It's Been a Weird Week
Happy belated Earth Day! It has been a weird week for me, and I feel like since that last time I sat down to do an update a lot of things in my life have already changed again. There are just some periods in life where things move fast I guess.
Personal updates
One strange thing about being in the climate field that I still haven't quite gotten a grip on, is that Earth Day, Earth Week, and Earth Month are VERY busy. It's nice to take a beat to celebrate the planet with folks, but the rest of the work doesn't stop in the meantime! On top of that, I also found out that I basically need to start looking for a new job... which is depressing, but I'm working through it...
I have been pouring more and more time into this page, making tiny tweaks, adding little pages that I haven't created links for yet... There may or may not be a chance to explore a certain shrine that I started in the music section of this post...
The only other thing that has been taking up quite a bit of my time decluttering and unpacking (pun not intended) my relationship with minimalism. I have since done some trips to donation centers and little libraries, but I have also been going through my external harddrive. I have taken thousands of photos over the last few years, and these have also been some of the most transformative times of my life. I let go of a lot of photos, which surprised me. A lot of it was junk, photos of receipts or homework, screenshots of stupid tweets or painful conversations. Random stuff like that. But I also ended up going through pictures from trips and letting some of those go too. I am maybe halfway through everything, but I want to do a deeper dive and maybe host some pictures from my favorite trips here, so I'll come back to this. But going through these decluttering exercises have been really eye opening and cathartic. It feels like a tiny dose of healing, in a weird way. I promise I'll start blogging about more things than minimalism and decluttering soon, this is just the season of life that I'm in at the moment.
Reading: Enchantment by Katherine May
This little book is full of so many little gems of wisdon and her writing inspires me to become a better writer. In honor of tonight's full moon, I will leave a snippet of a passage that I wrote down in my commonplace book:
As a child, I would look out of the window on a nighttime drive and think the moon was following us. From my vantage point, she seemed to be chasing us along the sky, breathlessly trying to keep up. Later I learned that it was just because she was so big that it felt like she was everywhere, and that I was small with an outsize sense of my own importance. Still, I was left with the impression that the moon had a certain constancy. It seemed that she was attentive to my needs, concernedly checking in. Sometimes I felt like I needed her gaze.
Listening: The Tortured Poets Department
Oh boy, I am still unpacking this one. Taylor Swift album release nights have become a ritual for me at this point. And I even decided to start building my first shrine for this site in the hours that I was waiting. It's definitely a work in progress, but I had so much fun learning more about css to make my own little swiftie corner of the internet.
Goals from the beginning of the month
In my first post, I made a list of goals. I thought it might be fun to revisit these before setting some new goals.
- Soak up that eclipse energy I did indeed, and I made some new moon wishes too
- Spend less money I did indeed, I paid down some debt and owed on my taxes this year, so it doesn't feel like it... we also booked some travel so we made some big purchases too. But the general random spending on crap habit that I have been trying to kick is improving!
- Learn the numbers in Japanese We're getting there, I haven't been practicing as much as I'd like to with how nuts it has been. I have been watching lots of anime lol
- Have a better week at work about that...
- Do a new moon wishing ritual, and continue to follow the lunar cycle forgot that i made a separate goal for new moon wishes along with enjoying the eclipse! but check! done! had a lovely time!
Goals for the rest of the month
- Full moon ritual! The fact that I am coming back on the full moon to do a life update is 100% coincidental
- Apply for 5 jobs
- Learn those stinkin Japanese numbers
- Start going to the gym again
- Finish reading a book