JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

While reading the Third Age Carnival hosted by Evelyn Rodriguez earlier this month I saw that my neighbor Jennifer Louden now has a blog. I can still remember when I met her and her husband, soon after they had moved into their house. Jen amazes me. She’s a best-selling author, personal coach, and someone you want to have in your community. Here’s a paragraph from her bio:

Jennifer Louden is the best-selling author of The Woman’s Comfort Book, The Couple’s Comfort Book, The Pregnant Woman’s Comfort Book, The Woman’s Retreat Book, and Comfort Secrets for Busy Women. She is both a personal coach and social commentator, who has taken the concept of “comfort” and self-care, and made these essential concepts irresistible and essential to women around the world. Jennifer is a cultural visionary, harnessing her extraordinary ability to recognize women’s comfort as both a fundamental need and an innate desire.

She’s been on Oprah and many other tv shows, and now has a radio show on Sirius.

I’m enjoying learning more about her by reading her blog. She writes with honesty about her struggles with creativity and life in general, including the blahs:

I’ve been in the blah blah blah zone… it swamps me every few months… a day or two into my period, I go blank. Dumb.  Depressed isn’t the right word, at least it doesn’t describe this state well enough for me.  Under rock, peering up. Inside Jesus’ tomb only he’s gone and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.  I can’t remember why I thought I could make art or finish my novel.  Raw.

Years of witnessing the blahs have taught me it is really not a rock or a cave but an ocean and a big bed of kelp.. swaying, full of light and fascinating ever shifting patterns and if I navigate with self-care and kind self-talk and rest and walks- for rushing about only gets me tangled in the long strands of suddenly menacing kelp, I lessen my suffering and hey, it even starts to feel good here, in the blah place.  It is both blah and not blah, light and dark, creative and not creative.

Thanks, Jennifer, for inspiring me! I look forward to this curious dynamic of building an online relationship combined with being neighbors in the physical world.

Bonus link for local blogs:

Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council now has a blog.