Be a Renovator
Change yourself and change your environment.
HACKS in LIFE
Good smells can release tension, clear the mind, and liven up any environment. But keeping your house or office smelling good can be challenging because good smells dissipate and bad smells concentrate.
So, here are a few hacks to keep your place smell swell.
Let me start by not telling you the obvious ones: open your windows, wash your clothes, take out the garbage, change your air filters, clean the upholstery, bring in fresh flowers, and buy expensive oils (my favorite) and candles and sprays and diffusers.
Have a nice pot of orange, cinnamon, clove, and rosemary simmering for an hour or two. The smell will cleanse your home and you’ll have a nice beverage after.
Make your own air freshener. They are simple and cheap and you can change the fragrance to whatever suits you. Here’s a great article with 10 Homemade Air freshener recipes and another with health-conscious homemade Air Freshener Recipes.
Fill a mason jar with 1/2 C baking soda and a few drops of essential oils. Then poke a couple of holes in the lid and place them around the house. Baking soda is incredible at absorbing bad smells and it is incredibly cheap. Once the smell dissipates, put a few more drops of oil to refresh.
Finally, I’m not quite sure why this hasn’t caught on yet, but putting a car air freshener in the air vents of your house does a great job of refreshing the home without little maintenance necessary.
NEWS in HAIBUN
(A Haibun is a Japanese poem made of a piece of descriptive prose with a haiku at the end that complements, expands, or changes the initial meaning)
The US Supreme Court accidentally leaked a major opinion on abortion rights, appearing ready to overturn part of Idaho's near-total ban on Wednesday. According to a document published on the court's website then quickly removed, justices will rule that Idaho cannot deny emergency abortions to women whose health is in danger. On Thursday the decision was made, passing authority back to the courts of Idaho, on a case-by-case basis, temporarily suspending the Idaho law and allowing for abortions under severe or life-threatening circumstances. Justice Alito commented, “Apparently, the court has lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”
Under mass
pressure from the ants
roots pull out.
—
When the call
for bacon comes, one
must answer.
HEALTH in MIND
Biosocial Theory claims that some people are more sensitive to emotional stimuli more often, out of the blue, and more intensely. In addition, people can live within an invalidating social environment that doesn’t understand their emotions. It either tells you that your feelings are invalid, wrong, weird, or bad or ignores them by saying things like “Don’t be such a baby” and “Normal people don’t do this.”
But to build instead of destroy our connections with others, we are to understand, and accept, that people who are invalidating are also doing their best. We should remember that perhaps they don’t know how to handle the situation, or they’re afraid to fuel our negative behavior, or they might be stressed, as well.
When I first developed depression, no one around me had experience with it, and it hadn’t quite caught on as the new fad for the kids yet. During this time, I blocked many of my emotional responses because I knew people around me would think of me as weak, weird, or crazy. Over time, however, I recognized that when someone made an insensitive or derogatory comment about people with mental illnesses, like me, they likely didn’t know much about it, and therefore, I had the choice to either forgive them and slowly educate them or speak up. Most of the time, I chose to forgive them, though I struggled to educate them.
In this difficult wedge of finding validation yet accepting that others might not be capable of giving it to us, it is the transactions we have with our surroundings that count: how our environment influences us and, in turn, we influence our environment. To be healthy and safe, sometimes we have to leave the environment and sometimes we have to change it.
INSIDE my LIFE
Hello friends,
Aside from my two-and-a-half-year-old learning to use the phone and calling me at work to tell me that she loved me, this week has been relatively calm as things ready for the wildness of July:
Independance Day and Pioneer Day (if you’re in Utah)
The Tour de France
More wild weather all over the States
and My YouTube channel kicks off (July 1st) with a 30-day Poetry Course for the Everyday Person.
I’m still not done with all the videos, but I have enough to get started, and I’ll continue to film and edit as July rolls through.
It’s been a wild summer. I’ve spent an average of 7 hours a day since May working on this project and the newsletter you're currently reading. I’ve gone to sleep at midnight or later every day. I’ve purchased equipment, educational resources, apps, and memberships. And even though it’s not much, I’ve had to sell a few things to balance out the finances for these expenses.
I’ve also learned a lot through this process. It’s surprising how much goes into making even the simplest things in life that we often take for granted. And, as a creative, I never thought I would become a video editor or be researching business strategies online, and even though it’s been exhausting, I’m glad to do it. This is what you have to do in the modern world. But I don’t have wild expectations for this initial run. I know it’ll take time for this to pay off, but I’m hoping the effort and commitment I’m putting into this will allow me to make a living by doing the things I love the most, creating and helping others.
Thank you so much for reading, and have a magnificent weekend!