move.
True-to-form, here is a list (cuz I love making lists) of some of the ways I keep the spirit of my practice fresh:
Continue readingAdding Our Name To The List
I’ll get straight to it. Involving our self in the practice of self-care doesn’t mean we need to stop what we’re doing in terms of offering direct supportive care to others. It’s not an either-or situation. Self-care is about adding our own name to the list of those we’re choosing to tend to. Also, while it is easy and very common to regard self-care with being detrimentally selfish or painfully self-absorbed, these are distinctly very different things. Self-care is not synonymous with any of the following: ego-inflation; self-aggrandizing; selfishness; narcissism; cockiness; being full of oneself; self-indulgence; or navel gazing. True self-care is an expression of self-awareness and deep understanding, motivated by a genuine desire to show up & care well for others.
In my current way of thinking, self-care involves these 5 aspects:
- Tending well to our physiological needs
- Prioritizing nourishing enjoyable activities
- Seeking input/support when it’s needed
- Actively practicing self-befriending
- Connecting with something bigger
Before I break each of these aspects down, I’d like to make a case for why self-care is important. If we imagine our self as a vehicle, self-care is about filling our tank so we can keep going and doing what we do. We all need gas in the car in order to keep on keeping on. Where this overly simplistic analogy falls apart is that unlike an actual vehicle, the lower our tank gets, the harder it is to fill back up. Additionally, when we consistently operate on low fuel – which so many of us do – trouble brews, spreads, and grows. Many of us have learned how to adapt to chronic shortages of fuel in the tank of our mind/body/heart system, to the detriment of our own well-being. Important note: Don’t hold on too tightly to the whole us being a vehicle thing. We’re human beings, not machines. I just want to make that clear.
Since we are in a near constant state of energy output, in order to function optimally, we need a steady stream of energy input. When our output is continually greater than our input, we are likely to feel rundown on a regular basis. If we don’t have enough fuel coming back in to restore what we’re expending, we will eventually be depleted, exhausted, maxed out or find ourselves broken down.
There are a number of ways that energy flows out of us as humans. While it’s relatively easy to see that physical activities expend energy, there are many subtle ways that energy leaks out or is drawn out that we often aren’t aware of. For example, we expend a great deal of our limited precious energy when we spend time ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, spinning around in obsessive over-thinking, and criticizing our self. We expend energy when we compare our self to others, when we are overly concerned about what others think about us, and when we hinge our self-worth on external factors. And we expend energy when we watch TV shows or movies that water seeds of fear, anxiety, jealousy, anger, regret, self-loathing, self-doubt, and despair in our consciousness.
Thankfully, there are also a plethora of ways that energy can flow back into us as well. It’s worth a brief mention here too that there are different types of fuel sources available to us, some of which are more beneficial than others. There are certain common attempts many of us make in the interest of self-care through means that leave a gunky residue behind, such as watching a steady stream of rom-coms or crime shows (both of which I deem to be equally corrosive to the human spirit; although, rom-coms might be the worst offender – just one gal’s strong opinion), drinking alcohol, using drugs, obsessively shopping, regularly indulging in junk food, or scrolling and swiping endlessly. In all of these cases, we have unmet needs that we’re trying to satisfy through certain actions. Trouble is, they are not in our best interest, and ultimately leave us feeling more restless and disconnected in the end. Practices involved with true self-care are healthy, sustainable and more sustaining sources of fuel – and also among the cleanest burning.
Continue readingMusings on Joy
Joy is a topic I return to often here on my blog. When it comes to cultivating and strengthening my own spiritual practice, Joy is one of my top 5 favorite hits.
Partly because I am currently participating in a free online summit entitled Living A Joyful Life, and partly because investing in joy as an active, intentional practice is a mainstay thread in my life, here I am yet again to wax on about my current musings.
At the surface, joy is simply a fleeting feeling of pleasure. The feeling rises and falls and that’s that. It comes and it goes. At first inspection, it’s easy to regard joy as trivial, trite, maybe even juvenile. In any case, it’s not important enough to put on our regular to-do list. From a Buddhist lens, we may be tempted to see joy as akin to grasping temporary highs or chasing sensual desires, which untether us from being present in the here and now. And many of us see joy as being the mark of an unserious, unconcerned, under-developed individual. Since joy can get a bad rap, and be subject to rudimentary understanding, I enjoy the task of re-branding what it is and has the potential to become.
Joy is a fleeting feeling. Yes, absolutely. However, when the feeling of joy is nourished & developed, it has the capacity to grow into a foundational quality of being. While I’m hesitant to share the following progression, because I don’t want to give the impression that the process of cultivating joy is necessarily this linear, it was what I personally experienced on my path of cultivating joy.
Continue readingFour Arenas of Practice (part 1 of 2)
Right up front, please know that Four Arenas of Practice is a list I’ve crafted myself, like super recently. So if you haven’t heard of them before that makes good sense. Four Arenas of Practice are: joy, gratitude, self-befriending, and comfort zone expansion work. NOTE: I’m trying really hard not to put the word ‘The’ in front of Four Arenas, so as not to give the impression that these are the ONLY practice areas worthy of investing time & energy into. There are many places in which to dig the well, these four just happen to be mine.
Assuming our basic needs are being met, actively engaging with one or more of these four arenas will enable us to truly feel as though we’re living a good life, regardless of the ills, challenges, and hardships that come our way.
There’s part of me that wants these arenas to be a linear situation. As in: if I start in one arena it will lead me to the next arena and then when I make my way to the final arena, I’m done! Mission complete! But these arenas do not work that way. They overlap; co-create each other; spill into one another. There’s no starting place, and therefore also no ending place. While they are distinct and distinguishable, they are not separate.
These practice arenas are places of ongoing maintenance, on-the-spot upliftment, and strength training. They assist us both in the short term and over the long haul. Their influence and impact are simultaneously immediate and time-releasing.
These Four Arenas are not simply areas for contemplation and reflection. Though yes, do that. These are areas in which to practice. And by practice I mean effort and action need to be applied. Here are some possible ways to activate ourselves in these Four Arenas.
J O Y
Make time to do the things you like to do. This may sound super basic, but most of us don’t prioritize enjoyment in our life. We put it off, relegate it for later, regard it as trite & trivial, and/or wait for joy to manifest spontaneously. For many of us, work & house projects & errands take precedent (always). Encouragement: think small. Sure we might like to travel or see a fave musician in concert or do a million other big things, but the subtleties of joy are vast & varied. When it comes to making time to do the things you enjoy doing, think & act small. This way we can enfold the cultivation of joy into our daily or weekly routine.
Expand your attention. Misperceptions about joy abound. One of the common ones is that joy is only big & flashy. If we think joy exists only in big-bang moments, we’re likely to miss the quiet simple joys that are quite literally all around us. The other day, for example, I was making a blended butternut squash soup and I was really wishing I had a ladle in which to scoop it up with. Then I remembered that we had fetched all of our things from our storage unit the previous day and my ladle was in a bin inside our freshly delivered shipping container now wonderfully located on our property. My ladle was just a short walk away! Expanding our attention when it comes to joy allows our radar to pick up on things that we might otherwise gloss right over. When our attention is more expansive, we discover joy everywhere we are and anywhere we go.
Let the good in. When something good happens we can sometimes have the tendency to slough it off or disregard it as being no big deal, or at least not a big enough deal to make any sort of difference. This kind of practice – and yes, it is a practice – is very unfortunate. If we keep the door to our heart closed when good things happen, we can become quite cynical and jaded. Letting the good in involves making a conscious effort to notice goodness when it’s present, allowing it to penetrate into our mind/body system, and savoring it for as long as possible. Goodness is always in motion and good people are everywhere. Practice to see it and let it in.
(Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post, where I’ll share practices for the other three arenas.)
On Keeping the Practice Fresh
Recently, in a Q&A session that took place here at Deer Park Monastery, a woman asked this question: How do I keep my practice fresh? It was such a good and important question that it inspired me to craft this blog post.
To help keep my spiritual practice of mindfulness fresh and alive, I:
- Cultivate joy
- Practice gratitude
- Find ways to be creative
- Try new things
- Remain open to learning
- Keep good company
- Stay close to art & music
- Maintain good boundaries
- Prioritize self-care
- Engage in random acts of kindness
- Do service work
- Spend time in nature
Cultivate joy. Joy is necessary fuel for being an engaged, present, caring and skillful human in the world. Being an active participant in cultivating the quality of joy in my life is one of the most important things I do that contributes to my felt sense of well-being.
Practice gratitude. When I don’t create an action-plan for myself when it comes to practicing gratitude, it becomes this distant idea that sounds good but never really lands for me in any real way. I’ve had different practices over the years, such as keeping a gratitude journal and creating a regular check-in with a close friend to share about what we are grateful for. What I do currently, and have been doing for a number of years, is as follows: 1) I say a gratitude verse before eating a meal, typically inwardly to myself. 2) I do three touchings of the earth after my session of sitting meditation every morning, which involves this verse I’ve created for myself, which I say internally: I bow down to the earth, in gratitude for ______. I then fill in the blank with whatever is alive for me in that moment. I do this three times, inserting a different gratitude each time.
Find ways to be creative. I’m a big fan of bringing creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to my practice. For example: A couple of years ago, I went though a period of a few months where I found it very difficult to do my sitting meditation practice in the mornings. I had a lot of stress on board in my mind/body system and sitting on the cushion often exacerbated it. In order to continue sitting, which I was invested in doing, I made some adjustments to my practice that proved helpful. I greatly shortened my sit time; I would sometimes put on instrumental music to help hold space for & with me during my sit; and I would chose atypical locations around my house to do my sitting practice, such as on the kitchen counter!
Try new things. In order to help keep my practice from growing stale and stagnate, every January I pick up a new mindfulness practice to carry with me through the year, which I then set down at the end of the year, in order to prepare to pick up a new one for the next year. My practice this past year has been to eat all of my meals with my non-dominant hand. (Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post which will reveal my new practice for 2023!)
Remain open to learning. If I ever start thinking I have something down when it comes to my spiritual practice, I take that as a sign that I’m entering a danger zone. Once I think I have it all “figured out,” I’m in trouble. Being a perpetual student, an ongoing learner, helps me not to become dogmatic, bound to present views, or overly attached to things needing to be any certain way, other than as they are. Being open to learning also involves continuing to learn about my own self, and understanding that I am of the nature to change. So what might work for me one day to nourish the quality of freshness within me might not work the next day.
Continue readingTurning 41-years-old
This body –
my body –
of flesh, bones, organs,
a forever pumping heart and breathing lungs,
turns 41-years-old today.
I wonder if my mom and my dad,
each in their own separate states,
will travel back in time today,
thinking back to the day I was born.
Will they will reflect on what it means
to be the parent of a 41-year-old woman,
self-possessed, dwelling in the mountains
so many hundreds of miles away
from the land of her raising?
This day is not in celebration of me,
as though I were self-created,
self-propelled, self-contained.
Today I want to elevate my heart
in celebration not of me but of my parents;
my grandparents; my ancestors, blood and land;
my tribe of people near and far, past and present;
the wealth of resources and privileges
I’ve been so richly and generously afforded.
Did I mention I am filled to over-flowing with gratitude?
Did I mention that I try my very best
not to take it all for granted?
Have I mentioned that each day
when I rise, I form a smile of love
on my lips for the sheer joy
that comes from waking?
Living with Chronic Pain
I just spent an hour or so crafting an email to a young woman looking for some support that I was connected with through a mutual friend. A young woman who lives with chronic pain and has tried using mindfulness as a tool to work with better managing her pain levels, with little success.
Knowing how best to respond to these sort of inquiries has been a challenge for me in the past. In my view, trying to take up meditation for the first time while in the midst of great difficulty (physical or otherwise) is just extremely difficult, if not near impossible. But I wound up finding an angle to share from that I feel pretty good about. Here is the email in its entirety, in hopes that it may offer benefit to other fellow folks who live with chronic pain as well.
Dear ________,
My apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Thanks for writing and feeling comfortable to share with me a bit about what you’re going through and your experience with mindfulness in relation to living with chronic pain.
I myself have a nerve condition called CRPS, which I developed when I was in my late 20’s (I’m now 40-years-old). I was on meds for a number of years which, as you said, took the edge off. I also walked with a cane for a few years as a result of my pain and challenges in moving. I’ve been off my meds now for a few years and only use my cane once in a great while, on my high pain days. I’m on disability for my condition but I am able to work very part time.
What you shared in regards to when your mind quiets it then floods with emotion/grief makes so much sense, I can totally understand that based on my own experience back in the beginning of my journey with living with chronic pain. Meditation is not a one-size fits all approach – and especially when it comes to living with chronic pain, I think it’s important to be aware that meditation can bring up more discomfort in our mind than it helps to alleviate in the body.
I can share from my own experience a couple of things that have been incredibly helpful – and I’ll share too that both of these things took me a long while to really “get” and truly understand in a way that I was able to benefit from them and experience a reduction in my physical pain levels.
1. Mind/Body Connection. As a mindfulness practitioner since my early 20’s, I was grateful to have some background in the practices of mindfulness and sitting meditation before the onset of my illness and pain AND it also took me a long while to really see how closely and intrinsically linked the mind & body are. After my injury (which is what led to my nerve condition) as time went on, I saw more and more clearly that the more I generated stories of thought about how bad the pain was, how awful it was that I’d be in this pain forever, how I’d never be able to do X Y Z again, and so on, the more these thoughts and stories amped up my physical pain. As soon as I started thinking about how bad the pain was and started running with that story, my pain was immediately worse. So a big game changer for me with my pain levels had to do with making friends with my body and with my pain when it kicked up – prior to making friends with my body, I treated it like an enemy with which to battle and fight against. I would literally say (internally) to my body: I hate you, I hate this, NO! And this fight mode increased my pain, every time. So I learned to start making friends with my body and my pain – when I was unable to do something I wanted to do, when I was bed ridden with pain, I would say to myself: It’s okay body, I’m here for you, I’m going to take good care of you. And this befriending process changed my experience with pain almost right away, because I wasn’t adding to the fury of it by tensing up and hating and fighting against my own body. I would also put my hands on the high pain area and send it kindness through light touch, helping to care for my body. And as hard as it oftentimes was, I would smile to my body when my pain was unbearable. These friendly approaches to my body were very helpful and an important part of learning how to better manage my pain.
2. The Art of Resting. Gosh this one took me a hella long time to embody. Friends who have known me for a long time will often ask me what changed in regards to my condition, as they saw how bad it used to be for me, walking with a pain and being incredibly limited in movement with high pain levels and now I’m at the point where no one would know I’m someone who lives with chronic pain and physical limitations. And the answer I give them is this: the greatest thing that has helped my condition is that I’ve learned the vital importance and power of the art of resting. It used to be that I fought against resting tooth and nail – No! I shouldn’t be resting, I should be doing something more important & productive!! Resting means I’m lazy and selfish and and and!!! Despite what my body was telling me very clearly, I would rally against resting, trying to push through with the no pain no gain sort of approach (which is just death and destruction to those of us living with chronic pain). And early on, even when I was laying down (because I had no choice but to lay down because my pain was so bad) I certainly wasn’t resting – my body was laying down but my mind was super spinning and fighting and hating the fact that I was in pain and laying down in the middle of the day. So for me, I learned that the art of resting involves resting both body & mind. It became absolutely necessary for me to learn how to rest without feeling guilty about it; without feeling like I should be doing something else. It took me a lot of practice – and it was worth every bit of the challenges I had learning how to do it. For me still currently, I regard resting/napping as my super hero power. I am able to do quite a bit with my time these days and it’s largely because I diligently manage and balance my time every single day in between activity and rest. I put a great deal of importance on the art of resting in my life. And I regard resting not as selfish but actually as one of the most altruistic acts I can do. Self-care directly translates to my ability to help care for others. When I’m miserable, so is my husband, so are my friends when they’re around me. Resting is what gives me ongoing strength and fuel to keep doing the things I am still able to do, even though what I can do is in some ways very different than what my pre-injury self could do.
Additionally, I will share the importance of finding/appreciating/investing in activities we are still able to do. Cultivating joy is so important – so trying to activate energy in the direction of the things we can still do vs. what we can no longer do was really important for me. I have had many different kinds of gratitude practices I’d done over the years too and have gotten so much benefit from strengthening my gratitude muscle – I have a daily and active practice of connecting with gratitude and it deeply enriches my life and my relationship with myself and the world around me. Perhaps something fun for you to do is something I’ve done in the past where I had a gratitude buddy to share with once a week or once every 2-weeks – so we checked in with each other and each shared our recent gratitudes, with maybe a little commentary about why we were grateful for the things we mentioned.
I’m a big proponent of starting small to work big, as I like to call it. Starting with small small super doable steps sets us up for success when it comes to bringing on board anything new in the way of change work/growth work. And I would encourage this approach with meditation too, if that is something you are interested in cultivating in your life. Please don’t feel like you have to sit for some long hellish amount of time in order to do it right or that you have to sit in some particular position. If you do want to start a meditation practice, I would suggest you start with 2-minutes. And be in a position that is comfortable for you, or as comfortable as you can get. It might be laying down. It might be sitting on your couch. Set a timer for 2-min and see if during that 2-min you can offer yourself kindness and practice to enjoy your in-breath and out-breath for just a breath or two. If silence is too much for 2-min, put on some ambient music you enjoy and have that accompany you for the 2-min, to help your mind settle. If the 2-min feels doable, continue sitting (or laying) for 2-min maybe 3-5 days a week and then feel things out for yourself – maybe you feel ready to increase to 4 or 5-min after a couple of weeks, and maybe not. The point is to start with a really doable amount of time in sitting meditation and not to set goals that are near impossible to stick with – consistency is more important than the length of time you sit for. There are some meditation apps I’ve heard great things about too that might be helpful – Insight Timer is one of them. Smiling Mind and Stop, Breathe & Think are others I’ve heard good things about. These are also all free, or have free options involved with them. 10% Happier might also be worth looking into (which is an app and podcast). Having guided meditations (and keeping them short) can be helpful.
I hope some of this was helpful. Please know I’m happy to chat more with you and I’m here if you simply want to connect with another sister living with chronic pain, which can be helpful in and of itself, as those without direct experience with chronic pain, while often well-intentioned, can only understand so much and I’ve found that friends/family can say things that really show how little they get it (and how could they?!).
With care,
Nicole
going outwords & inwords 