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It’s okay to be comfortable
I’ve spent the past five years in varying states of discomfort. And I thought this was how things had to be. I thought that this was the only way to push through your self-imposed boundaries. Get uncomfortable! You don’t get anywhere sitting around in your comfort zone! Life begins at the end of your comfort zone! I took all the quotes and incorporated them into my life. I got seriously Uncomfortable. For example: I threw up before going on live radio (twice). I threw up when I published my first book. I threw up before Tudorcon (three times). I didn’t sleep at all the entire weekend of Tudorcon, actually, because…
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Not nuns but close…
I’ve often thought that the life of an average medieval woman would have been really awful. Legally being the property of first your father then your husband, no reliable birth control, dying in childbirth, and all the hard work in between. No thanks. But I recently came across a group of women who actually did have agency in their lives, and choices to marry or not. In his book “Edge of the World, a cultural history of the North Sea and the transformation of Europe,” Michael Pyle has a chapter devoted to the Beguines. Beguines lived in semi-monastic communities, but did not take any kind of religious vows. They promised…
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Stargazing: Cassiopeia
We live out in the countryside here in Spain, on the side of a hill that overlooks a long shallow valley. And we have a huge sky. I can easily see everything from west, to north, to east clearly. South gets a little bit obscured by the lights from town, but other than that, it’s all clear. And one of the things I’ve really fallen in love with the past few years is getting to know all of these stars who have been watching down on us for millennia. I often think about who else stood here where I am now, and looked up at those same stars, and wondered…
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Kickass Women I love: Lady Mary Wortley Montague
In 1716 a 20-something woman arrived in Turkey with her husband, who had just been appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. For the next two years Mary Wortley Montague wrote letters home, the Letters from Turkey, that have been an inspiration to women travelers ever since. Mary had a precocious child who devoured books, and wrote in her diary, “I am going to write a history so uncommon” when she was still not ten years old. Women were not formally educated at this time – she would campaign for women’s education later in her life – and so she taught herself in her father’s library,…
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Slowing Down Time
The thing that I struggle with the most with getting older isn’t the gray hair (though that sucks, too), but just how quickly time is moving these days. Remember when you were a kid and December seemed soooo long? Summers would last forever. Now you blink and the holidays are over. I remember talking with my dad about this once when I was younger. How a year seems to take so long when you’re five, because at that point it’s 20% of your life. But by the time you’re 50, a year is just 2% of your life. Now that I am firmly in my mid-40’s, I am searching for…
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It’s time for a quiet November
I think after the week we’ve all been through, collectively, it’s time for a deep breath moment of calm, no? Man, the past seven days have been rough, haven’t they? No matter who you voted for, we’ve been through the ringer. Raise your hand if you spent the week consuming every news site available, hitting refresh like a hamster who gets a treat each time, and getting very little work done. It’s not just me, then? Didn’t think so. But hey, it’s a new week, right? And we’re deeply into autumn, and it feels soooo good. Stews, sweaters, apple spice candles, and Jim Brickman holiday piano music are all making…
