Connecting The Dots: September

I blinked and September is coming to a close.

I have a feeling I’ll be echoing this sentiment every month for the rest of the year as our schedule fills up more and more, but my brain still hasn’t comprehended the fact that September is just as busy now as the rest of the -ber months.

In the past 27 days, my daughter turned three and started school for the very first time. I also took a trip to Boston with my sister in law and three days after coming home, threw a BalleTHREEna birthday party. BSF¹ started back up this month and I also started a new creative cohort walking through The Artist’s Way (more on that at the end of this post).

While emerging from the sleepy rhythms of summer felt jarring at the beginning of September, as the calendar rolls into October, I’m feeling energized and excited. The Lord has used this month to show me how beauty can lie on the other side of letting go of the plans and ideas I had for myself (which is another Substack for next month, stay tuned). For the first time in forever, there is magic, there is fun. I can feel the death grip I had on everything in my life slowly melting away. I don’t know if I’m elated or have just listened to the Frozen soundtrack one too many times, but I’m somewhere in that zone—for the first time in forever, I’m feeling more Anna than Elsa.

(I also went back to wearing natural deodorant after a Texas summer requiring full on antiperspirant and have gotten the dosing of my anxiety medication right after suffering a prolonged panic attack in May. The effects of both of these factors on my overall mental state cannot be overstated.)

Reading Roundup

On September 1, I woke up to a message that my Libby hold was ready. Confused, I opened the app because I didn’t remember placing any Libby holds. When I saw it was the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor, I knew why I had forgotten—because I had placed the hold at the beginning of the summer on a whim after hearing it mentioned on the Exhale podcast.

At first glance you may be tempted to dismiss its contents, but would you believe me if I said I can’t stop recommending this book? I highly advise listening on audio for peak learning experience.

I will admit, I am predisposed to find this material interesting with my speech pathology background and personal quest to solve my daughter’s mouth breathing issues, but even without those precursors, I think there’s something in this book for everyone. Nestor delves into the science behind why nose breathing is so important and mouth breathing is so terrible, how there are a variety of ways to breathe depending on what you want your body to do, and how our breathing has evolved over time. At the end, he even has his research counterpart lead you in different breathing techniques (which is one reason I recommend the audiobook).

Reading this book has reaffirmed beliefs I already held about nose breathing versus mouth breathing, has helped fill in some of the gaps behind the “why”, but has also given me some new breathing techniques to help when I get anxious.

If you have an interest in wellness, if you’re an athlete looking to improve your performance, if you struggle with anxiety, or if you’re simply interested in the science behind something we all involuntarily do every second of every day, I highly recommend Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor.

Speaking of library books, I also checked out a physical copy of Devotions by Mary Oliver from my local library. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but over the past month or so I’ve felt myself more and more drawn to poetry in a way I can’t explain. I don’t really have any experience with poetry aside from having my poem chosen to be read at our school’s Veteran Day assembly in sixth grade, but I’d like to graduate onto more sophisticated takes than “fifty stars and thirteen bars make the flag that we call ours”…

I plan to purchase my own copy because I’ll need to return this one soon and I’ve loved being able to just pick it up and read a few poems at a time. I think one of my fascinations with poetry now that I’m writing more consistently is how amazing it is that someone like Mary Oliver can say in 300 words what it takes me 1500 to say, and she does it in such a poignant way.

Other forms of poetry I’ve been enjoying on Substack are

Margaret Ann Silver

and

Part-Time Poets

. I particularly can’t stop thinking about the poem (S)MOTHER from Part Time Poets’ September Issue.

I also started reading The RomCommers by Katherine Center this month, as it has been in my TBR pile for awhile, but even after about 100 pages, I just can’t get into it. I absolutely LOVED The Bodyguard by Katherine Center, so I was anxiously awaiting reading this one, but it just isn’t landing. Is it me? Is it the book? Should I push through or move onto the next one?

Entertainment Honorable Mentions

When I found out Netflix was rationing the release of the new season of Emily in Paris over two months, I held off binging the entire thing at once out of spite, even though I already pay for a subscription, so they will never feel the consequences. Unless someone from Netflix is reading this now, in which case—I think it’s very stupid to release 5 episodes in one month and 3 in another just to squeeze another month of payment out of subscribers. Just give the people what we want up front. At the very least do an even split. But I digress.

I don’t watch this show for anything other than the fashion and the setting. I’m not sure I could even tell you the plot of this season, let alone the plot of any of the previous seasons. So this is not a recommendation in the sense of this show being good television, but more for it being a wonderful background show.

Like every other woman in America, I watched The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and I. have. thoughts. This is when I wish there were bookclubs for shows and podcasts because there is much to discuss. If you can make it past the horrendous editing of the first episode, this 8 episode season is the perfect show to binge if you’re sick in bed or have a weekend to yourself. Once you finish, answer the age old question, will MomTok survive this?

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t give thanks for the golden age of Bravo we have entered/are entering. RHOC. RHOSLC. RHOP. Some would argue for RHONY, I would not, but I will still watch. We were in a Housewives drought this summer and now it’s raining wives and we are blessed.

What’s Cooking

I’m still adhering to my meal planning method of picking a cookbook a week to cook from and it continues to work really well for me. I realized I prefer cookbooks to online recipes right now, because in addition to less decision fatigue, I love not having to deal with my phone going dark or ads popping up or scrolling through a 10 page blog post about the chicken’s life story before getting to the recipe. With a cookbook, you open to the page and leave it there. It’s as simple as that. I’ve upped my cooking game this month in two ways:

• I started checking out cookbooks from the library. I don’t know why I never thought to do this before, but it’s genius, if I do say so myself. Right now I have Magnolia Table and this week I’ve made: King Ranch chicken with jicama salad, chicken spaghetti, and Sunday supper beef tips and all have been fantastic.

• In addition to cooking, I’ve also been really into making cocktails at home. Now, let me be clear, when I say I’ve been really into it, I mean I’ve been really into having Luke make us cocktails at home. But only because he’s so good at it! When we were at my friend Brooke’s wedding in Colorado this summer, one of her signature cocktails was a Gold Rush, which I ordinarily would have avoided because, bourbon, but when I tried a sip of hers, I was instantly in love. When we got back home, we had all the ingredients to make them ourselves (again, I’m using that word loosely) and the at home version miraculously tasted JUST LIKE the one we had at the wedding. See, he’s so good at this! Why would I even bother? This is my new go-to fall cocktail and foresee many evenings on the back patio with one of these in hand.

Gadgets and Gizmos Aplenty

Before my trip to Boston, I knew I needed a new pair of sneakers for the amount of walking we’d be doing. I’ve had the same pair of black and white Vejas for the past two or three years and while I love them aesthetically, they have no arch support and I knew my back would be all kinds of messed up without a good pair of walking shoes. But I still wanted to look cute, ya know?

After lots of looking, I decided on these New Balance 237s. I won’t bore you with the saga behind procuring these shoes, but the moral of the story is I actually ended up with both the white and the tan. I wore the tan on my trip, but have enjoyed having the grey, as well. They look cute with dresses, jeans, or any other type of pant and most importantly, my back was in good shape despite all the walking we did. The end definitely justified the means in this scenario.

In the spring I shared my favorite seasonal HTeaO tea and now I quite literally have a new flavor of the month—Apple Pie. It’s a “secret menu” item, but it’s a mix of Texas Chai and Ryan Palmer. If you’ve ever had spiced tea in the winter, this tea tastes like an iced version of that, so it’s perfect for these not-quite-fall days here in Texas when I want to channel autumn but the weather has other plans.

For as long as I can remember, Target’s Threshold “Leather & Embers” has been my signature fall scent. I’ve really gotten away from fragrances in the last few years, though, so when I lit an old one to create a cozy fall atmosphere during a bout of false fall a few weeks ago, it was too overpowering, even from a room away². Unwilling to give up on candles forever, especially on gloomy days like the one I’m writing this on, I started searching for a less intense scent and landed on Threshold’s “Whiskey & Oak”. It still has a masculine smell, which I love, but it’s not as intense as Leather & Embers. I don’t light it every day, but when I want to up the cozy factor of my house, this is my new go-to scent.

Practice Makes Perfect

Over the summer I started praying about what lay ahead for me in the fall. The details of this deserve their own post, but when I found a cohort going through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way at the same time I had some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, I knew it was no accident and signed up right away.

The premise of the book is “discovering and recovering your creative self”. Two basic tenants of this discovery and recovery are: morning pages, daily stream of conscious journaling for three straight pages, and artist dates, weekly time set aside for your inner artist, ideally alone. In addition to the morning pages and weekly artist dates, you read a chapter each week for 12 weeks with various exercises to complete.

I can’t imagine committing to this practice on my own, which is why I’m so thankful for the group of women walking through this course with me. Led by

Laura Rennie

and

Laura Bass

, we have a Slack group where we can share highs and lows, struggles and successes, and talk through our thoughts each week.

At the end of the summer I finally felt alive enough again to start writing regularly in earnest but I craved some sort of creative direction, and going through this book is giving me that. I can truly feel myself discovering and recovering my creative self and I’m so thankful for the time to be able to dedicate to this right now. Prioritizing my creativity at times feels unnatural but overall, it is life giving.

My hope for anyone reading this is that you, too, are able to practice something life giving this month that helps you discover and recover who you were created to be.

1. BSF is Bible Study Fellowship for anyone not familiar. It’s a worldwide Bible study founded in 1959, so it’s been around for a minute. This is my third year doing the study and this year we’re diving into Revelation, which is equal parts thrilling and terrifying.

2. I light candles so infrequently that when I did so, my daughter excitedly asked whose birthday it was and I had to explain that sometimes we just light candles to smell good and she was sorely disappointed.