During this conversation we will focus on being present and identifying ways to stay grounded while planting seeds for what's to come.
Hey, Monday. I lied. It's Wednesday. Happy Wednesday. Happy hump day. Gina Jill's coming in here saying hello, hello. Gonna sit here for just a few moments. I'm actually gonna do something. Speak wonder. This is for you. I was recently visiting a friend of mine who's a painter and I got to be at their studio and found this book sitting on his table. This art studio is big and it's amazing. It said 100 poems from the Japanese and when I asked him about it he told me that it was one of his favorite books.
Now my painter friend is 80 years old, still painting and very passionate about painting. And I wanted to just share just like a passage from this incredible book. Here's today's. In all the world, there is no way whatever the stag cries even in the most remote mountain. So I just find poetry fascinating. I find sitting with a book that someone put together as a compilation of these different combinations of words. I'll do one more and then I'll dive in for today's conversation. This one, In the sea of ivy cloth Awami, near the Cape of Kara, the deep sea mural weed, Grows on the sunken reefs, the jeweled sea tangle, grows on the rocky foreshore, swaying like the jeweled sea tangle.
My girl would lie with me, my girl whom I love with a love, deep as the mirror growing ocean. Beautiful, right? Sometimes poetry can be very fascinating. You may not always understand what it is and different poets write in different ways. But I am always just fascinated to see what the art holds within. So I'm going to be popping in here on Wednesdays. So now Mondays and Wednesdays, Fridays coming soon. But today's conversation, I wanted to just talk about life lately. What does that even mean?
Life Lately. I see people posting on their Instagram stories and they just use the words life lately in the comment and I'm always curious so every time I see it I scroll through all the different photos. And most people, not all, hello Mel Meyers, welcome, nice to have you here. Thank you for joining Life Lately, a conversation about Just being in the moment. As we kick started today, I read a few poems from a new poetry book that I've acquired. So if you want to go back to hear those, feel free.
But diving in today in the conversation around life lately, I don't know about you, but when I go through Instagram on those moments where I just do some little scrolling, I'll see sometimes the little posts that have a whole bunch of different photos and the tagline just says life lately or March or April. And it's a photo dump of what's been going on. And most of the time, not all of the time, but most of the time as I scroll through these photos, you see laughter, you see joy, you see photos of experiences or people out and about Happy.
And I always pause a little bit, especially when I know some of the people like personally who did those posts, because I know in that moment, in those moments leading into those photos, that not every moment was happy. Some moments are just real right now. We might not take a selfie when we're feeling like. out of sorts in a given day or maybe if we did take a selfie, we would be taking a photo of something maybe that inspired us on a walk. Or if it's me, I'll take screenshots of quotes that somehow magically appeared in my feed that somehow I magically needed to hear that day.
And I take a lot of screenshots of those, or on those given days, I'll repost them. So when I think about life lately and our ability to share what that is, it's not always easy to talk about all the hard things, right? Now today is a day that it's beautiful outside, but maybe inside you're not feeling the same beauty. So for me, life lately and starting this series of conversations is really about what's happening in the moment, about being truly authentically present. It doesn't matter if it's up on social media or not.
That's just kind of what got me thinking about all of this, of how might we have more real conversations about what really is going on right now. I was listening to or I watched a movie recently and I'm going to get it wrong. So I'm going to say this out loud. I'm going to get it wrong. But they had this phrase in the line that the actor said. And it struck me enough that I grabbed a piece of paper, I wrote it down, and it's posted actually out in my kitchen right now. But the phrase was about allowing time to move with me instead of through me.
So think about that. What does it mean to allow time to move with you and not just through you? So if you're in the chat and you have any reactions to that phrasing, I would love to hear what you think about that. So for me, as part of the conversation, it really made me stop to think. In this moment, if time is moving with me, that means I'm present. It means I am acknowledging the things that I see around me. So on my standing desk, I have this coaster made out of crystals. And I have a lot of crystals on all of my desks.
I'm a woo woo girl. Here are a couple of my favorites. And when I'm in time, in the moment, I see things like this and I pick them up and I look at them and I see that maybe there's some rainbows in here or the cool angles. Oh, there's a little rainbow. Did you see it? Or the clarity that I find. And it gives me a moment to pause and to recognize something beautiful that's around me. Even on the day that I'm having the worst day, I have probably just over a dozen different crystals sitting on my table right here.
And on any given day I might look at them slightly different or might need something different, but today this is the one that sticks out to me. And the reason why is because I'm fascinated with what's hidden. So it's crazy for me to think about life lately in the form of a crystal. But in this particular crystal, there are different shadows and when I turn it and look at it different ways, sometimes I'll see what's inside and sometimes it just disappears like it's a little mystical. But why is that important for right now, this moment?
Because when I think about a crystal, any rock, any stone that you might see in a crystal store at a gem show or something like that, maybe something someone gave you as a gift. What's fascinating about this is for this beautiful crystal, this is a clear quartz, to have formed, it took thousands of years. And then it took the effort of people to dig and then to clean and to polish. And for this particular quartz crystal, there were stone cutters that had a vision for how meticulously they wanted to cut this individual piece so that it could show the beauty within.
So when I think about time moving through me, it's like time moving through this crystal. Thousands of years it took for it to form underneath the earth. the pressure of the earth that sits above it and around it. That's patience. That to me is time moving with the crystal. Crystal had nowhere to go and eventually got here, right? Now I'm using that as an analogy, but when we're thinking about life right now, there could be all kinds of things happening. We could be in a city with protests. We could be, I live in Minneapolis.
We could be celebrating the birthday of someone who's passed. We could be actively digging into our work, maybe loving it, maybe questioning why we're doing what we're doing. So at any given moment when we actually live in that time, in that space, a few things can happen. We can check in with our body to see how it feels. How does our breath feel as it moves through us? If we're out at a meal, are we actually tasting the food? Or are we just inhaling because we have the next thing to get to? So for me, these life lately check-ins are really going to be moments in time for us to explore how might we be more present.
We'll do that with breath. We can do that through ideas, conversations. But today I just wanted to start the conversation by saying hello. If we haven't met, my name is Jean. I wear a lot of hats. I'm a coach. I'm a consultant. I co-own an indoor cycling studio. I run. I like to run and bike. I work a lot with crystals and I'm a Reiki master and energy healer. So for me, I can find that balance or I try to find that balance between all my overthinking with my corporate world and the pausing and feeling with my energy self.
And my goal is to always see the whole human. So life lately is going to be about us just being present, identifying ways in which we can experience things more holistically and being really honest. Where are we at in this very moment? Because when we can name it, we can recognize it, maybe sometimes it's all we need to be able to move through it. So keep it a little simple and short today, but I'm going to send you off with this one invitation. At some point today, my invitation to you, ditch the technology, ditch the headphones, and simply sit or go for a walk.
Five minutes, doesn't even have to be long. And during that five minute period of time, observe your breath. How does it move with you? Listen to the sounds around you. And just look around, be present and see what it feels like in your body to simply breathe and allow time to be just time. Nowhere to go. Nothing we're chasing, nothing we're running from, but just strictly being in that moment. And if you do that, feel free to come back to this and post in the comments how that felt for you. This will be posted up shortly and I'm excited to hear what you come up with.
So on this beautiful Wednesday, wherever you're at, Life in this moment, what is it for you? Enjoy the rest of your day. Take a breath and we'll see you soon.
