What Will You Do with Your One WIld and Precious Life?

I make beautiful food. And it is delicious.

My son once suggested I start a food blog. He was over for dinner and had just seen some of the meals I'd photographed. 

I've been thinking about it.

I have fantasized often about hosting a cooking show. I'd be good at it and I'd love doing it. Sometimes when I'm cooking I narrate as if it is a show. One of the benefits of living alone is you can do that kind of thing and no one thinks you're nuts. The technology exists these days that enables people like me to create shows without network sponsorship. I'll bet there are a lot of cooking shows on YouTube and as podcasts. Who knows? Maybe one day I'll indulge this.

I've been thinking lately about all the things I'd like to do and wondering about actually doing them. I'm a bit of a dabbler. I like to do many things and to do some of them well. Some, I like to do simply for the experience. When I was a Girl Scout, my favorite badge was, you guessed it, The Dabbler. I think it's great that that kind of thing can be rewarded in a world where specializing is such a big deal.

I think it would be fun to set aside some time this week and make a list of everything I'd like to do. To play around with the list, see what I already have planned to meet myself there and to think of ways to meet myself even more in this.

It's important to do the things you'd like to do in life. 

And to think about what would be fun.

A close friend asks me that all the time to counter my seriousness. "What would be fun?" I can hear her voice as I write this. Most of the time I have no idea how to answer her. And that is usually because I'm locked into some kind of mortal combat with myself when she asks. 

Today I'm not in a serious frame of mind. I've been enjoying the expansiveness I cultivated with yesterday's meditation. It's a rare enterprise for me to offer a day to whatever rises to the surface. But it's been a great day. I've been dabbling. Some reading. Some laundry. Some grocery shopping. Some TV. Some cooking. Some scrolling. Some planning. Some puttering. Some driving around and looking at the wide open skies filled with big puffy white clouds and the rippling of the waters in the river. And a little bit of writing. I forgot all about meditating today so I think I'll do that before bed and hopefully will have a good, long night of sleep. 

Tomorrow's a long day at work so it feels good to take today and simply enjoy it without any kind of serious agenda.






The Summer of Self-Love is a daily writing practice created to cultivate three months for thriving. The goal at the end is to host a dinner party. Sounds like an odd Hero's Journey, doesn't it? Most of them usually are.


The title of this post, of course, riffs on Mary Oliver's The Summer Day.