Getting clear on what I want.
What brings me joy?
In The Secret, author Rhonda Byrne suggests that in order to receive what we want, we need to get clear on what it is that we want. We want a life of Joy. What brings us Joy is what we want. A quick look at the bookshelves in my home office answers that question quite easily. The books are arranged by category;
- Travel
When I was a kid we would go on annual family vacations, usually to Myrtle Beach, SC, but it didn’t matter if we were going to Charleston, WV to Hawk’s Nest or Mount Olive, KY to get gravel, I loved going somewhere. When I was nine my family went to Florida, to Disney World. When I was 12 I went with the Talented and Gifted program to Boston. In high school, band trips to Atlanta, Williamsburg, and Gatlinburg kept my interest piqued. Other kids were always happy to get home, but I wanted to see more of the world, much more of it. After graduation I went back to Florida for three weeks. The following year I took a train to San Francisco from Huntington, WV, alone. Though at 19 I was not quite an “adult,” solo travel was fantastic! That fall there was another trip to San Francisco, a third the following spring. As I met people and became friends with them, my desire to make more friends and visit more places grew. On the third trip to San Francisco I met Christoph. That summer I was on a plane to Germany to visit him. I spent 28 days backpacking across the continent. I returned to Europe 4 more times over the following few years. I made as many trips to California, including Los Angeles in my adventures. At 26 I went to Israel on my Birthright trip. It rounded out my travel to 26 states, including Hawai`i, 10 countries, on 3 continents. Other than a couple trips back to WV to visit family and two trips to Cincinnati to visit friends, I have traveled very little over the past 5 years.
TRAVEL BRINGS ME JOY! I WANT TO TRAVEL!
- Food
As a kid I loved helping mom in the kitchen. I loved learning from my great grandmother how to make chicken and dumplings, watching my grandfather fry chicken, and being part of every Sunday dinner at Granny’s. All West Virginians love food. In high school I started my own hope chest of kitchen wares. I would get things like a stand mixer and flatware for gifts. I would unwrap them, express gratitude, box them back up and store them in the attic until that time I moved out and needed to supply a kitchen. I also loved to go out to eat, trying new foods, savoring the favorites. When I was at Marshall University I got a job at the Huntington Museum of Art’s Café Bauhaus waiting tables. Soon thereafter I became the Café Bauhaus Coordinator. I did all the menu planning and cooking, shopping and financing. I made decided to go to culinary school. Eight years later I went to the Midwest Culinary Institute and graduated Magna Cum Laude. We moved to Florida and one thing that we regretted about leaving Cincinnati was the fantastic culinary scene. We wished that we had spent more money eating out while we were there. I cook regularly, and every meal I produce is delicious and appreciated. We go out to eat about once a week, but over the past 5 years we find ourselves eating at the same places.
FOOD BRINGS ME JOY! I WANT TO EXPERIENCE MORE FOOD!
- Language
My mother wanted to be a French translator when she was younger. She learned the French that one could learn in Wayne County in the early 1970’s. Even though she was dissuaded from that career path before entering college, she did teach me and my sister the French she knew. In elementary school I carried a pocket English dictionary with me always. When I didn’t know a word, I looked it up. When I was bored, I would read random pages of definitions. When I started high school, I couldn’t wait to take more French classes. I took French all four years in high school. I received an award for Oral Proficiency in French as a senior. I also fell in love with a little red German-English dictionary I found on my parents’ bookshelves. My friend Tanya, whose mother was German, and I practiced our German while Crystal kept me up to speed by writing me letters in French. She loved other languages too and tried to teach me the Phoenician and Sioux words that she knew. At Marshall I had two more years of French classes. By the end of my formal education I could watch French movies without subtitles and read Voltaire. Traveling introduced me to more languages. I had long held a love for Italian Opera (see below) so learning Italian was a must. At that point in my life I was studying Art History at Marshall (see below) and I fell in love with Florence, Italy. I had planned to spend four days in Italy my first trip, but it turned into nearly two weeks. Converting to Judaism in my early 20’s (again, see below) meant that I had yet another language to learn, Hebrew. A half a dozen languages are spoken in my place of employment every day still.
LANGUAGES BRING ME JOY! I WANT TO SPEAK MORE LANGUAGES!
- Writing
My grandmother is an expert storyteller. Whether the story was of a life experience or a fairy tale of princes and castles, my grandmother could tell you a story and keep you captivated. I hated the act of writing as a kid, but loved story. In middle school I had a writing teacher that encouraged me to hone my writing and story-telling skills. She told me that I was especially good and narrative and that I should do something with that skill. Every assignment was twice the required length and more in depth and thorough than any other student’s. I overcame my hatred of the act of physically writing by writing continuously in high school. I churned out pages of notebooks a day in journal writing. Over four years I hand wrote nearly a thousand pages of journal. In college I turned my journal writing into a creative work, a novel. Chapters of novel came pouring now from my finger tips as I had finally mastered the keyboard. Friends said that my fingers would twitch in my sleep as I continued to write in my dreams. I wrote several papers in a creative writing class in culinary school. Last year I took up the mantle of helping my grandmother turn the stories that she told us as kids into a children’s book. I started a blog page to share my thoughts and feelings on the world.
WRITING BRINGS ME JOY! I WANT TO WRITE MORE!
- Art and Architecture
In elementary school my mother confessed that she was worried about me because I couldn’t color inside the lines in coloring books. By middle school my artistic abilities had increased. I was even asked to be in the middle school’s “Advanced Art” class. I didn’t take high school art classes, instead I took Mechanical Drawing and AutoCAD classes at the vocational school and a community oil painting class on Tuesday evenings in Huntington. Architecture and Architectural Drawing was amazing. I was the best student Mrs. Evans had had in years and she wrote me glowing letters of recommendation. I bought a drafting table for my home and one weekend after an especially vivid dream, I drew full elevation blueprints for my “dream home.” Tuesday evenings I produced quality student works that I gave as gifts and have kept and cherished. At Marshall I studied Fine Arts. I took every studio class I could get into, drawing, painting, sculpture, and weaving. Trips to museums were always a highlight of any vacation and how many weekends in Cincinnati were spent. No trip home to WV is ever complete without a trip to The Huntington Museum of Art. Over the last 5 years I have gone from painting landscapes to painting kitchens, bedrooms, and porches, but even that gives me joy. I have crocheted a dozen blankets, and have done some sewing. I love adult coloring books, too.
I LOVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE! I WANT TO PRODUCE AND EXPERIENCE MORE ART!
- Photography
When I was ten years old my Granny gave me my first camera. It took 110 film cartridges, which I went through like mad. I took pictures of anything that would hold still. I later upgraded to a 35 mm film camera. My family was sort of nuts about still photography. Full bookshelves of picture albums were to be found in my home and in my grandparents’ homes. Pop always had his ’76 Minolta SLR camera close at hand, my Dad had the next year’s model. At the Huntington Museum of Art I took beginner and advanced photography classes. I loved working in the dark room developing my pictures and as an employee there was given free access. When I traveled (see above) I carried the two Minolta SLR cameras, now mine, with me, one loaded with color film, one with black and white. I saw beautiful composition everywhere and wanted to capture it. In the years leading up to our move to FL I took all of those thousands of pictures that I had taken in my lifetime and scanned them and organized them in folders on my computer by date and location. The hard copies I put in physical albums that now line my shelves. I swore I would never go digital, but film has become scarce and dark room access even more so. The last few years my phone has been my camera, always on me and always ready to take color, black and white, sepia, or video. I upload my pictures onto my hard drive and organize them using the same nomenclature I set up years ago. As the main folder is entitled, it is truly “My Life In Pictures.”
I LOVE PHOTOGRAPHY! I WANT TO TAKE AND SHARE MORE PICTURES!
- Music and Theatre
Everyone loves music, but not everyone loves as much music or music as much as I do. I grew up listening to the music my parents listened to, the same as all children, but early on my introduction to, and love of, other styles of music began to grow. Not only was the record collection of my parents available to me, but that of my grandparents as well. I had a radio of my own for as long as far back as I can remember. I would scan up and down the dials, listen a while, move on. I found that I loved the oldies, big band, country, and classical. I liked some contemporary music as well. West Virginia Public Radio introduced me to classical music. One year, when I was about 10, before a trip to Myrtle Beach mom gave me a two cassette set of Mozart. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. One night on PBS there was a broadcast of La Boheme. I watched it in my bedroom. Despite being unable to read the subtitles, I was spellbound. Public radio also introduced me to “New Age Music” and international music. In middle school and high school I was in band and later took piano lessons, and learned to read music as if it were just another language. High school was my age of musicals. As a child I loved South Pacific and The King and I, now as a senior in high school, it was all about Rent and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Phantom of the Opera. We didn’t have a drama class in high school. Our school didn’t even have an auditorium or a stage! My friends and I would sit around the lunch table and read aloud plays. I remember an especially dramatic lunch reading of Salome! Many of the friends I made my senior year of high school were in the drama class at Huntington High School and I saw them all again at Marshall. Everyone had to take an “appreciation” class their freshman year at Marshall. I got my dean to allow me to take the introductory theatre class instead of an appreciation class so I could actually learn more about the stage and life upon it. I learned the basics of Acting as well as Set and Costume Design, and Lighting. I love reading plays. I love going to plays. Whenever possible, vacations have always included a trip to the opera and a performance of a play. As a child I loved going to church and singing. Years before I converted to Judaism I started attending services at the synagogue. I began singing with the choir. Liturgical music is very moving. I feel a connection to the divine that goes beyond the words of the music. To keep services consistent over centuries much of the music is ancient and the chant puts one in the place of the original recitors. In order to keep the services fresh and new, congregations are always learning new tunes. I don’t know if I make a pleasing one but I know that I make a joyful noise. I love reading music scores. Music plays around me continuously. Spotify is an amazing friend to have and I recently completed the life-long goal of being able to listen to the same music in my entire home.
I LOVE MUSIC! I WANT MORE MUSIC IN MY LIFE!
- Gardening and Nature
Working the land has been something that has passed down from ancient ancestry and still burns strong in me. As a child my family grew a garden, roughly a half an acre of tilled land. We grew corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, etc. We ate what we grew, canned and froze what we couldn’t eat. It was work, nearly every day, all summer long, often backbreaking labor, but the rewards of it cannot be measured. To sit down to a meal that you produced yourself from the dirt is gratification that cannot come from any other meal. Always at the edges of the garden we grew flowers, to attract pollinators, to detract deer and other pests, and to add to the beauty of the garden. Watching a handful of seeds, that I myself collected the year before, turn into flowers delighted me as it had the generations before me. In high school I cordoned off a section of our back yard and turned it into a flower garden. Growing that garden, tending it, weeding it, loving it gave me a peace during a very difficult period in my young life that I have never been able to yet replace. During the summer months, my entire day was spent in the garden. I worked and weeded it, ate my meals in it, read, napped, lived in that space. When we moved, I took the flower bulbs, that had been passed to me from my great grandmother, with me and planted them elsewhere where they could grow and bloom for another generation of admirer. When I moved into an apartment I kept a porch full of plants. When we bought a house, the first season we lived there a planted a vegetable garden and spent the following 4 years tending to the flowerbeds. Now I grow pineapples on my porch and every year when the red geraniums are available I plant them in my Granny’s flower pots on the porch.
Growing up in the mountains of West Virginia, nature is your closest friend. It is everywhere and all around you and inescapable. Walking the trails was something I did with my father and grandfathers from the time I could walk. An appreciation of the earth and it’s natural way came very early. By high school I had begun to gain appreciation for the billions of years of geology than had made my coal filled mountains, the evolution of the plants and animals that lived on them, and the original humans, some of whom were my ancestors, that called them home. The wildflower collection project in my senior biology class really focused my attention on the flora that surrounded me. Any chance I could get to get to “the woods,” I took, and still take. When I met my husband we took many vacations to state parks, with trails, peaceful lakes, quiet nature. In Cincinnati there were many hundreds of acres of wooded parks to explore just minutes from the house. Florida has a different kind of nature, but we still love going to the Fern Forest, the Everglades, or the beach and walking the trails.
I LOVE GARDENING AND NATURE! I WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME IN NATURE AND GROWING THINGS!
- Literature
I was slow to learn to read. My mother noticed early on that I was better at remembering what a page said and reciting it at will than I was at actually reading the words on the page. Despite rarely seeing my mother without a book in her hand, I just never got into it as a child. In middle school I had no choice. I was assigned the task of reading a novel, any novel, and writing my first book report. I read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. I quickly jumped from being a 12 year old, reading a book written for a 12 year old, to a 12 year old, reading books at a 12th grade level; Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere, and any other Michael Crichton book I could get my hands on. By the time I was in high school I had progressed to classic literature. On the long bus ride from home, to high school, to vocational school, and back every day I read Jane Eyre, which, to this day is my favorite novel. I love being told a story page after page. Science fiction and 19th century English novels are my favorites. Perhaps a throwback to my mother’s love of Nancy Drew, I also love mystery novels, though I think any book of any genre has to contain a certain level of mystery to be of any quality. In the fast-paced world I have found myself in at this point in life, I often consume literature in the form of Audio Book. I can do just about any other activity while listening to an audio book except read or write. That is multitasking at its best. In the past five years I have “read” over 60 audio books, including the entire 20 book Dune series, TWICE! I’ve also recently fallen in love with the book Mrs. Dalloway. Storytelling and storylistening are one of the greatest expressions of self possible. You become the characters, you see what they see, feel how they would feel. There is no greater empathy building exercise than reading.
I LOVE LITERATURE! I WANT TO READ MORE BOOKS!
- Spirituality
My parents were not very religious at all. Going to Sunday School and church was never part of their plan for us kids. My Great Aunt talked mom into letting us go to church with her and her family. My mother had read us the stories of the Bible, but with equal sincerity had read us Greek and Roman Mythology, and I held both with equal viability. I was, however, swept up in the passion of the Baptists. They held passionate beliefs about Jesus, and G-d. They preached passionately, they spoke passionately, they sang passionately, they believed passionately. I found that even as a little kid I couldn’t always reconcile the inconsistencies between what was said at the church and what was known by science to be true, but they spoke with such conviction I knew that if I studied hard enough and learned all the scriptures as they had done then I would see how both Truths could be true. I went to Sunday School, Sunday Church Services, Sunday Evening Services sometimes, Wednesday Awanas Bible Study, Wednesday Evening Church Services, and Vacation Bible School. It appeared that I was a very religious child until the question of being baptized came up. I refused. I had still not found the missing link of reconciliation and had instead found more and more and more inconsistencies. By 10 years old I was already having a crisis of faith. When I started 5th grade I noticed that my teacher gave preferential treatment to the kids that were also in her Sunday School class. I boldly changed churches from the Baptist doctrine to the Methodist doctrine. A few things became apparent right off the bat; 1. Methodists were not nearly as passionate about their religion as Baptists, 2. Their god wasn’t as passionate about following rules, 3. Both doctrines taught a love of their version of god, but Baptists also taught fear, fear of their god’s wrath, fear of the devil’s tricks, fear of death before being Baptized, and 4. I, too, was given preferential treatment in my elementary school class. I found the first three lessons fascinating. How could, what was supposed to be the same religion, Christianity, be so vastly different? I had assumed that all churches said the same prayers, sang the same songs, worshiped the same god. This was amazing! Maybe the Methodists had the answers I couldn’t find. They didn’t. The Baptists didn’t have the answers because it wasn’t allowed to ask the questions. The Methodists didn’t have the answers because they just disregarded the inconsistencies. Then the fourth lesson really took over. I had learned the political nature of religion. It didn’t matter what you really believed, or how you worshiped, just so long as you agreed with and followed the people in control. This was disgusting to me. Within a year I had stopped going to church completely and was studying the most feared opposite of both churches, Wicca. Wicca did a fine job of explaining the inconsistencies, they just had a deity for every natural, scientific, occurrence. All of these gods and goddesses and rituals and all of the equipment needed to practice this religion soon made it too cumbersome and I dropped it. At this point in life I wondered godlessly for a few years until an event my freshman year of high school forced me into questioning my thoughts, feelings, and sexuality, and by proxy, what I believed in religiously. At the same time, I was given a copy of The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. I had finally found the link between the science I knew to be true and the religious philosophies that I had been taught and continued to study. Over the following four years my spirituality increased, though I had no religious practice or doctrine. When I was working at The Huntington Museum of Art’s Café Bauhaus, I was in constant contact with the Jewish population of Huntington. Joyce Levy invited me to the bar mitzvah of her grandson. I went. I felt more at home in the synagogue on the first visit than I had felt at church after 7 years. There is a great line in the Siddur, or prayer book, that says, “I am a Jew because it requires no abdication of mind.” This was a fabulous concept to me. In my Baptist upbringing questioning what you were told was blasphemous, the Methodists used their religion only to make them feel better in times of need (and really what better use of religion is there?) but never even bothered to question. Jews were allowed to question, forced into it in fact. It wasn’t just man’s right to question G-d, it was his job. How can you know what you believe if you do not question it? All the answers were there in the Torah, the Mishnah, and the commentaries, and all the answers were interpretable, and re-interpretable, generation after generation, in order to make sense to the person reading in the time that they were living. There was no “abdication of mind,” no disconnect from reality. The Jews knew the value and purpose of parable, where its Truth was. There were, as my husband calls them, “Unicorn and Fairy Stories,” many of the same ones that I had learned in my early Christian upbringing, but the practitioners knew that the universe was billions of years old and no one believed in a literal zooboat. They understood what I had spent years learning; 1. Knowledge is what you know to be True, for which you have clear empirical data 2. Faith is what you believe to be True, for which there is no clear empirical data, 3. Religion is a set of rites, rituals, and daily practices used to keep Faith in the things that you have no proof of. A person can know without faith or religion. A person can know and have faith without religion, but faith falters easily without ritual. Judaism is overflowing with ritual. There are rituals regarding everything from waking up to going to bed and every action and bodily function in between. The purpose of these isn’t and never was to be a codex of secular laws, but rather minute by minute reminders to keep faith in the unseen truth of the Divine. Over the next 5 years I learned more and more and never had issues reconciling my Knowledge with my Faith, so I converted to Judaism. I became a Jew. I never missed a Friday evening service, even on vacation. At the apex of my living Jewishly I wore a kippah always and kept kosher. At 26 I took my birthright trip to Israel. I kept the faith and it kept me. When we moved to Florida I made it to temple less and less. I often found myself working…or playing on Shabbat. Since Rosh Hashanah this past year I have gone regularly to Friday Night Services at Temple Bat Yam. When I can’t make it or don’t feel like leaving the house, I like the Shabbos candles and watch the live video stream from Valley Temple in Cincinnati. Also since September I’ve been rebuilding my spiritual life by re-examining the texts that inspired me when I was younger and adding to them the newer “self-help” books and programs. I am trying to start a Celestine Prophecy Study Group and am actively working with the Law of Attraction.
I LOVE SPIRITUALITY! I WANT TO BE A MORE SPIRITUAL PERSON!
- Friends and Family
One thing that brings me great joy doesn’t have a shelf in my office. It is rather something interwoven in all of the books, something that is in all of them and greater than all of them. My friends and my family bring me joy beyond what can be expressed. I love the friends I made growing up and through life and in my travels around the world. I love the friends that I learned languages with and the friends that I had to learn languages to make. I love the family from whom I began my love of cooking and food. I love the family that I’ve shared meals of celebration and of loss with. I love the friends I’ve made in kitchens around the country. I love the family whose stories I’ve learned and am writing. I love the friends who read my works with interest, and those that read with a critical eye and mind. I love the friends who make it into my stories. I love sharing the enjoyment of Art with friends and especially love making art with friends. I love sharing my life with my friends through my camera lens. I love sharing music with my friends. I love sharing the stage of life with my friends. I cherish the long walks in the woods with my family, especially my father. I love the love of gardening that I inherited from many generations. I love when my friends suggest a good book. The characters in some books are like old friends. My Jewish family is my family. I love sharing the spiritual adventure of life with everyone.
I LOVE MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY! I WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME WITH MY FAMILY AND THE FRIENDS I HAVE AND MAKE MANY MANY MORE FRIENDS!
When I look back on the last few years it becomes apparent why I have suffered from depression and my life hasn’t moved forward. I haven’t been chasing joy. I have done very few of the things that bring me Joy! I have been living, and I’ve been happy, but I haven’t engaged in the adventure of life. How can I further my evolution without doing the things that I love to do? Sure, bills have to get paid, and some of the things on my list cost money, lots of it, but it isn’t necessary for me to figure out the details. The Universe is abundant. There is more than enough for everyone to have everything they want. My goal today was to look for a new job, to try to piece together a career that would incorporate the things on my “Joy List,” but that isn’t necessary. Now that I am clear on what that list is, all I have to do is focus on going after the things that give me Joy and the rest will fall into place. All I have learned from life tells me that this is true. I’m looking forward to proving it.