“The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” —Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

This week has been filled with hard moments. Gratitude and joy are not always there. Sometimes feelings of gratitude, joy, and delight are fleeting— here for an instant before they seem to disappear. But they are still here. They are here in the moments of paying attention.

This Little Moments Lately post is a collection of random notes + affirmations from my journal, moments + things I’m paying attention to, and flashes of delight from the last week.

Notes + Quotes from the book I’m reading, The Artist’s Way:

• Why should we all use our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
• You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.
• A mind too active is no mind at all.

As suggested in this book, I’ve been doing morning pages— three pages of stream of consciousness writing first thing in the morning. The idea is that you write down anything and everything that crosses your mind no matter how silly or trivial your thoughts may seem. Because it’s these thoughts that stand between you and your creativity. Morning pages get us to the other side of our fear, our negativity, our moods, and our inner critic. Then, we are able to find our own quiet center and the small voice that is both our creator’s and our own.

Creativity Affirmations:

• My creativity heals me.
• My intuition is always aligned.
• I am creative for a purpose.
• As I listen to my creativity, I am led to my creator.

Moments + things I’m paying attention to:

• The smell of pine trees in the woods behind our house
• Filtered sunlight coming in through the window
• Others’ facial expressions + body language
• The words of songs I’ve listened to a thousand times
• Animals that I tend to take for granted at times— robins, squirrels, finches, ducks, deer
• The sound + feeling of laughter
• Hugging some people for the first time in over a year
• Relationships that feel good

Flashes of delight from the past week—

Walks in the park with the deer, melting snow, sunsets

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Baking (oatmeal chocolate chip pumpkin muffins, lemon chia seed bread, instant pot peanut butter cheesecake)

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Celebrating Ella’s 7th birthday

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Thank you for being here. If I’m being really honest, sometimes these posts are hard to write. But I write them because I believe that no matter what, there are always little moments of joy in life, and it’s important for me to practice leaning into those every week.

Reminder to self and whoever else may need to hear it: tell the people you love that you love them, trust your intuition, and pay attention to the good + the beauty in life— it’s always there for us, even when it doesn’t feel that way.