Weekly Round-Up

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girl_with_lassoWelcome to the first round-up of a  new blogging year and it’s been wonderful to read what you have been writing and reflecting on this week – fresh starts abound in the blogosphere.

“I feel excited at the prospect of a new season of growth”, writes Dee of Greenside Up this week, and while she may be writing about gardening, I can’t help thinking of how relevant her post is to the nurturing, tender, care we need to garden our own lives with. Someone, who really gets this is Sarah, who has written some delightful posts this week all about her allotment gardening  – this marks a new direction for Sarah’s blog, as this year she wants to broaden its scope to include more of Plot 44.

I love Therese Borchard’s take on New Year’s resolutions this week, declaring she is sick of the usual “lame resolutions”, she has resolved that “this year’s is to be okay in all the chaos: to be less obsessed about finding the answers, and more content in navigating through all the messiness in my life.”  She is taking as her guiding principle that wonderful Ranier Maria Rilke quote “to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves”. Someone with a question in her heart to resolve this week is Bringing Up Goliath, who wonders if you can feel gratitude and be mad at the same time.

Someone who has made it her mission to find things to be grateful for is Florence, and this week she is finding the gratitude easier to find lounging in the sunshine of Florida!

Nancy has her own great take on this start of a new year which to her is ” more about a mental cleansing and creating a clean slate for the mind.”

And the Pink Underbelly’s Nancy  is planning on having some fun with her new year’s goals, as she chooses to view them.

Gretchen also views resolutions as goals and shares some of hers with us on her blog The Second Blooming (a great  new year’s blog find).

Lori has come to see New Year’s Resolution, as ” a cop out” and would rather think of it as a “New Year’s Commitment”. Her commitment this year is to  “strive to be the best, most true “me” that I can be.”

And Laurie resolves to ditch the guilt this year – that’s one I also need to work on myself!

So many of us have eschewed those “lame resolutions” that Therese writes of, and chosen instead to focus on three words to guide and inspire us during the coming year.  Terri has chosen to let “connection” be her guiding word, and shares a little of how last year’s word choices of “healthy, loved, and inspired” led her down the path to a brand new life.

Create, Nurture and Appreciate are Jackie’s three words; while Dr Attai is focusing on resilience, rejuvenation, and serenity. Resilience is also my word this year – I originally borrowed it from Phillipa and it seems to be a popular choice with many of us – so if you want to read more about cultivating resilience in your life, check out this post at Psych Central.

Julia’s new year commitment – she calls it her 2012 manifesto –  is all about simplifying life – a wonderful word to guide us all in the coming year.

 

This week’s #BCSM twitter chat had the three words concept as its theme and if you would like to catch up on what people were tweeting about, check out BCSM Chat “My Three Words”.

Brenda Coffee has been reflecting on beginnings and opportunities in a moving and quite lovely post in Breast Cancer Sisterhood.  And Debbie at Where We Go Now echoes the same theme of beginnings (and endings) in her Meditation Monday post and in a follow-on post, she celebrates the joys of female friendship. And while we are on the subject of female friendships, here in Ireland, today, the last day of Christmas is celebrated as “Women’s Christmas” and I have written a post on one of my other blogs (yes, I am a serial blogger!) which explains more about this lovely old Irish tradition.

It’s been a real bumper round-up this week, and I hope I haven’t left anyone out, but if I have, please do leave a link to your post or one you have read which you would like to share with readers.  I would like to leave you with a quote from Debbie’s blog by Anna Quindlen, which seems like the perfect way to sum up how I feel about this new year before us:

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

Here’s to another year of muddling through the middle together!

Marie xxx

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