I acknowledged the anniversary of her death last week, but surprise(!) we are still in conversation and this postmortem connection has proved to be the most instructive of all.

Nothing special is a Buddhist concept that says being ordinary is enough. No need to be special. Everything we need to learn is happening right now. And it’s pretty amazing.

"As my first teacher, Munindraji, would say, the thought of your mother is not your mother. It’s a thought. A thought of anything is not the thing, it’s a thought. So when we can relate to whatever emotional turmoil might be happening and the thoughts associated with them [by saying to ourselves], “Yeah, this is just a thought in the moment,” it gives us access to relating to it in a different way." ~Joseph Goldstein

Besides being a passionate writer and narrator of this bi-weekly newsletter I am: *An essay writer and poet. *A teacher on Insight Timer. https://insighttimer.com/valeriespain, and a Certified Mindfulness Mentor.

If you don’t want to commit to a subscription but found this post meaningful, you can drop a contribution here: buymeacoffee.com/valeriespan.

Regarding AI: I do not use it in any part of my writing process: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing the final essay. All the imagining, writing and editing is the work of one human. We don’t need more content. We need heart-centered, human content.

To be free in the world, you must be free of the world. Or your past decides for you and your future. ~Sri Nisargardatta

Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication on Substack and you can read this essay there, and become a free or paid subscriber.

Valerie's Bio

*Writer, essayist and poet. *Teacher on Insight Timer. *Life coach helping folks living with type 1 diabetes to nurture their mental, emotional and spiritual health. I’ve lived with T1D for 30+ years. Read The Type 1 Diabetes Dilemma. Schedule a free Discovery Session. *To learn even more, go to LinkedIn. **My identities: older, white, cisgender woman of European immigrant descent; a mother of sons, a grandmother, daughter, sister, friend, advocate for social justice and for this beloved, animate earth.

AI: I do not use it in any part of my creative process: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing and recording final essays or podcasts. Everything you listen to and read—including the em dashes—is the work of one human.

I am a writer, poet, life coach and someone who has lived with type 1 diabetes for 30+ years. I’m launching a new newsletter this month, Type 1 Diabetes Dilemma. Stay tuned! I’m also refocusing my coaching niche to work with people living with type 1.

Glorious Ordinary is reader-supported Substack newsletter. If you like what you hear, please go here: https://valeriespain.substack.com/

And become a free or paid subscriber!

It’s unlikely Eve plucked an apple from the Tree of Knowledge since up until the 17th c. the word “apple” was a generic term for all unknown, i.e. foreign, fruit, excluding berries, though it did include nuts.

What fills out heads

Eve disgraced herself when she ate from the Tree despite God clearly saying absolutely not! but even as a child in Catholic school I could not condemn her.

To name out of all paradise the one thing denied her, so Eve would spend those first days walking around with apple apple filling hours in her head- ~from "Original Sin" a poem by Lucia Perillo

How could she think of anything but apples after that?

Regarding AI: I do not use it in any part of my creative process: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing and recording the final essay, everything you read and listen to is the work of one human.

* I’m a writer, poet, life coach and someone who’s lived with type 1 diabetes for 30+ years. I’m focusing my coaching niche to work with people living with type 1. I’m “in the gap,” someone who always does “fine” clinically, but gets little emotional support (from the medical profession) re how to navigate daily life with a chronic condition. If that sounds like you, we might be a good fit. You don’t have to do it alone.

*I’m excited to launch a new newsletter this month, Type 1 Diabetes Dilemma, about my my journey and ongoing insights.

The particular difficulties of my life feel like so much drivel when there’s a baby asleep on my chest, or I’m making pillow forts with a five-year-old, or holding the hand of someone happy or grieving, anxious or excited.

Those experiences reinforce a believe that the love inherent in those actions has the power to vanquish political leaders who break people and infrastructure with no intention of mending. I need to feel that love as often as possible.

We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be foolish—can have no future with us.

~Barry Lopez, from Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

What if holding was the starting point? What if hands and children were held as much as they needed to be held? What if the Donalds and the Petes, the Pams, the Kristis and the Elons got the love they needed at all the crucial points they needed to receive it?

How about that?

Everything is about love and the absence of love.

When I am not tethered to love I am lost. I want lie down, pull the blanket to my chin and sleep for a very long time.

But babies, children and grieving adults, even pets, do not owe me love or comfort, so when they are absent, I find both, walking, hiking woods and mountains, and meandering through fields and along riverbanks.

Long ago, I stumbled into a grove of pine trees in a Maine forest, and one invited me to lean against it. The only requirement was a desire to lean.

It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. ~Barry Lopez

This is an essay from my Substack newsletter, Glorious Ordinary, which you can read here.

Regarding AI: I do not use it in any part of my writing or recording processes: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing and recording the final essay. Everything you read and listen to is the work of one human.

Let’s work together!

* I’m an executive and life coach, and my niche is working with people living with type 1 diabetes. I've lived with T1D for 30+ years, and share a compassion borne of lived experience. I work with people "in the gap.” Folks who are doing "fine" clinically, but get little support navigating daily life events. Diabetes inserts itself into every aspect of life. You don’t have to manage alone. Contact me here on Substack, or LinkedIn.

* Mindfulness is key to my work and writing. Find my talks and guided meditations on Insight Timer.

This now is no different than any other now. The place we find ourselves isn’t anyplace new, and the consequences of choices made will unfold in the places it always has—neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, small towns, big cities, every place we live, work, play.

Be kind and generous—throw your arm over someone’s shoulder and pull them close.

I write, produce and narrate these essays. I also write poetry. Contact me for projects and collaborations.

I am a life and executive coach, and a meditation teacher. My coaching niche is working with people with type 1 diabetes. I bring a compassion borne of lived experience to my work. Message me on Substack.

Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And the companion meditation here: Meditation: Releasing Irritation

The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again. ~Krishnamurti, spiritual teacher, author

Of course, Krishnamurti did not mean we should not know the names of birds, simply that the label is not the living being. We stop seeing the robin, the wren, the eagle, if we think knowing a label is knowing the bird. Or knowing anything.

It’s not.

I love words and their etymologies. I acknowledge the mystical quality of language especially the oral traditions of Indigenous cultures that relied on a communal transmission of history and culture. Colonizers understood that taking away someone’s language was akin to individual and cultural erasure.

If we lived in a society guided by the sacred, we might say that naming the bird brings us into right relationship with it. But we, the non-indigenous, do not have that relationship with our language. We worship facts, or what we perceive as such. We codify cognitive intelligence with degrees and certifications, and forget about the lively intelligence that has nothing to do with cognitive thinking.

Clouds, fish, elements, flowers, trees—life on this animate earth—are essentially nameless, and knowing them in their nameless state—experiencing them somatically through meditation—is what Krishnamurti, a teacher with a radical view of meditation, points to.

Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life, perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody. That is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy, if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So meditation can take place when you are sitting on a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face of your wife, husband or child. ~Krishnamurti, On Meditation

White people (and I am one) have a history of “discoveries” but we uncover what was always there for the knowing. What we learn are gifts given by a generous universe—something our Indigenous ancestors understood—not “discoveries” to be hoarded, exploited or both.

As a child I often thought, why don’t adults see that we live in Eden? Why don’t they take care of the trees and oceans and animals?

It used to depress the hell out of me to ask those questions, and it still can. Writing poems, essays and stories helps me write through to the other side of sadness. And what’s on the other side? Compassion.

…compassion comes only when you understand the meaning of sorrow, not only the sorrow of yourself, but of your neighbor, of all the mothers, of all the sisters, all the wives that have been killed, who are shedding tears, who have shed tears. When you understand what sorrow means and remain - to understand it one has to remain with it, look at it, not escape from it, not try to justify it, then out of that total negation of all escapes, then out of that comes passion, and with it compassion which is love. ~Krishnamurti, from “Meditation is the Whole of Life”

Maybe it’s the way of humanoid creatures to crash through boundaries to chase the new thing glittering before them rather than keep their eyes on the trackless stars above.

We are stardust, we are goldenWe are caught in the devil's bargainAnd we've got to get ourselvesback to the garden

from Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell

We are born in Love.

Children of God.

Stardust.

Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication. As a free subscriber you will receive everything except for 4 posts a year for paid subscribers only. To receive new posts and support my work, please become a free or paid subscriber. Welcome!

NOTE regarding AI use: I do not use it. AI is not used in any part of my writing process: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing the final essay. This is the work of one human doing her best to write essays and poetry for her readers on a bi-weekly schedule. We don’t need more content of poor and dubious quality, we need thoughtful, heart-centered human content. ps: I love the em dash and use it whenever it makes sense to me to use it.

The kernel of this essay is the still image from the 1950’s melodrama, All That Heaven Allows: an older woman looking at her reflection in a TV screen. I saw this Douglas Sirk movie for the first time decades ago and this particular image stuck with me. Apt for our times, and I thought I would write about screens and their deleterious effects, but happily the essay is not that dull!

It’s about a delicious morning without screens but it’s also about sons misunderstanding what their mothers really need, running away with the gardener; a cabin, a cat and a writing desk, and how understanding matters and how it absolutely doesn’t.

“If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.” ~Zen proverb

If you don’t want to commit to a subscription but found this post meaningful, you can drop a contribution here: buymeacoffee.com/valeriespan.

* I am passionate writer and poet on Substack. * A mindfulness teacher on Insight Timer offering guided meditations and talks. Download the app for access to an amazing array of free and premium content, including mine! *I’m a life & executive coach with a niche helping women navigate the consequences of leaving an abusive workplaces. Message me here or on LinkedIn to schedule a free initial meeting and learn more.

NOTE regarding AI use: I do not AI in any part of my writing process: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing the final essay. This is the work of one human doing her best to write essays and poetry on a somewhat regular schedule. We don’t need more content, we need heart-centered human content. Sometimes that takes longer.

It's about dealing with lingering Covid symptoms and what was, and is, truly healing.

Thank you for being such a constant listener of this podcast. Please like, rate and share so others can find me.

And if you celebrate the year’s end and beginning, I wish you many Blessings and all Good Things in 2026!

I am a passionate writer and poet, and a mindfulness teacher on Insight Timer. Download the app for access to an amazing array of free and premium content including mine: https://insighttimer.com/valeriespain

I’m a creativity coach. You can connect to your deepest and most expressive creative practices. Contact me to schedule a free initial meeting and learn more https://valeriespain.com/contact

And subscribe to my Substack Glorious Ordinary https://valeriespain.substack.com/

This is a replay of last year’s week-before-Christmas essay and updates.

My hope for you, dear listener, is to also find solace in the dark of the year. And together may we embrace the light of the New Year with whole and loving hearts, as Dylan Thomas did in A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night.

I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication. There are no paywalls. But if you enjoy what you read, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Also share with friends or colleagues, or heart or comment—those help a lot. To receive new posts subscribe at any level. Thank you!

Thank you for listening.

*I write essays and poetry, as well as guest posts. *I’m a mindfulness mentor, spiritual director and teacher on Insight Timer! *I’m a life and executive coach and help clients reclaim their attention and deepen their spiritual practices. Contact me to schedule a free initial meeting.

Anger is an incendiary power. I want to reclaim legitimate expressions of anger and not cede that power to the depraved and corrupt, not give it up to people who mistake chronic grievance and cruelty for a cleansing rage.

Presently it seems fine to be angry any time, any place, in any which way one wants, certainly on social media, but it’s increasingly OK in the real world too. People at the highest levels of government demonstrate this is so.

We’re normalizing the most vile kinds of name-calling, normalizing and celebrating physical brutality against unarmed civilians, and yet, it is still basically taboo for any woman of any race, creed, status or ethnicity to be visibly, audibly, demonstrably angry.

And yet, we are.

When I say I am not angry anymore ~Valerie Spain

I mean I absolutely am angry. I mean I will smash that face now bewildered by age, crush the skull and thrill at white hairs clinging to bone, swimming in blood. I mean it has been a long day of being happy and I have busted my ass to show up here— happy. When I say I am not angry anymore I mean I will have to tell you it took twenty years to get into therapy. Like how I had to stop doing everything myself—like every maid, matron and crone in my family who claimed she did it herself. And when I say I am not angry anymore I mean I love ruin and despair more than I should, and sometimes I am scarlet-tongued Kali slurping gore and sometimes the Virgin Mary staying the goddess’ hand while bleeding through blanket and sheets to the mattress. When I say I am not angry anymore I mean I am a hair-on-fire clown wielding a bloody axe in a schoolyard of screaming children. When I say I’m not angry anymore I mean I still swallow razor blades and hope someone notices. I mean I am not the tabby licking itself at the foot of your bed I am the steel muscled, open mouthed tigress ready to clamp her jaws on your neck and break it without regret. When I say I am not angry any more I mean I am the one who ate and ate and was never satisfied. I mean I am also a house cat and house cats look like tigers look like any big cat so beware. Do you think you are the only one who’s ever been abused? When I say I am not angry any more I mean I am a shorn novice kneeling naked on sharp stones, knotted lead-tipped discipline in hand still unsure unsure unsure of salvation.

Creative expression, whether poetry, music, painting, or dance—any or all of the arts—has the ability to transmute strong emotion in the crucible of the heart.

One of my very favorite poetic expressions of anger is from George Bernard Shaw’s great play, Saint Joan.

Joan was subject to six public examinations. She answered her inquisitors with incredible self-possession for a seventeen year old peasant girl, but their relentless questioning wore her down. They said the only way to avoid burning at the stake was to denounce her voices and confess. So at a point of great weariness, she signed a confession thinking she would be set free, but the reward for compliance was not freedom, but rather, a sentence to spend the rest of her life in a foul, dank English dungeon “eating the bread of sorrow and drinking the water of affliction.”

When she hears this, Joan grabs the confession, tears it up and says:

Yes, they told me you were fools, and that I was not to listen to your fine words nor trust to your charity. You promised me my life; but you lied. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. ... I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed, blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God. ~excerpt from Saint Joan, a play by George Bernard Shaw

We can only ever be who we are. The rest is misery.

Joan has the last say. Not words from a play, but her actual words taken from the transcript of her trial.

"Whatever I have said about my deeds and words in this trial, I let it stand and wish to reaffirm it. Even if I should see the fire lit, and the hangman ready to begin the burning, and even if I were in the pyre, I could not say anything different." ~Joan of Arc, 1431

NOTE: My poem, “When I say I am not angry anymore”, came from a writing prompt in Kathryn Petruccelli’s recent 8-week poetry workshop titled Naming Names. The prompt was based on Luisa Muradyan’s poem, “When I Say I Am Not the Speaker of My Poems.” I picked up on bits of simmering anger and ran off and wrote a poem about rage.

When I think about … how to recognize the animacy of the more-than-human world, the answer is simple enough: start close to home. Forget the quest towards the sublime mountaintop. Start with the earthworms in the backyard…. Pay attention to the place where our lives unfold. Where time, lots of it, is at least partially, a given. Here, right here, is where we begin to recognize the Earth as alive. ~Mary Rush, “Glacial Longings”

Every landscape is alive.

Attention eventually turns to breathing. Breath settles the body. And finally just breathing—just walking—just hearing wind and bird calls—just smelling the pines and the snow.

Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end? ~ Stanislaw Lem

Pausing, paying attention, being still, deep listening, whatever you call it, brings us to an awareness that’s always available.

This podcast includes a short guided meditation at the end.

Resource The Many Faces of Nonduality

Lucille Clifton’s poem, “blessing the boats, was the centerpiece of my wedding toast. It was especially apt since we had the ceremony on a ninety-foot schooner moored in the middle of Gloucester bay.

It’s tempting to belabor all the life metaphors the ocean provides but I wanted to avoid that, so when someone shared Clifton’s austere and profound poem, I knew I would offer that to my son and daughter-in-law instead.

Everything you want to say about love, ambiguity, and fear in thirteen lines. And, of course, it isn’t just about boats.

blessing the boats   (at St. Mary's) Lucille Clifton                                   may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back     may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that

The following poem, the one I end with, isn’t a companion poem exactly but it fits. It ambushed me in a workshop I took nine days after the wedding. Once a poem conveys all the hard things obliquely or in metaphor the mind may be baffled but the heart understands. Then there’s no need for explanation.

driving with my son six days after his wedding

you are in the passenger seat of your own car when your son says, I sometimes wonder in what world would you and dad talk to each other the road winds through a seacoast town a bay on your right the tide has receded you know how that mud sucks ravenous because once you were in it trying to lift your foot and step forward your answer is another question, Is that what you want? from space the atmosphere is a faint and fragile blue but under it’s aegis we breathe together from where you sit the sky hard blue and pure as an iceberg crashes through the windshield you catch your breath everyone still intact (September 2025)

Before we find ourselves reaching for food to alleviate distress, can we consider which foods truly nourish us so that when we turn to food for comfort, we choose dishes that are an expression of our beliefs, not an exception to them?

Nourishing ourselves is not about willpower. Doing go it alone. Do your best to create community when you aren't distressed. Who has your back? Who’s in your neighborhood, your life, your heart?

In lieu of a subscription, you can Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you! :)

This episode if from my Substack podcast, Glorious Ordinary. I’m a writer, poet and mindfulness meditator and teacher. Soon you’ll be able to find my talks and guided meditations on Insight Timer! I’m a life coach and spiritual director, and help clients reclaim their attention and deepen their spiritual practices. Schedule a free initial meeting HERE.

What else is there? Again, love. Love is always there. No matter whether we know it or not.

Sometimes we need something to disarm us. Once disarmed, we find love where we least expect it. We recognize it, even without an apology.

If you want to read or listen to more of my essays, check out my Substack, Glorious Ordinary https://valeriespain.substack.com/

I'm a writer, author, mindfulness mentor, spiritual director and certified life coach.

For my erasure poem, “Not An Apology," I used an email my ex-husband sent me after we attended our son’s graduation from nursing school. We had been divorced almost two decades by then.

The first paragraph is blah blah blah about how we worked together to be good parents, but the second caught me by surprise. It began as an apology. “I am sorry…” he wrote, and followed the phrase with an explicit list of abuses. On first reading, I only saw that sentence. Actually, for a long minute, I only saw “I am sorry…”

Within minutes of reading that one sentence, while crying, I replied and thanked him. It took a while to gather my wits and slowly read the entire paragraph—over and over.

It was not an apology.

*I write essays and poetry. My Substack is Glorious Ordinary. Please subscribe!

*I’m a mindfulness teacher with a long meditation practice. Soon you’ll be able to find my talks and guided meditations on Insight Timer!

*I’m an executive and life coach. My niche is helping women navigate or recover from abusive workplaces.

Growing up is hard. Otherwise everyone would do it. ~Kim Harrison, author

I’m the grandparent who dismantles the family room couch to make forts and other structures for my grandson who’s loved doing this since he was a toddler. Inside the fort I read to him with a flashlight and tell stories with hand shadows.

Forts are also structures to be endlessly jumped on, demolished and rebuilt. Or we leave it open on either end to make a tunnel that we crawl through, run around and crawl through again and again. And again. A game of tag that eventually brings me to my crawling, running, and jumping limit, despite, Faster, Nana, faster!

The other day I made a fort with the big rectangular cushions and a blanket expecting the usual but he gathered his animals, a flashlight, more blankets, a musical toy, and a book. We made it cozy inside, but as I crawled in to join the fun, he half turned in my direction and said,

“Nana, you’re too big. You have to go out.”

And truthfully I did take up a lot of space. As I shimmied backwards and out he said, “Now you have to close it.”

So I plugged up the opening I had just exited with a big square pillow. No way back.

The great pleasure of playing with my grandson is totally forgetting the constraints of the real world. I fly off of cliffs, picnic with sharks and cheetahs, splash on beaches in the basement, and build couch cushion forts that make us invisible to the world.

But this time was different.

I was kneeling on the other side of the wall, and he was inside talking to the animals (though I still provided the voices).

We have more room! said Puppy. Sharky started jumping around trying to bite the others (as usual) but Cheetah, ever the alpha, cried, Stop! and everyone asked my grandson to tell them a story.

They went to sleep. I rigged a metal flashlight so it wouldn’t fall on anyone’s head in case they needed light in the middle of the night (sometimes Puppy is afraid of the dark). They woke up clamoring to go to the beach. I laid down throw pillows that led from house to beach, and they sat on a towel in the shade of a rain umbrella duct taped to the mini basketball net.

My grandson invited me to play board games (probably because Puppy, Cheetah and Sharky are not very good at board games). Then they went home, slept, woke up and returned to the beach. Days passed… in other words, we did this routine at least half a dozen times.

I. Am. Nana. I oversee a universe of play, but even at that altitude, inner, four-and-a-half-year-old Valerie was kinda hurt. Why can’t I be inside too?

Because, I gently remind her. Now you’re big.

*I write essays, fiction and poetry. Contact me for freelance writing projects and collaborations, or to write a guest post. *I’m a life coach and mindfulness mentor. I help clients reclaim attention and deepen spiritual practices by expanding self-compassion and imagination. https://valeriespain.com/contact

Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy what you read, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Also share it with a friend or colleague, or heart or comment—those help a lot.To receive new posts and support my work become a free or paid subscriber.

So let me know. :)

Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist whose drawings and lithographs detailed the suffering of women and children during both world wars, was also a mother and a doctor’s wife. She discovered the woodcuts of Ernst Barlach some months before her youngest son, Peter, died in the early months of the First World War. The graphic power of Barlach’s prints inspired her to work in the medium.

Die Eltern (The Parents) is one in a series of extraordinary woodcuts showing the universal agony of loosing a child to war. Kollwitz developed a vital, muscular drawing style that expressed a righteous rage as well as boundless grief.

She distilled images to bare essentials—stripped them of specific references and details, in favor of depicting universal cycles of loss and mourning.

Kollwitz once mused that unlimited creative time was not as focused and productive as the precious minutes of art-making wedged between parenting and working in a wartime clinic with her doctor husband. As she grew older she mused,

The hands work and work, and the head imagines it is producing God knows what; and yet formerly, in my so wretchedly limited working time, I was more productive because I was more sensual; I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything. ~Käthe Kollwitz

When my sons were young, I was an illustrator and visual artist, and when I went into my studio during naps I had limited time to work, and constraint fueled an urgency to be productive in the time available. There was no time to play with every color, medium or support, so I worked with a limited palette, and that austerity was an unexpected blessing. When the sleeping child woke and creative time ended, I was satisfied, and surprised that I was.

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. ~Picasso

Strength in reserve seems absurd in a culture that demands we give the utmost and more in every arena of life. Work hard, play harder; parent better, and be your very best self always. But imagine a world where you work below your means and handle the things you choose to do with mastery, knowing there’s a reservoir of strength in reserve you can always draw from.

I’m a fan of restraint and minimalism. Of the spare and unadorned. But synonyms for austere—severe, harsh, unfeeling, stoney, steely, reserved, remote, aloof—show we don’t have a friendly regard for working with less, owning less, or giving less.

My love of the austere comes, I’m sure, from dour and flinty Scottish ancestors. I’ve also lived for years with the unfortunate flip side of seeing the world through a glass half empty, but when I’m not worrying and fearful, flailing around in lack, my heart is pierced by the grace of a teacup alone on a kitchen table.

Kollwitz and Picasso admired economy of means. Both distilled images to their essence. Both were highly skilled at using the most basic artistic implements: charcoal and crayon.

Picasso was wildly prolific, yet seemed to constantly practice reducing images to their essence, and endless iterations in almost every artistic form—paint, ceramics, prints and collage—blossomed from that mastery of simplicity.

I remember walking into an museum gallery filled with masterful drawings and prints but a small ink drawing on the far wall caught my eye. Picasso. Five effortless lines of a bird caught for a moment mid-flight.

You can be creative only when there is abandonment-which means, really, there is no sense of compulsion, no fear of not being, of not gaining, of not arriving. Then there is great austerity, simplicity, and with it there is love. ~Krishnamurti

Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication. Please heart posts you like, or share them on Notes, refer to them on Instagram, or wherever you hang out online. It makes a difference! To receive new posts and support my work, please become a free or paid subscriber.

NOTE: I write from the perspective of a white cisgender woman—I have a safe, stable place to live and a car. I have type 1 diabetes but am otherwise healthy. (At the moment) I have reliable healthcare. I am always supported and loved by family and friends.

What I actually need is fairly simple, and the simplicity rests on knowing what’s enough and when I'm satisfied.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

* A review of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

* A Buddhist story about relationship as the center of a good life

* A meditation on what we’re relating to

Thank you for listening. You can find this podcast on Apple podcasts. Please like, review and share. It really makes a difference. I’m also active on LinkedIn.

I’m a writer, an executive coach, a creativity coach, and a mindfulness teacher with a 30+ year meditation practice. Contact me to discuss writing projects, coaching, teaching and speaking.

Be well!

Resources

Maslow’s Expanded Hierarchy of Needs

Koan - A seemingly paradoxical or enigmatic statement, question, or story used as a tool for meditation and contemplation in Chan and Zen Buddhism. Repeated contemplation of a koan pushes the meditator past the limitations of conceptual mind to a direct, complete experience of reality. Among the best-known are: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “Does a dog have buddha nature?”

Dhammapada - The best known text in the sacred scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. Its popularity has raised it to the ranks of a world religious classic. It is a collection of the Buddha's teaching with all the essential principles.

Pausing is radical because you stop.

Listen and discover how to be radical.

Valerie is a passionate writer of the bi-weekly newsletter, Glorious Ordinary, and the sole producer of this podcast (ChtGPT did help her write the show notes but only the show notes!) She’s a leadership coach and mindfulness teacher, and helps clients develop the attention and self-awareness needed to navigate challenges in life and work. She draws on a successful career as an entrepreneur and nonprofit leader, as well as from lived experiences that include recovering from an eating disorder, surviving intimate partner violence, and flourishing with type 1 diabetes. To explore working with Valerie, message her through her website.

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How are people I know well, or not so well, affected? How are the people they know affected?

Everything feels very different.

It is and it isn't.

**I’m a mindfulness teacher and coach, helping clients focus attention on what’s truly important. To work with me, message me on Substack, LinkedIn or through my website.

**I’m an essay writer and poet. Contact me for contributions and collaborations.

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I’ll read the full poem at the end of the episode, but for the last ten days, all I had was that line, and I kept repeating it,

People have done this before, but not us.

**I’m a mindfulness teacher and coach, helping clients focus attention on what’s truly important. To work with me, message me on Substack, LinkedIn or through my website.

**I’m an essay writer and poet. Contact me for contributions and collaborations.

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Can we even imagine that?

Where we put our attention matters-

I’ve long wanted to start a podcast and can’t wait to share quality audio content with my subscribers.