#bestof09

best packaging of 2009

Did your headphones come in a sweet case? See a bottle of tea in another country that stood off the shelves?

My vote: One Condoms. It's about time.

 

what’s the best change you made to the place you live?

I'm habitual Purger of Stuff. Can't stand clutter. Nic nacs give me hives. Someone once critically described my living room as "austere" and I glowed with pride. So happy change for me usually comes from getting crap out the door. Dropping a bag of clothes off at Value Village, giving a chair away to a new university student, piling piles into the recycling bin = euphoria!

The best changes I made this year to my place:

• downloaded 400+ CDs onto MAC/iPod, bought small docking speakers, and sold/gave away said CDs and mammoth old stereo system - including fake wood speakers that always made me feel like a cheap 70's house wife.
• sold plushy couch and got my dream sofa: a danish day bed with a trundle. Had it recovered in a mocha with blue fleck cotton/velvet.
• put some twinkly lights in the bedroom.
• found my favorite new incense from Ten Thousand Villages, which smells like ancient India.
• bought a new white desk unit.
• stopped burning candles with paraffin in them (cough cough, hack hack.)
• hung two of my favorite pieces from text artist, Cheryl Sorg.

 

best moment of peace for 2009

An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?

The monastery was peaceful. Those five days when the Man and the Boy went camping, now THAT was peaceful (read: get to have long baths with magazines, write at 3am, eat breakfast at noon, watch documentaries in the day time.)

But this week, this week has a quality of Love Boat peace to it - exciting and new. And I've come aboard. I made way for the peace by declaring December the Universal Month of Tying Up Loose Ends. And I've given myself the space to meander. Time management systems have their place, but not for the immediate now. I'm clearing my in box. I'm having lunch with my Man, tea with the girls. I'm following the rabbit hole of new blogs and spiritual texts and iTunes. Hell, I may even put my kid's baby photos in an album - the ones that have been sitting in a shoe box for five years. I may...bake something. But probably not.

Nothing's changed on the outside. I still have tons of email. There are new projects that I'm so excited to ignite, that I can barely sit still when the promise of it all runs 'round my heart. There's laundry in the living room right now, and my TV producer is waiting for me to deliver my next segment. But peace is my call to make. 1-800-Life-is-good-cause-I-say-so. I'm letting the GO! GO! GO! of 2009 unwind from my spine. Flexi plexi meander. Peace in. Peace out.

 

best of 2009: meet ups, workshops, and blog pow

Best night out: September 30. Tweetup at the Thom Bar, SOHO NYC. Hot, high-minded women in NYC, lounging and laughing. I mean, really. In the red tent that night was, Bindu, power Kate, Rochelle the inspired dancer, the When I Grow Up Coach, a Bronx Beauty, an insecure Ivy Leaguer, a lawyer come entrepreneur, a pole dancing techie, Step Up's Selena, and other new and familiar femmes. The highlight had to do a very animated conversation about clits and literature. Not in that order.

Best workshop or conference: Gail Larsen. Transformational Speaking. Two weeks ago. Runner up: Patty Digh and David Robinson's tele-seminar, Playing With Blocks.

Best blog find of the year: Cleavage, from Kelly Diels.

 

best book of 2009: the unfolding now

What book - fiction or non - touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature Through the Practice of Presence
by A.H. Almaas

A.H. Almaas is the creator of The Diamond Approach work, which Ken Wilber calls "a superb combination of some of the best of modern Western psychology with ancient (and spiritual) wisdom...probably the most balanced of the widely available spiritual psychologies/therapies."

The Unfolding Now book is like chamomile tea for the soul, made with purified water, with honey from sacred bees, served in a hand made Zen bowl. So simple and nourishing. It is a book of rare transmission that sparks one's deeply innate desire to be real.

We want to learn how we can be here in as real a way as possible: How can I be completely here and completely myself, or as completely as possible? How can my atoms, which are scattered, vibrating, and oscillating in some kind of frenzy, slow down, collect, and settle here as what I am?
- A.H. Almaas

The most delicious mix of questions I drank in all year.

 

best article of 2009?

My pick: Bindu Wiles' Unexpected Broken Heart. A Buddhist in Brooklyn on opening your heart and minding your manners.