Magic Pencil Meditation: How This One Simple Trick Helped Me Erase Negative Thoughts for Good

Lately the leaves in the breeze are not at ease.

I've been worried in the woods.  

Every thought a demon uttering falsehoods.

Can't stop battling beasts of burdens I didn't even want to know.  

A tiny acorn cannot grow 

in the shade of an old dead tree.  

Just as dwelling on the past won't set your mind free.

When dealing with intrusive thoughts that so often accompany anxiety and depression, it can be hard to re-direct your focus.  No matter how hard we scream at our brains to shut up, or to stop thinking about something, it seems to be in an endless loop, a highlight reel of our worst nightmares, fears & insecurities.  Luckily, it doesn't have to be that way.  Take back the power to re-write your own destiny with a simple pencil charm!  Here's how:

Step 1: Pencil it In!
Carry a pencil in your pocket.  Whenever intrusive thoughts spring up, take a deep breath and place the eraser on your forehead.  Rub the eraser on your head and count to four forest breaths.  Clear your mind.  This trick is a physical distraction that will take away the thoughts.

Step 2: Erase and Replace!

Take the trick one step further with a small notebook, piece of paper or even a leaf.  Write down an opposite thought to the stressful one.  Next time you need to erase a thought, you can distract yourself further in the forest by re-reading all the mantras you've written, and re-write the script for a better future!

Words of Wisdom: Treeherd's Lament

Last week I Jesse dumpster-dived me a tiny book called 'A Tolkien Treasury'.  As I've always been a fan of Tolkien, I was excited to read the Tolkien-inspired poems, recipes, and essays by a community of writers.  I opened it to this poem by Ruth Berman and enjoyed it enough to share it with the friends of the forest!

Yes There Are Two Paths in The Forest, But In The Long Run, There's Still Time To Change The Road You're On

These days I wander round the woods, contemplating my direction in the Forest.  As I sit under the trees, feeling the breeze, eating leaves, mushrooms and chocolate.  Why did I resist the call of the wild so long?  I have realized that the only things that really matter are peace, love and joy.  

  I never started this blog to make money.  I started it to save the forest.  But how can fashion save the forest?  I prefer to make my own clothes, and tend to wear the same brown and green garments every day, washing them in my barrel and hanging them to dry when needed.  The "lifestyle blog" format of daily outfits, friday favorites, and shopping hauls is not saving our planet.  The business model of selling advertising on your blog, sponsored posts...that was never my vision of the Forest.  Instead I saw a social network of forest friends, sharing how we can all go greener, crafting and cooking and making art.  So what happened?

My life changed in the blink of an eye.  I went from a working girl to a hobbit housewife.  Suddenly, I felt pressure not only to run a business; I was now responsible for the cooking, cleaning, and crafting of a whole household.  I would wake up and yell at everyone for making the house such a wreck when I had just spent hours cleaning it the day before.  I needed a picture-perfect home, something that would look good in blog photos.  My home never met my expectations, because I held them to other's standards.  After spending the morning cleaning I would frantically try to squeeze in a blog post, any blog post.  I felt like I needed to post daily, and found myself shoving crap content onto my "storyblog", as I once called it...

These days I take it easier.  (I know what you're thinking, "How much easier does she need to take it"?)  I believe we were not put on this earth to feel stress 99 % of the time.  I believe we are meant to live, love, and learn. My new goal is to create a work of art every day.  It could be something as small as a poem or a gourmet dinner.  If I blog about it, great, but I'm giving myself permission to just live.  To write plays, novels, and songs.  To lead my own life.

I feel like I'm at the crossroads in the forest trails, like I'm in the middle of a particularly good chapter of life.  Within three years, big changes will be taking place.  I need to stop and smell the rosemary once in a while.  Sit under a shady tree with a big book of Yeats, feeling the sun shining and playing with my cats and lying in the sun with my love.  I don't have time to cut the grass.  Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow...

Words of Wisdom: Voice of the Trees

The voices of the trees whispered through the leaves

Your life is a speck of dust in the breeze

Listen to us, pay heed to us trees

For you are a human, and one so young

And your song is a good one, though it has not yet been sung

For we have lived long lives of oak and decay

And you, who dance in the sun, must live for today

Words of Wisdom: Kerouac Quotes

"Grass will grow and the gods die fast, and everything is true."

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a copy of Jack Kerouac's journals, Windblown World, whilst dumpster diving!  The other evening I had a chance to read it into the late hours of the night, sipping wine and devouring it's pages.  What I didn't expect was philosophical forest analogies,a veritable woodland of words!
This manuscript reminded me of how much I used to love writing, crafting complex sentences and paragraphs.  I haven't written in a while, and I want to focus more on one of my favorite creative expressions again.  Perhaps, like Kerouac, I will start keeping a daily diary again...

"All of a sudden, the forest looms around in the night.  Great simple art is always suddenly inexplicable and forever understood; it looms like the forest"

The forest is the art of nature herself, the tall trees and picturesque scenes bring a looming sense of calm...

"Cool, cool day, I'm grateful for these swell workdays,  and nice and gray too.  Gray workdays are my Thurinigian Forest, my Wiemar, and Jinny is my Italy, you see.  I travel back and forth in my coach-and-four over the Alps of conflict..."

Like Kerouac, I prefer gray, cloudy, rainy days.  I feel much more inspired on a gray day.  The Thurinigian Forest is a huge forest in Germany that has inspired countless artists, including me!  Traveling over the alps of conflict, being "lost in the forest', these things are very true for a struggling artist...

"As for me, the basis of my life is going to be a farm somewhere where I'll grow some of my food, and if need be, all of it.  Someday I won't do nothing by sit under a tree while my crops are growing (after the proper labor, of course) - and drink home-made wine, and write novels to edify my soul, and play with my kids, and relax, and enjoy life, and goof off, and thumb my nose at the coughing wretches."

I know exactly how Jack feels in this passage.  This is how life should be for everyone, but somehow along the way things got so twisted that a person can't just build a home and farm the land.  We are taught we have to work hard our whole lives and save money to afford even a small plot of land to farm on.  He never did get that farm, and sometimes I feel like I never will either...

Words of Wisdom: When Trees Fall...

Time for words of wisdom wednesday!  I had a great craft tutorial lined up for today, however, plans fell through when the technique didn't turn out so well.  I need to fix it up by tomorrow.  It's easy to feel like a forest failure at times like these.  That's why I try to remind myself that the forest is a wild, natural place that has it's own cycle.  When a tree falls in the forest, just let it fall...

Words of Wisdom: Be a Woodworkaholic

Here's an idea: be a woodworkaholic.  Do all the things you "wood" do if you had the time...You'll be surprised how much you can accomplish when you put your mind to it!

Words of Wisdom: The Early Bird...

Well, friends of the forest you know the old saying.  "The early bird gets the worm."  It's Monday morning again, and let's all try to get out there early and get lots of stuff done today!