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To manage her many intrigues, the lovely Lady Mary definitely could use what my new fave writer Brené Brown calls a “move a body” friendship. Until this week, I’d never read Brené Brown’s theory of what makes the truest sister bond, but thanks to my fellow travelers in my (amazing) Mondo Beyondo “Dream Lab” online course, I’ve seen the light. You’ll have to read Brené’s explanation for yourself; I can’t possibly do it justice. But trust me: with just a teeny soupçon of dark humor, she imagines the bleakest scenario in which we might call upon our sisters for help, the one in which we need and deserve support without judgment.

How far would you go, could you go, have you gone for the sisters in your life? Do you know who your move-a-body sister friends are? It’s worth pondering, before you need them. Watch some great TV, study up with Brené, and chime in.

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Last year, I blew off resolutions, and took on a revolution instead. I vowed to move more, write more, create more. I don’t know about the “more” part, but I was successful in bringing each of these changes into my life during a year that presented many challenges, both emotional and logistic. I didn’t run a marathon or finish my  novel, and at the end of the year, I regretfully dropped out of my art class due to an overloaded family schedule. But I did manage to shift my thinking a bit, to transform those revolutionary ideas into “normal” parts of me and my everyday life. I count that as a victory.

This year, I want to do more of the same, but I’ve also been looking for a different kind of transformation. I struggled over the last year with not losing myself in a sea of family responsibilities. If that sounds like a bourgeois housewife’s complaint–well, it is. I can’t pretend otherwise. But last year I realized that in managing my responsibilities to other people, I’d stopped examining my own place in all our lives: not just the work I do, but the person I am.

The video above, from the TEDx conferences, presented me with my “eureka” moment on, wouldn’t you know it, New Year’s Day. Brené Brown’s ideas about vulnerability and self-love left me speechless with identification, and so I went searching for more.

Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher are the brilliant dreamers behind MondoBeyondo, an online class dedicated to helping people identify and achieve their dreams. I’ve been tempted, so tempted, to take part in the past. But my search for more Brené Brown? It led me straight to Jen and Andrea: they’re collaborating with Brené on the next session of the class. So you know what? This time, I didn’t hesitate. I signed up. It started yesterday, and I’m already blown away by the size and enthusiasm of the class community. Follow along as I work on dreaming big and letting go of perfect in 2011.

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A work from Karen Arp-Sandel's collaborative art project, FE-MAIL

LATE LAST YEAR, in the throes of a long and somewhat dark winter, I wrote about my new year’s revolutions. Allowing myself to make art was one of the key changes I made last  year, and I owe it to my amazing teacher and gifted artist Karen Arp-Sandel. Amid reawakening my creative spark and her own myriad projects, Karen was kind enough to work with me on a profile of her and her art for TSP. Read the results here, and let me know how your creative endeavors are going. Me? Inspired by Karen and her current collaborator, Suzi Banks Baum, I’m tackling a round of mail art. Watch your mailboxes, sisters.

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IAM NOT MUCH for New Year’s resolutions. They mostly just make me feel like a slacker by the time March rolls around, one more thing for me to beat myself up for not doing well enough. (And don’t we all have enough of those already?) This year, instead of chaining myself in the guilt of unkept resolutions, I’ve decided to take a more, uh, aggressive approach.

As I’ve written complained here before, last year was hard. But hard times have a benefit, which is that they force you to examine how you live your life, and confront the ways you might make changes to accommodate whatever new difficulties you face. (I’m not trying to gloss over the extreme hardships so many sisters have faced this past year with unemployment and foreclosure rampant, and our nation still at war. I’m talking about difficulty, not catastrophe.)

In my life, one thing that became apparent this year was that my habit of putting myself dead last in order of my own priorities was actually having the opposite of the intended effect. I was spread too thin, miserable and grumpy and short with everyone. It was clear that my life needed a brand new organizing principle, and I started carving out time for three things that are, if I take the time to admit it to myself, really really REALLY a big deal to me. These were the holes in my life, and I needed to fill them, pronto.

The first was  (drumroll, please) making art. I am the daughter of an incredibly talented visual artist (my mom, the queen of pie) and as such have a fair bit of insecurity about my own abilities. And yet––I love to make things, used to love to draw, have a secret desire to learn to paint…you get the idea. I compromised.

"Extra, Extra"

I took a collage class, for which, it turned out, I’d been collecting materials (old books and photographs, scraps of paper) for years. I have no illusions that I’m the next Joseph Cornell, but the attempt (often unsuccessful, but an attempt nonetheless) to fulfill my teacher‘s assignment to make a collage-a-day made me more productive than I’d been in years. And, even better, it made me happy.

"Mother, the Woven Word"

The second was to write fiction. In November, I spent about an hour a day writing fiction, yet another thing I’d wanted to do, oh, my whole life, and hadn’t really tried since second grade. I completed a first draft of a novel; this month, I’m about to dive into the rewrite after putting it aside for a few weeks to give me some breathing room and some perspective. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I think it’s got the potential to be, and you know what? It exists, all 51,000 words of it. Put another way: I did it.

"Tolerance of Concentricity"

The third was to move this old, tired body of mine. This was my strategy for not succumbing to the onslaught of butter and sugar we Americans like to call “the holidays.” Three or four days per week in December (until my kids’ vacation began–sigh) I went to a local community center/gym to a cardio or strength training class. I’ve always held to the idea that I don’t like group exercise classes, but you know what? I was wrong. I love sweating my brains out, dancing around like I’m auditioning (unsuccessfully, mind you) for a Beyoncé video, with a bunch of other women. It was oddly inspiring, and both physically and emotionally curative. When school starts again on Tuesday (yippee!) I’ll be back.

My revolution this year? To keep all three of these new habits present in my life. Ironically, this fall was the time when things got really, really hard for me and my family, and yet, having a commitment to doing these small things for myself kept me sane, rather than making me crazier for taking up my ever-evaporating time.

I learned that I don’t have to write 1,500 words in my novel every day. I don’t have to create an original collage every morning, and if I don’t make it to the gym seven days a week, that’s OK. But my revolution is to change the organizing principle of my life, which had been: “Take care of everyone else before myself.” Instead, I’m going to shoot for this trio: Make Art. Tell stories. Dance. I’ve found that by creating some space for the things that really matter, deeply, to me, I can actually take better care of everyone else.

How about you? Do you want a revolution for 2010? Do you know what the organizing principle of your life is? Does it need revising? Share with your sisters.

P.S. That image above? That’s Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man and fought and was injured in the Revolutionary War. She was honorably discharged in 1783, and 20 years later, became the first woman to be awarded a federal pension for her service to her country. There are all kinds of revolutionaries. Thanks to the site Honor Roll of Liberty for this image of the statue of Deborah, located in Sharon, Connecticut.

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Amy’s project, entitled The Beckoning of Lovely, turned out to be a perfect fit for me right now: I’m trying my hand at a new creative outlet (neither cooking nor knitting involved, and I promise to reveal all one of these days) and because of that, and the usual chaotic state of my life, I have been spending a lot of time pondering Marion’s latest list o’ brilliance, about how we manage our time, or don’t.

So Amy’s reminder to respond to the call of beauty, to make something, make it beautiful, make it with friends, old and new, is the perfect way for me to take a breath and appreciate what I am doing (instead of what I am not.) I’m not too proud to admit I shed a tear or two of joy and recognition as well. I hope you enjoy Amy’s video and the project it represents as much as I did, and be sure to explore her website for more of her videos and more about her.

What is speaking to you these days? Do you feel a deep calling to create, to write, to reconnect with family or friends? Share your discoveries with your sisters.

(Special thanks to my old friend Gretchen over at The Happiness Project for pointing me in Amy’s direction. Gretchen’s lovely, too.)

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There once was a girl from New York,
Whose husband thought she was a dork.
She’d knit without fail
In the snow, sleet and hail,
But come summer, cast off needlework.

OK, SO I’M NOT MUCH OF A POET. Or a limericist. But you get the idea. I absolutely, cannot, CANNOT knit when the weather’s warm. (Though I did once finish a shawl on vacation in Hawaii. But that was when I lived in Los Angeles, and if I wanted to knit, I couldn’t let hot weather stand in my way. Another life, another time.)

Now, come summer, I drop my needles like they’re radioactive, and, apparently, plant a vegetable garden instead. But this summer, right around the time my tomatoes would have been delicious had they not all been killed by the dread late blight, the air turned a touch cool, and I got the urge. Bad.

I dug out the shawl I was supposed to knit, oh, back in March. I’ve got 10 whole rows, which means that by sometime in 2011, I should have something to wear. But in the meantime, I’m loving all the cabling and counting and wasting time enjoying myself over at our Sister Project group on Ravelry. Join us there, if you haven’t already. If you’re new to knitting with the sisters, make sure to visit our roundup of all our writing about knitting. And in the meantime, tell us what you’re up to now that a threat of hint of fall is in the air…

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