Ellen-Mary O'Brien

Mar 042019
 

This is much prettier than anything in my garden right now

March in New York is a mess. Winter and Spring play tug-o-war throughout the month. The temperatures climb into the high thirties but it’s snowing or it snows during the colder nights and melts by noon. The upside is my walkway and driveway, clear themselves. The downside is the unpaved ground is either mud or frozen mud and you can never be completely sure which until you’ve stepped on it … or in it.

During Winter the trees are bare, the grass looks dead, and the sky is mostly overcast. Everything is a dull brownish gray. Now, with the lengthening days, color is slowly creeping back in and it’s always such a joy to see the first buds poke their heads up.

I find myself feeling the urge to purge. It happens every year about this time. The promise of warmer days, of sunshine and open windows, makes me want to clear out my house and start fresh.

Several of my friends have felt the same itch to clean and organize and they have gone deep with the Konmari Method. That is so not me. I have no quarrel with Ms. Kondo. I’m a different kind of person. The very thought of piling up all my clothes in one spot makes me so anxious I can’t imagine actually doing it. Faced with a pile of stuff from all over the house, I would probably never start.

What works for me is a compartmentalized approach. I’ve been clearing and organizing my way around my kitchen. I started by the entry door and on the first day did the first shelf on my right. Then I stopped. That’s the important part of not getting overwhelmed: stop at a predetermined place. Tell yourself what you are going to do, then do it, and then stop.

It’s easy to get caught up in the momentum and plow through shelf after shelf. I’ve done that. If you have too you know what happens. You run out of steam before you’ve finished and frequently have left yourself a mess. This is what keeps you from starting again. You think the job is going to eat your life and leave you with a mess. Don’t do that to yourself.

Pick a job that has boundaries or set boundaries. One cabinet, one shelf, or one hour’s work, and stick to that. Once that cabinet or shelf, are done or that hour is up, stop working. The next day do the next one thing. You will be surprised how much you can get done in an hour and you will feel so much better about doing it again when you don’t let the job eat up all your energy and time.

We’re getting some stupid March snow again and then it will be warm, then cold, then rain and who knows what else. I will be spending part of each day in March, prepping for spring, one shelf at a time. If the Konmari craze doesn’t spark joy*, maybe the way I do things will work for you.

*I do like her spark joy angle. It can be quite useful when letting things go.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Prepping for Spring
Feb 252019
 

February is associated with romance. A lot of the readings I’ve been doing this month are on the subject of love and relationships so I asked the Tarot for insight into romantic relationships and she gave me a nice general guide

Eight of Wands ~
There is a rush at the beginning of a relationship. It’s the energy of novelty and the excitement of connection. This feels amazing. It feels alive and it is very easy to get carried away in the flow. The energy is focused and you are moving together. That focus blinds you to each other’s faults and you tend to overlook the parts that aren’t working because you’re so caught up in what is. Eventually those wands are going to hit the ground and the energy will be spent. You will come down off that high. You will be two flawed humans who now have to deal with each other as you really are.


The Star ~
In relationships that progress past the initial rush, and survive the inevitable impact with reality, there is the moment where you see each other as you really are. You progress to a deeper, more meaningful connection and union when you get to this phase and lovingly accept the other. There is no hiding. Here there is real love. There is compassion for yourself and the other and there is understanding and hope for the future.


Two of Pentacles ~
Loving someone, and being loved, flaws and all, requires effort. Over time we may find we can’t do this with the person we are with and we separate from them. Or we discover that we can’t imagine life without this marvelously irritating person and we make it work. We balance our needs with theirs. We take the good with the bad and together you find the sweet spot because you have found someone worth going through the struggle with.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Tips from the Tarot ~ Romantic Relationships
Feb 182019
 

This past week NASA announced that the Mars Rover Opportunity has stopped transmitting and its batteries have died. People all over social media were quite touched by Opportunity’s final words and there were heartfelt comments of sympathy for Opportunity.

I thought it was kind of sweet. Other people found a way to be put off or even offended by this. There were false analogy arguments comparing the feelings people had for the rover and what they feel for a variety of other sympathetic causes like abused children, refugees, animals. It was exhausting to read and misses the greater point; as most false analogies do.

It’s not about parceling out compassion. There is room for feelings for everyone and everything. At the moment we are mourning the loss of a thing that was dear to many. That doesn’t have any relation to the compassion people do or do not have for abused animals, endangered species, or missing children. Those are separate issues.

It’s completely human to feel deeper feelings for people and things that are closer to you. It is understandable to cry over your dog’s death. Is it okay to ask someone, whose dog has just died, where are their tears for all the other dead dogs in the world? No, of course not. It would be heartless and unfair to minimize someone’s pain in that way.

Yes, Opportunity and the other rovers are machines. Human beings are social creatures and we bond not only with other humans but with animals and objects too. Think about your childhood teddy bear, your first car, an instrument you play, art you created. All of these things are things but you have affection for them. My husband’s first car was destroyed by a drunk driver while parked in front of his house. He speaks of that car like a long lost friend. The Mars Opportunity Rover was an extension of Us and as such has a special place in our hearts.

Opportunity was intended to last 90 days but instead lasted nearly 15 years. We have all seen the amazing images sent back to us from Mars and learned the data collected that has shed light on the origins of our planet and our solar system. Opportunity was our eyes and ears on a different planet and over the years he and the other rovers were personified in the way NASA spoke about them and the stories we read. Discovery Rover sang Happy Birthday to himself on the first anniversary of his landing on Mars. Curiosity, Spirit, and Opportunity, nicknamed Oppy, have their own Twitter profiles. They are technological marvels that humans created, paid for with our taxes, and launched into space.

We all know that Opportunity was a machine. We also know that it had a life of some sort. Most of us can’t really explain how we mean that. I think that understanding of Opportunity, as more than just a machine, is a throwback to our animist roots as humans. It’s in our bones to sense the life in the world around us. This is why we bond with our cars as well as we do to our cats.

Opportunity’s final words were very human and poked us in our existential dread but that doesn’t make the sadness we feel for him less real or shallow. It instead reminded us of the affinity we have with all things and that brought out our compassion. This week that compassion was focused on a little robot who shut down on Mars.

I’m sorry to see him go.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Opportunity for Compassion
Feb 112019
 

Personal intimacy and physical intimacy are not the same thing. They can be. But they aren’t always.

You can have sex with someone you don’t know very well, care for very much, or even don’t respect. There is no emotional risk when you aren’t invested in the person you’re in bed with. You can claim an intimacy with them because you were physically naked and your bodies intertwined. But were you really engaged with that person? Was there a real connection? Or, were they a prop in your experience? Were you a prop in theirs?

If you are okay not connecting any deeper than that, mazel tov. You have what you want. If, however, you say you want a more profound bond with someone, it needs to go beyond physical intimacy. This is where it gets scary for people and I suspect this is the reason many of us make our personal relationships sexual so early on. It’s an unconscious effort to bypass this discomfort and have the appearance of intimacy. But deep down we know it’s not the same thing.

Real intimacy is being your authentic self with someone else while they are their authentic self with you; warts and all. That’s really being naked. It’s a wonderful experience being seen for who you really are and being loved and accepted as such. The risk comes from not knowing how the other will react to the real you. This risk and the fear of that kind of rejection is the biggest obstacle to that deep connection we all say we want.

The risk is real. The cost can seem high. You invest in a relationship and slowly, over time, reveal who you are and then, perhaps at some point a year or two in, either you or the other person realizes you two are not a good fit. Sometimes you can let this go on much, much longer and find yourself married, with children, to a person you don’t really know and who doesn’t know you. Ouch! That sort of pain corrodes your soul and your self-worth. You thought you were protecting yourself from pain but instead you inflicted a slow torture on yourself.

Now what?

You have a choice. Be who you really are. Be your authentic self and let the chips fall where they may, or not. Actually, you have always had this choice. If you didn’t actively choose then you might want to start by looking at why not. I think it is better, and ultimately less painful, to be rejected for who you actually are than pretend to be something you’re not.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Intimacy
Feb 042019
 

In 1999, Mr. Wonderful and I sold our tiny townhouse in New York City and bought a single family home in the Hudson Valley. When I say our townhouse was tiny I’m not kidding. The entire property plot was 23 feet by 36 feet. That included the footprint of the house. We were so excited to be able to buy ourselves a home; a place of our own, where we could raise our kids and be a family. Before we closed on the house we had already outgrown it. It was a two bedroom house and we were expecting baby #3.

We made it work for years. You can get away with a lot when your kids are little. Our oldest was going on eleven and we knew we needed to upsize. We also knew that was going to be a challenge. Mr. Wonderful would have to drive to the city, every day, so the final say was his. The last thing I wanted was a miserable husband who resented us because of his situation. If we weren’t all going to be happy there, it wasn’t the right house for us.

We did find a nice house, good schools, nice neighbors, and commutable to the city. It was in pretty good shape but no one updated the interior since the house was built in the 1970s. We made that work too. Little by little I removed ugly wallpaper and wood paneling. If you don’t have the money for renovations, paint is a good way to go.

The one thing that I absolutely despised was the double oven range. I cook every day. I make all our food from scratch and when the kids were little I was baking muffins and things several times a week. That range was a nightmare to use. It took up too much room in an already tiny kitchen. The top oven burned everything and overhung the range top in such a way that I could only use small pots on the back burners. It was so unnecessarily complicated that to get the bottom oven to work required three different knobs. So aggravating! Our first Thanksgiving dinner was two hours late because I didn’t actually turn the oven on when I thought I did.

It was pretty much like this but brown

We didn’t have the money to replace it so I adjusted to that awful range and made it work for the next bunch of years.

If Mr. Wonderful and I are anything it’s practical. We made a list of all the things the house needed. We prioritized and slowly worked our way through it. Five kids, one salary, new house, money was tight. When I say slowly I mean slowly. One day, while out with Mr. Wonderful, he took me to an appliance store.  I thought we were just going to see what sorts of things were available and what they cost. You know, window shopping. No, he had brought me there to buy a new stove. I nearly cried. He had been planning this for ages. He squirreled away a portion of his cash every week for nearly a year so we could buy it outright. It was so sweet. I picked out a nice, simple, single oven range and by the end of that week the worst thing in my house was gone.

I don’t think any other gift has ever made me happier.

It’s not just that the oven was something I really wanted. It was that my husband went out of his way to make it happen for me without me ever asking him to. It was on our list and would have eventually been dealt with but he didn’t want me to have to wait. That thoughtfulness and care made a mundane thing like an oven incredibly romantic.

If you follow me on Instagram or are friends with me on Facebook then you know that first thing Saturday morning I accidentally knocked a mug off a shelf and couldn’t catch it in time. Instead of smashing itself on the floor, the mug crashed into the oven door glass and shattered it into a thousand pieces. I was a bit more upset about it than I expected I would be. I actually have a sentimental attachment to this oven. The repairman will call me sometime today with the cost to repair it and I really hope it’s not too much.

It doesn’t look like much but it makes me happy.
 Tarot  Comments Off on Mundane Romance
Jan 282019
 

January is just about over. How’s your progress on those goals you made for the new year?

I pulled a few cards to get Tarot’s perspective on what it takes to achieve your goals and here is what she said.

King of Pentacles:

He is steady, reliable, and follows through on promises. Competent and committed, he creates stability. Goals don’t achieve themselves. They require your commitment and follow through to go from just being a good idea to being a reality. Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you promise yourself you will do a particular thing then actually do it. This card also speaks to stewardship and conscientious maintenance. Don’t lose sight of how far you’ve come already and do what you need to to maintain that progress.

Knight of Wands:

This knight is confident and daring. He is willing to try a thing to see what happens. He rises to whatever challenge comes at him and puts his fear aside in favor of new experiences. This energy is a good balance to the King of Pentacles. Where he is steady this knight is more reckless. Together these two make a good advisory team. Somewhere between the two extremes is a good place to land on most things.

“Be bold but venture to be wise” ~ Horace

Ace of Pentacles:

Embrace new opportunities. As you move toward your goal old issues will fall away and new opportunities will present themselves. Don’t shy away from them immediately. Take a bold, wise look at the new things that pop up and see if they are in line with where you are going. The you that started this goal journey is not the same you now. You have grown and changed and so the challenges and good fortune that cross your path will be new and more suited to the new you.

The Fool

Trust the flow. With each challenge you overcome on your way to your goal you level up and are a beginner again. You are beginning at a higher level. You haven’t been here before so you need to trust the process. When you first started at the level you just completed, you didn’t know what you know now. But you learned it as you needed to know it and here you are. This will happen again and again with each new level. Step forward into the unknown. You can do this.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Tips from the Tarot ~ Achieving Your Goals
Jan 212019
 
the worst part is the end of the driveway where the street plow piles it up

I knew more than a week ago that I was going to have the house to myself today. So, I made plans. There was art to make and a couple of readings to do. There were things to prep for the eclipse work I was planning. There was a soup recipe I wanted to try and of course, knitting and Netflix. I had a nice day all set for myself. I was going to have a day of just doing things I wanted to do.

What I did instead was spend most of the day removing snow and ice from my walkway and driveway. I wasn’t happy about it. I also know that how I felt about it was irrelevant. It had to be done and I was the only here to do it.

Once you know you have to do something, that there is no alternative, it makes no sense to resist that reality.

When I got up this morning, the snow that had started last night had turned to freezing rain. It made everything slick with a coating of ice and the inches of snow were that much heavier. If you live where it snows then you know what I was facing. I bundled up, grabbed my shovel and, with a sigh, went out to assess the work ahead of me.

The whole time we’ve lived here shoveling snow was a family event. Mr. Wonderful, me, and the kids each took a portion of the job and got it over with. Then we’d go back in the house and have cocoa. Being by myself this job felt huge. I also wanted to complete as much of my original plan as I could. Some of that stuff wasn’t just fun it needed to be done.

So I followed the advice I give to clients with big projects or goals they are working on. I broke it all down into sections and gave myself a deadline and a schedule to get it all done. The deadline in this case was actually imposed by Winter herself. This evening the temperature is going to drop to 3F/-16C. Whatever snow is still on the ground would be ice by tomorrow morning. The deadline for my other work was flexible with the exception of the eclipse work. That got priority.

When faced with a big project it’s important to be realistic about your capabilities. Knowing how far you can push yourself and for how long is a critical piece of information when planning out your strategy. I have also found, for myself anyway, that alternating things you don’t enjoy with things you do enjoy makes the whole job a better experience and makes me more effective.

Half an hour to forty five minutes of chopping ice and snow and moving it off the walkway and driveway was about all I had in me in one burst. I divided the territory into sections I thought I could do in that span of time and started. When I was done with each portion I would go back into the house, dry off, warm up, and work on the more pleasant things. It worked out.

I got all the snow and ice removed that I needed to before the wind picked up and the temperature dropped. I prepped some items for the eclipse, did some readings, and even made that soup I wanted to try. There was also a nice cup of tea, some knitting and Netflix once I was done.

I’m a bit sore from hours of lifting snow and annoyed that my FitBit doesn’t have snow shoveling as an exercise choice because it should totally count. All in all it was a good day.

It was windy and cold when I took this photo but the sunlight on the icy branches was so pretty

 Tarot  Comments Off on Best Laid Plans
Jan 142019
 

We are just about half way through January. How are you doing? Did you set goals for yourself? Have you done any work on them? Made any progress? Are you where you wanted to be at this point?

If you said yes then Congratulations! Keep doing whatever it is you are doing because it’s working for you. Seriously, you are doing great. Even baby steps, in the right direction, are better than staying still.

Two weeks into the New Year is when the bulk of resolution makers lose their oomph. Ask any of the regulars at the local gym and they will tell you that this is the time of year when they get their gym back.

A handful of those New Year gym members become regulars. Those people broke the code. If they are reading this they answered Yes up there in the first paragraph. They have a strong why, they found their discipline, and they put their inner petulant child in a corner somewhere while they got on with the business of effecting change.

When you want to make a real change in your life the first thing that has to change is your thinking. Not just your thinking about the thing you want to change, but your thinking about yourself. Who you are is a product of your thinking.

Always.

To be a different version of yourself requires you to think of yourself differently. Thinking of yourself as an overweight couch potato will keep you an overweight couch potato. To see the possibility of a lean, strong, fit you and to think of yourself as that lean, strong, fit person currently inside a chubby body is the way to move toward that reality. To remind yourself you are broke, in debt, and underemployed, is to keep yourself there. To see the possibility of yourself working the job you desire, making the money you want, and being debt free, and to understand you are that person, currently working through some hard stuff, is how you move toward that reality.

Two weeks is about all you can get out of sheer willpower. If nothing develops to bolster it, when your willpower falters you will fail. If your New Year’s goals are flagging perhaps what is missing is a shift in thinking about yourself and your life’s possibilities. Who is it that you want to be? Do you have a clear image of her in your mind? You need to know her well enough that you can judge your behavior by her standards. That’s how you move from who you are to who you want to be. You follow her lead. What would she do right now to get back on track? Do that.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Rethink and Reboot
Jan 072019
 

The winter holidays have a way of distorting time. No one really, officially celebrates all twelve days of Christmas anymore but with family visits, and holiday parties, we sort of do. Work weeks are shortened. People take holiday trips. Businesses and schools are closed all or part of these days. We really should stop pretending that we go back to work after Christmas Day and embrace the energy of this time of year.

There is such a build up to Christmas. It’s a lot of planning, and shopping, and cooking, and decorating, and baking. To spend all that energy for one day is not very satisfying. Whether we mean to or not we extend the experience throughout the days around Christmas and, with a boost from New Year’s Eve, we keep going for a few more days. I think it’s in our blood.

Our ancestors celebrated the return of the sun in myriad ways. Rituals and celebrations with fires and feasting happen all over the world and as far back as anyone can reckon. We make our feasts in modern ovens and capture the moments of celebration on our smartphone cameras but we aren’t that far removed in time or place from the people who prepared their feasts on an open fire and captured moments as memories. They also practiced divination for the coming year. A lot of us do too. You might seek signs in nature during the Omen Days or have your cards read. Either way you are in good company.

Whatever you and yours do to celebrate the winter holidays it all comes to a close on January 6th. Whether you call it the twelfth day of Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany, Little Christmas, or Three Kings Day, January 6th is about as far as you can stretch the holidays. (In the western world anyway) When all the celebrating is done, it’s time to get back to your regularly scheduled life. Once upon a time, not that long ago, that meant it was time for the ladies to get back to their spinning and the men to get back to the plough. From this we get Distaff Day, which is January 7th and Plough Monday which is the first Monday after January 6th. Every few years, like this one, they are the same day.

I hope your holidays were enjoyable and satisfying. I hope there was good food, laughter and lots of love. I hope your omens were all favorable. Today is the day to get back to work. I hope you are doing so with a full and thankful heart and that you don’t have to spin any fiber unless you want to.  

 Tarot  Comments Off on Distaff Day: When Life Goes Back to Normal
Dec 312018
 

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I think they are a lot of feel good hype for the most part. People make them for the wrong reasons and/or execute them incorrectly. While I am sure all those people start out with the best of intentions, you can’t ignore the fact that about 80% of them abandon their new year’s resolutions by February.

I’m all for becoming the best version of yourself. I think goal setting can be an amazing tool. I have seen people transform themselves, their lives, and their relationships. And, almost every time I’ve seen real transformation, they didn’t wait until New Year’s Day to start. They started the day they really decided to change. They started where they were, and with what they had right there.

I’m not saying this to discourage you. If you want to make real change in your life, I want you to succeed. I’m pointing this out because, if you want to make real change, you need to get real about what that means.

New Year’s resolutions that fail are usually reactive and therefore not well planned. The holidays can highlight issues we ignore the rest of the year and, annoyed with ourselves, we make quick promises to do better. It’s a good idea followed by a poor execution. Without a well thought out strategy, meeting with some resistance will cause failure.

I’ve also seen resolutions collapse because the Why isn’t big enough. You see photos from Thanksgiving and Christmas and decide you need to get in better shape. The credit card bills come in and you think you need to get out of debt. These are both worthy goals but why are you pursuing them? Find the big why behind these desires. Don’t do it because you think you should. Don’t do it because someone else thinks you should. Dig deeper and find the reason that lights you up. Ask yourself why, and after each answer you come up with ask yourself why again. Three or four whys will get you to an honest answer from yourself. Is it a big enough why?

Humans are basically motivated by two things: seek pleasure and avoid pain. Avoiding pain is the bigger, more powerful motivator of the two. This is what is at work the morning you skip a workout because you’re sore or the weather sucks, or you didn’t sleep well. You have a stressful day so you dull that pain with shopping, smoking, eating or whatever. You slip into old habits because it is less painful than pushing through your resistance.

To get past your resistance you need to have a plan to deal with the part of you that is whiny. Give it some thought and you can see how you might get in your own way. How will you outsmart yourself when this happens? What can you do to head this off? Are there phrases you can say to yourself to keep you on track? How can you make it easier to follow through than to quit?

Couple these plans with a big enough reason why you are making this change. Those two things work together to get you out of bed in the morning and to the gym. Together they make resistance painful. It’s what is at work when you forgo dessert, don’t light a cigarette, don’t buy the thing, or whatever action you need to take to stay on track to your goal. Together they are bigger than temptation. Together they help you find your discipline.

If you’re going to do this, do it well. Get clear about what you actually want, why you want it, and what it is going to require from you. And then go do it.

 Tarot  Comments Off on New Year’s Resolutions: Why They Fail and How to Succeed
Copy Protected by Chetan's WP-Copyprotect.