Leo Babauta on Practice

I read Leo's blog, Zen Habits, fairly regularly and have found it inspiring. One thing I like about Leo's blog is that it has no advertisements, is reader supported, uncopywrited, worker-owned, and hand-made. Fabulous!  Zen Habits has been an encouragement to slow down my life a bit and really be present in the moment. He has a nice article on Practice that I just read and a link in it to Ali Edwards' musings on practice as well. I had read Ali's before, but it was nice to revisit. A reminder that my artistic pursuits need a little practice as well.

I can pack a lot into a day and have let art slide a bit while I got to absorb a little of other aspects of my life, but I'm ready now to put art back into the practice cycle. I have been doing my photo a day, for the last 15 days.

I'm going to do some art with those soon. I'm still working out the inability to upload directly to the computer so it requires more effort like printing (remember doing that?) photos and scanning to upload. I feel like I'm in the dark ages and hoping Canon and Apple catch up soon.

Along the lines of Leo's list of practices, a fellow dental hygienist shared with me a little nugget she took away from a continuing education course once- "Only touch it once". I have adopted that in many ways and it has lead to a real peace and order to my daily living. I could create chaos dropping stuff here and there and never being able to find what I was looking for.  I was spending incredible amounts of time looking for things. Dealing with whatever I touch all the way to where I really want it to be is fabulous!  Mail, especially. It is sorted, shredded, recycled and dealt with immediately when I get home. I do still have a small stack of things to go up or down the stairs occasionally but that, too has some order to it.

Practice has a lot of payoffs.
And because I'm a visual person- here's a little sidewalk art I did yesterday.
My wish for you.