Thank you.

Thank you, Wednesday for not being Monday anymore. Happy Wednesday.

Jessica-Rabbit-kisses to the commenter mice and the Beloved Lurkers and you.

My dear sweet love,

It is five years today since I knew you existed. A few months later when you first got your real name.

And four years today since we marched into City Hall in San Francisco and made it official.

I felt as though I was holding you in the palm of my hand, trying to grasp how something so fragile and so special could breathe and exist in this world.

Like if someone breathed too hard, you would be gone. Whoosh. A dandelion in a gust of wind.

But I was wrong.

The question last year was “What do I have capacity for? Can I squeeze something else in there?” …

This year it has evolved: “How can I get better at respecting my capacity so that I’m not constantly pushing at the edges?”

Capacity.

Just because I can hold my breath for a long time doesn’t mean that’s what I want to be doing right now. Or every day.

I don’t want to be at capacity. I want space and spaciousness.

I was going to come up with a clever title but then the posts I’m Item! -izing this week all have way better titles than anything I could come up with.

Going with my mad Shivanautical mutterings, hanging my head in shame, and then distracting you with bright and shiny links! Whee!

Item! Post No. 56 in a mostly weekly series that really wasn’t supposed to last this long.

Item! The skirt of stars.

Shannon made an “illuminated interactive” skirt.

Oh yes. And now it will drive you crazy that you don’t have one.

My commitment.

To keep eyes and ears open.

To activate my web of fabulous connections, as my friend Pam says.

To walk on it, sleep on it, dance on it, breathe on it, blow bubbles on it, eat nachos on it, dream on it, laugh on it.

To dance, dance, dance. And then to sit.

So last week I celebrated — okay, I didn’t celebrate, but I noticed that ten years had gone by — my ten year anniversary of the no sugar no caffeine thing.

Which is kind of crazy, but not for the reasons you might think.

The truth is, I don’t even remember what chocolate tastes like.

Homemade yogurt with walnuts and raisins is almost unbearably sweet. I keep insisting it tastes exactly like ice cream and everyone thinks I’m crazy.

Anyway. So I spent most of the week obsessing over this cupcake. I mean, good grief! A cupcake eating a cookie!

On one side, I want and need to have certain level of privacy for my process. I want sovereignty. I want it to be my gestation period.

And I don’t want to be dealing with other people’s stuff (whether that’s things like jealousy or “constructive” criticism or just their growth period around my growth period).

On the other side, I want this to be a communal endeavor. I want cooperation, love, excitement, enthusiasm, support, help, caring, connection.

So I need to find a way to have the good parts of quiet and isolation along with the good parts of partnering and community.

Here’s how I want this to work:

I’m not sure.

But I do know that it’s what I want.

Item! Seriously great stuff.

Next time I run the Destuckification Retreat, instead of having a page about how great it is, I’m just going to point to people like Kelly, who has been blogging up a storm of smart, funny, fascinating content ever since getting back.

I can’t even call it “content” because content sounds kind of boring and this stuff is just hot. Wow.

Honestly her posts are so good that I don’t even know which ones to link to anymore.

There was one about guts that I read three times.

“A friend of mine recently had a close encounter with her gut.

She and her gut had previously related on a strictly need-to-know basis: Don’t ask, don’t tell. If I’m about to run into a wall? Holler. Otherwise, I’ve got this, thanks.“

Ooh. This is also the post where Kelly said, “If direct response wanted to meet for a beer, I would totally be there.”

And then her post about her worst client ever, which is one of the funniest — and most useful — things I’ve read online.

What I know about you.

You are a space.

A space for me and my duck to have some of our wacky events and workshops. To do magic in. To hold things that are strange and transformative and beautiful.

You are special.

You are more than special. You are kooky and strange and marvelous in every way.

You live in a building that is unique. Nothing strip-mall-ey about you. You are one of a kind. And you know it.

Item! Horse quartet! Horse quartet! Horse quartet!

Really, nothing could possibly make me happier than this page.

Instant bad-mood-dissolver.

Warning: if you work in an actual office, do not start playing with this. Or do it with the sound turned down low.

But you might end up like me obsessing over Swedish horse quartet music forever.

I got to this from Rami who refuses to get on Twitter and expects me to still love him anyway.