Try to collect a glass of blue water from the ocean. Try it with a two ounce glass or a 200 ounce bucket; it will always and only be clear. Because the sky matters. It is there offering you some significant piece of a beautiful puzzle, whether you ever look up to acknowledge it or not. Our deep appreciation for the ocean and all of the ways it impacts us has everything to do with its relationship to the sky. It is the same with us. What is reflected - every thing, experience and person we encounter - is an integral and indispensable part of our journey, and on this earth plane, everything in our experience field is reflective of us. These are often aspects of ourselves that are more easily recognized by our looking outward than looking in. As you make your way today, pay a more deliberate kind of attention to the things, experiences and people you encounter. Notice what draws you and what repels you. Notice what you embrace and what you resist and then ask yourself, "What part of this is me?" This looking creates a deep compassion for self and others as well as and an invaluable clarity that brings us endless opportunity to witness, shift and grow.

A lovely client asked the following questions about the significance of bead wearing and why and how I began offering them to women. I hope the answers are also helpful to some of you: Q: What is the significance of the beads and why have you chosen to make and sell them? A: Waistbead strands are worn for several purposes including adornment, attraction (partner, resource, energy), weight management, body/posture awareness and correction, and energetic shift through intention. My focus is on the beads as another tool for mindfulness. They act as a reminder towards presence, which over the last year or more has been of immense comfort and support to me. They sit between the second and third chakra in the center of the body. This is where the outward, engaging, creative center and the ego center meet. This is also the space in which we understand and express ourselves in the world and heal our personality. This orbit resonates with an uncommon power when we set intentions and place them there. Alaiyo strands are all inspired by nature. As a result, they hold a vibration that solicits the manifesting power of the Mother and all of her forces. This vibration helps remind and navigate us towards getting our needs met. Certain colors call forth and support certain energies. I work with women to give voice to the energies they would like to amplify and then create strands that will work with them. The custom beads you see in the photos are all pieces that come from my own inspired creative energy and express animal, vegetable, mineral and cosmic qualities that women can embody to gain confidence and strength at their center. I chose to make them because the process presented itself as therapeutic for me. When I began posting them on my personal social media pages, women wanted to buy them and that's how the selling began.

I took today as a fast day; something I haven’t done in a long time and generally reserve for Mondays. My body is insisting that I give it rest, open my receptors and follow its instruction, which I'm praying will be clear (it has never not been clear, but human foolishness being what it is...). I feel small waves of trepidation about this but I know from experience that this is the way. So I sit here with my slow careful breathing, nervous mind and soft determination. I am also doing what I am calling Center Peace Practice; bringing my attention to my solar plexus, the 3rd chakra field just above my navel. For the next few months I'm focusing particularly on the energy of curiousity and openess to discovery. Asking myself in every situation, "What can I learn here? What is this trying to teach me?" Yesterday I was captured by the quote: “If flowers can teach themselves how to bloom after winter passes, so can you.” I feel like that today. Like I can learn new ways to bloom; faster, more efficient, quantum ways to grow myself. I can sense at the cellular level that there are aspects of myself that when I learn to harness and bring them forth, I will be even more secure, expansive and radiant, to both myself and in all of the ways I reflect in the world. But for now, sitting here on the sofa, slowly following my less-than- steady breathing and preparing to study ceremony and ritual, I wonder if flowers ever feel anxious when their delicate parts are unfurling. ❤, -xoj

I am here in obedience to Spirit. Had I not been so instructed by the Creator’s insistence I would probably be beading, eating cashew yogurt, executing elaborate but meaningless internet searches or possibly cooking. Which is to say absolutely anything other than writing. And I would be doing this dance of avoidance because like any other thing we evade with all the spectacular tools of our cunning, writing is the place that reveals and heals me. The place I most need to enter to access the essential questions and answers of my life. But at 42 I have also learned that resistance – long term, protracted resistance - is not only futile but dangerous to my body, mind, spirit and experience. For this reason I am here at my dining room table, fingers on these keys (which really feels like toes on the edge of Vesuvius) without one clue about what I’m supposed to be doing or saying and the scariest unknown of all; where this all will take me. Because….me. Which reminds me of another thing I’ve been avoiding; tying myself with Nebula. Today I will do both; publish these words and re-calibrate my center with a strand that encourages and reminds me about the power of curiosity and the transformative magic of unexpected discovery. I will dust off my lessons on beginners mind and begin again and again and again starting today, and see what happens. #discovery #blackstrands #obedience #writing #listening #curiosity