GRG of the Week Abbie Testa and her mom, Emily, opened the Dish and the Spoon Cafe in River Falls, WI. She says, "I truly love what you have to offer the station. It is a constant battle to balance the stress of being a business owner with the importance of living a balanced healthy life. Listening to your show...helps with the balancing!"
My mission is to inspire excellence in people, to facilitate growth and the discovery of giftedness, and to serve as a catalyst for positive change.
It's hard to say when the journey began. Somewhere deep in childhood, I suspect, gently guided by a creative mother, a thinking father, a challenging high school English teacher, a quirky college drama teacher, friends who've nudged, books, music and art that have inspired... a myriad of signposts and guiding hands along the way. The start that I remember, though, is much more recent than that.
It had a lot to do with maternity leaves. After birthing babies, something else was birthed in me. On my second maternity leave, I wrote a novel while my babies napped in the afternoons. It was never published, but it reawakened my love of writing that had lain dormant while I'd built my marriage and my career. My third maternity leave was short (I'd had a stillborn son, so only had 3 months of leave). I didn't have enough time for any major creative projects, but it was around that time that, after learning to embrace grief and the shortness of life, the world unraveled a bit and I knew I couldn't put it back together in the same formation. There emerged a deep sense of calling for something different - something deeper.
A few years later, I was on maternity leave with my third and final daughter. Away from my full time career for a year, I had more time to wrestle with the calling that beckoned around the time my son had come and gone.
It was on a walk along a riverbank that the idea started to take shape. My spiritual community was beginning a series of eight week sessions where a potluck meal was followed with a time of learning and connecting. They were looking for people to facilitate different learning groups that would enrich the participants but also enrich the community. I knew what I wanted to teach - something that had become a passion of mine - creativity.
That eight week session changed my life. Before starting the workshop, I spent weeks devouring every book I could find on creativity, talking to anyone whose creative ideas had inspired me, and eating, breathing, and dreaming creativity day in and day out.
I started Smart Women Company 10 years ago. The original items were made with a rubber stamp as gifts for friends; bath salts, cards. THe business part was by accident - a friend took them to a gift shop and the gift shop like them and ordered several dozen bath salts.
From this beginning, literally on my kitchen table and living room floor the business began. First as a way to make a little cash as a mom with an infant at home. Later, as a real job and business. Now, it is a way to give a venue to smart women and share their experience with each other.
"I have studied over the last several years my own inner, energetic relationship with food. As a very young child, I delighted in the investigation of different foods and my sense of taste. What a world to explore! Very soon, though, I learned to become afraid of food; I was taught the mental constructs of certain foods being "bad" for me, certain foods to avoid if I wanted to lose weight, and I learned not to trust my intuitive sense of when and what I wanted to eat. As an adolescent I came into a more tortured relationship with food; watching my feminine role models be so concerned with the thinness of their bodies as well as buying in to the media images of the ideal female, I alternately ate grapefruits all day, starved myself, went vegetarian, vegan, ayurvedic, ate right for my type, ate high-carbohydrate when I ran competitively, ate low-carbohydrate when that craze was in, etc. etc. etc. I have been all over the map when it comes to exploring all the ways to have an imbalanced relationship with food. Over the years, I have yearned to feel at ease again about food and have been examining the ways in which I desecrate what I eat and therefore my body, soul and spirit. I am now reclaiming the joy and ease with food that I experienced when I was a wee one."
Read the rest of Licia Berry's fascinating article on our energetic relationship with food. And check out her web site here.
Tonight, when I needed an ear - just a friendly contact with another human I liked - I reached out to someone I've yet to meet. Because his face was friendly and familiar, and he's become comfortable to me.
I think that's an increasingly common phenonmenon, and for those of us that spend a good deal of time online, more prevalent than ever. The definition of "stranger" has totally changed.
It used to be that a stranger was someone you'd never met. But that just doesn't suffice anymore, does it? Perhaps the better questions is asking what "meet" means today. I've had thousands of conversations across the web, phone, video, email, instant message...and yet, many of these people feel more in tune with me - with my person - than people I've "known" my whole life.
We were once confined by our geography and the range of our travels to find the people that made up the fabric of our relationships. We met people through sweeping commonalities - school, work, neighborhood, mutual friends - and it was chance to connect with someone who shared (I mean really shared) anything about who we were.
If you were anything like me, you often wondered if there was anyone who shared anything like who you were.
But I'm not a slave to my physical space anymore. I still very much cherish live human contact. There is no replacement for that to me, not ever. But there is instead a new presence of people, somewhere between "I know you" and "I've met you" that really, truly matters. That makes it okay to reach out to someone when you've not yet shared a room with them, if only because you know that through all that aether, they might just not be a stranger after all.
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