just hanging out.

i'm not really a traveler (I like my own bed, my own pillow and i hate airports) - so i love to spend my vacations 'just hanging out' - ten things i enjoy about just hanging out:

1. not setting the alarm for 4:20 a.m.
2. 40 minutes running...every day.
3. watching the today show and daytime food network.
4. having time to put on makeup - or choosing not to.
5. going out for lunch.
6. reading - measure 'success' of my time off by how tall the stack of read books rises (record is probably 8-9" from a beach trip a few summers ago).
7. feeling caught up.
8. cooking (sara and i made yummy sourcream pancakes - another barefoot contessa recipe - for breakfast yesterday)
9. spending time with sara (and katie when i'm lucky enough for our vacations to coincide).

i finished eat, pray, love by elizabeth gilbert yesterday afternoon - strongly recommend to everyone. this is the first book i've 'marked up' while i read it. thinking i need to do this always. which does mean no library books! i really enjoyed going back over the marked up pages when i'd finished - recalled some of my favorite lines:

meditation stuff...teaches you how to quiet your mind. ...I need to actively
learn {me, too!} ...how to, as Walt Whitman once wrote, stand "apart from
the pulling and hauling...amused, complacent, compassionating, idle,
unitary...both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it all."

When I get lonely these days, I think: so be lonely...Learn your way around
loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. ...never again
use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own
unfulfilled yearnings. {note that i have never lived by myself and i wonder
sometimes if i've missed out on an important learning...about myself}

...the Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible
brothers...[who] inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and
happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) {me
too!} poetry.

this book was so different from the chicklit i typically tend toward, especially on vacation :-), but it made me think about my life and my spirituality in a new way. think i've found my bookclub book.

from yesterday's journal entry - a wonderful line from walt whitman's song of myself:

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

view from our front door on sunday morning

so finally - #10 on my list - just having time to think and explore!