Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 27

Embracing Color

I have a goal, well, I have many goals, but one big goal I have this year is to encourage people to embrace color.

Why the fear? I find myself constantly wondering. We were at an event and a woman came up to me and told me how much she loved my outfit (I was wearing my orange leather coat from Morocco with a dress and long black boots) and that even though she wasn’t dressed up, she loved seeing me dressed up.

That also happens with color– people tell me how much they like my color-filled work. And yet they’re wearing black and afraid of expressing it themselves.

Maybe I have been lucky that my mom encouraged color (“That store was dead inside!” she might exclaim after going somewhere that she felt had no color) and then later it was the same with my friend Bonnie when my former husband and I bought our first house.

“Live with it for a while,” she had suggested, noting that I’d then know what colors to paint the rooms. And she was right– within several years all the white walls, except the hallway, were painted a color.

I started small, or light, and gradually worked my way into bolder colors, sometimes choosing several colors for one room, that way everything didn’t feel like it was shouting too much. People thought I was crazy to paint my kitchen lime green, but once the white cabinets and colored tile were in place, it all came together.

It’s the same with my clothes. I used to wear a lot of navy blue. When I married the first time, I used navy blue as my color. My chosen towels were navy blue. There was navy blue everywhere. I ran in a lot of black and dark colors, making me feel as dull and drab as a Midwestern winter day.

But at some point I wanted to be something more; I didn’t want to be a piece of paneling, blending into a wall.

Color makes a dark day feel happy, color makes me feel happy. I get more compliments when I wear color.

Life is too short, wear color, paint a room a happy hue. Carry a handbag with a fun print and pattern.

And you’ll see how much better life can be. With color.

No Regrets

It’s easy to get caught up in feeling like what we have accomplished isn’t enough or to reach an age where we look back and wonder what we missed out on. It seems it’s even easier to feel that way because the billboard messages are large and more prevalent– thanks to social media and technology– or because someone has written a book telling us so (the inspiration shall we say for this blog, but I won’t reveal the book as I believe it’s whiny and stupid and I’d rather give you a positive inspirational message).

Over the past few years, I’ve often found myself reflecting on choices I’ve made and as I drive through life and the roads I didn’t choose pass me by, I see how easy it is to spend my time wondering what if I had made other choices. Sometimes I believe I haven’t accomplished enough because I haven’t accomplished some of the goals I set for myself going forty years back.

Thankfully, I’ve managed to remind myself to fill the glass back up of all that I have accomplished. While in many ways it’s not the life I expected to have, I know that in the long run, I’ve had a better life. And when I feel bad about these thoughts, I ask myself what I can do with them, where I can put them, how I can include them in my writing (most my fiction).

Then there are the things that have happened to us that we, quite honestly, didn’t ask for. Those things? Those are the ones where our response is what it’s about. We can’t change them, we can’t spend our days agonizing over everything we could have done differently. What we can do is find a way through it and use it in our lives to propel us forward.

My life choices haven’t been the same as many people and, just as I see the choices others have made, I know they aren’t ones I would have made. However, that doesn’t mean they are bad, they are for that person, not me, because I’m supposed to have a different life.

If you’re still feeling like there’s something you haven’t done, then find a way to make it happen, or make some aspect of it happen. Life is short and you don’t want more time to pass you by. But if you need to rest to collect your thoughts and figure out what’s next, then take the time to do that.

Whatever it is that you need to do to make your life one that makes you happy, do it. Don’t let others tell you anything else. Reflect back on where you came from if you need to, but don’t stay there too long. There is much hope in the future and you can start now to make that light burn brighter.

Helping Each Other

Things had gotten slightly out of whack at our house.

It had been really important to me to make Greg’s lunch- and not for the reasons most people might think I did it– but because I knew that if I made him lunch, he was more likely to eat better than than eating crap or not eating at all (and arriving home starving and grabbing whatever he could from the kitchen).

But the pace of my life in the past year has changed, especially because I had to speed the Chelle Summer process and creation up in preparation for my research job that ends in six weeks. And in that time, there were some things I had to let go. One of them turned out to be Greg’s lunches.

Last spring when he did the Mt. Taylor Quadrathlon– the crazy thing where he bikes, runs, snow shoes, and skis both up and down a mountain– the weather was terrible. At the finish line where I shivered for an hour wrapped in a blanket in the wind waiting for him to finish, I told him that I was retiring from future races.

When he couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers several months from frost bite, he, too, said he was retiring from the race.

But the problem was he also retired from any motivation to exercise. Lilly didn’t get her morning runs with him (she usually gets one from each of us) and the weight that he had worked so hard to lose, crept back on.

I knew that when we joined “the winter pool” in October that my 11:00 am swims weren’t going to work for him because he’s teaching. When he found out the pool and gym open at 5:00 during the week, he adjusted his swimming from evening to first thing in the morning.

That left weekends when the afternoons can be filled kids whose parents have dumped them at the pool where they exercise. I made a proposal that we swim on weekends right after my workout.

This is torture for me as I’m coming off six miles and running and walking with the dogs and I’m cold. But if I go, Greg will go, and we’ll be finished for the day. The entire reason I run first thing in the morning is because I know I would never run if I waited until afternoon. If Greg does his workout early, I can see it’s the same for him. Otherwise, it’s easy to spend the day making up every excuse in one’s head of why not to go.

Now that we are back to the post-holiday new year routine, the first thing we did Sunday morning after arriving home from LA the night before and my early morning workout was go to the pool. I knew more than anything, we had to show up.

So that left me with Greg’s lunches.

I recently found a recipe for breakfast sandwiches that can be made ahead of time and frozen. Between these and breakfast burritos, he can down them after the pool on his way to school and then we can figure out snacks to keep him full the rest of the day.

It’s a hard balance with my overflowing plate right now and it means extra work to plan, but if I want Greg to succeed with his fitness and weight loss, he shouldn’t have to go that road alone. Two are always stronger than one.

It’s worth the journey.

Article in Rio Rancho Observer

Happy 2020, everyone! Let’s cheer a great year ahead!

In case you missed it, here’s an article recently written about me in the Rio Rancho Observer. The blog will return next week!

Read it here.

My Christmas Gift

I like to give parties. And I like to do Christmas cards.

I know there are many people out there who hate both of these things, or at least doing them. Many are happy to attend a party or receive a card though. And I am quite happy to invite them to a party and send them a card. If there were some way I could invite more people– because I have friends all over the world– to my house for parties, I would.

And I like to make a new dress when I have a party. Yes, I realize it all sounds extreme, but it’s not something I do daily or even weekly, just maybe twice a year. And through planning, as Greg will attest, the day of the party isn’t frantic at our house at all. In fact, the hardest part is right before the guests arrive and all the food is laid out, one of us has to remain in eye distance of the food because Ash will steal things off a counter, table, anywhere reachable.

Our house is typically very zen by fifteen minutes before the party starts (although there was the one party where Nestle decided to go for a swim right before the guests arrived and when she heard the doorbell, she went flying out of the pool and through the house, leaving a wrath of water on the clean floors).

I don’t exchange gifts with many people in my life now without my parents and younger sister here, however, Christmas to me isn’t about exchanging gifts anyway. It’s about something small I can do for a larger group of people and thus the party and the cards, those are my gifts to all.

The Patience of the Unknown

Fr. Josh, a priest I know, said once that he was praying to Mary because he needed help with patience and that was something obviously Mary knew well. It didn’t resonate with me at the time, but as I have found myself drawn closer to Our Lady of Guadalupe (essentially, the Mexican Mary) and on Thursday, December 12, I will celebrate my birthday on her feast day, I have awoken to what she is teaching me this year.

I have been writing recently that my job will end in late January and I’ve been busy trying to gain both traction and momentum as I await for new windows and doors to open. After all, I know well that if you want doors and windows to open, you need to work hard, too.

But in all of this, has been much frustration as I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels, taking more steps back than forward, and feeling a start-stop-start-stop with all that I do.

Then one day it occurred to me, maybe it was because yesterday is the celebrated Immaculate Conception, that Mary didn’t know why she was called on to be Jesus’s mother. And that’s when what Fr. Josh said to me several years ago about praying to Mary to learn patience better made sense.

I feel like I know what I’m supposed to be, to do. I feel that I am supposed to be more, to do bigger things. And yet here I stand with a gorge separating me from where I want to be. I ask and ask and ask to cross it (and I’ve recently decided that it’s a gulf and that maybe I should swim across it), but it’s still start-stop-start-stop.

Every year this time I feel closer to Guadalupe, I feel a stronger sense of meaning on my birthday, that the day is more than, well, my birthday. It’s a day– and time– that Guadalupe comes closer and brings me messages for the journey, while we also are in the thick of the waiting and magic of Advent.

Patience. The unknown. All the things I hate. And yet Guadalupe is saying, “It’s coming. I’m with you. Keep walking with me. This journey will make sense and you’ll get across that gulf. But not on your schedule. On God’s, on mine.”

Stay the course, I often tell myself, just as we did particularly when running cross country. Stay the course. It will come, it will happen. Patience. The lesson has to be learned first.

The Holiday Season Upon Us

How did it get here so fast? Where did the year go?

And with that comes, we’re going to blink and it’s going to be January!

It’s hard to believe that it’s December already and all I keep thinking is how quickly the next few weeks are going to fly by. Seems so different than childhood when it felt like Christmas Day would never arrive, like it took all year for time to pass on just Christmas Eve.

The Christmas season– Advent– is one of waiting, of listening to what’s inside us, of the end of the year when we reflect back on not only where we’ve been, but where we want to go. All this as we await the magic of Christmas Eve and the joy and peace of Christmas Day.

While it’s a challenge during this time when we’re pulled in all sorts of directions for different reasons, take the time to think about what it means to you, what’s inside of you that you’ve been pushing aside or ignoring. As we come to the end of another year, it’s the perfect opportunity to seize what we don’t want to miss in the future.

And have a few cookies, too.

Thankfulness

Since my mom’s death, I’ve been able to write more about her struggles and challenges in life– many of which I believe stem from her having had polio when she was six and walking with a limp the rest of her life. But I also have become more aware of how the way she felt about herself translated to us, her children. She loved us, I have no doubt about that, but that’s not what this about.

Instead, it’s about how she never felt good enough with anything that she accomplished or had in her life.

And if you know me well enough, do you see the connection?

While she often told me that I was from another limb of the family tree– one that didn’t connect with the rest of the family– what reflects back at me is how much I saw the pain, the challenges, the unfulfilled lives of my parents, and how I didn’t want that to be me.

Maybe I am from another limb, maybe I’m an old soul, but with each passing day I am more and more aware of how I choose to spend my time and what goals I want to achieve are a culmination of everything that makes me who I am.

Long before there was social media where I could share what inspires me, the items I create, or anything about my writing (how different my life would have been if there had been social media when my first book about sibling suicide grief was published), I was still doing everything I am today. I was still a bit crazy (okay, anal is a better word) about my housekeeping, after all who judges a husband on how clean a house looks?! It’s always the female half who gets the judgment. I ran, I swam, and I ran my dogs. I cooked, I tried new recipes. And there was that doctorate somewhere in the midst of all of this. I thought people who took three-day tests were crazy until I became one of them.

Everything.

These things that make me not just who I am, but who I want to be. As I stand here, I’m in front of a gulf that separates me from where I am today and where I want to be. I used to call it a gorge, but I’ve changed it to a gulf because I can swim that gulf. I wasn’t sure how I’d get across the gorge as there wasn’t a bridge.

I struggle some days with the fact that I am not where I want to be, that my goals that seem so close in my mind, still look so far away on the outside. And then I take myself back to my youth, to the very things that have inspired me to get here, that have kept me motivated. And I remind myself to keep going.

I don’t want to live an unfulfilled life. I don’t want the sadness and depression that I saw plague both my parents in their lives. The inspiration is flowing so fast some days that it’s overwhelming, but it’s what keeps me going. I rest when I need to and gather strength for the next leg of the journey.

I have worked hard to get here. I might have a long way to go to where I want to be, but somehow I’ll get there. I refuse to be sidelined by the thoughts of “not good enough” that my mom had.

More than anything, for this Thanksgiving week, I am reminded how much I am thankful for who I am.

Why not?

Lois Bloom said some of the most significant words in my life to me when she turned around in the car and asked me “Why not?”

She and her husband Sam had just picked me up from the airport in Orange County where I had flown in to speak at an event several days later. First, I was going to spend a few days with them at their house and a friend I was texting in the car asked if I was going to surf while I was in LA.

I told Lois and Sam this, and that I had told him no, and that’s when Lois turned her head toward me in the back of the car and said, “Why not? You can rent a surfboard.”

But I also hadn’t thought to bring a swimsuit, I told her– not even addressing that I’d only been out on a surfboard three times and was both exhilarated and still fearful of the experience.

“You can buy one,” she reminded me.

I don’t want to say that I was raised in a home where new opportunities weren’t encouraged because that wasn’t the case. As I grew older, I began to sense that because my mom had spent all but the first six years of her life with the effects of Polio lurking in the background and being told she couldn’t even have ballet slippers because she couldn’t wear them, that life became more reserve, more tentative.

I wondered in later years, while my friends were on the swim team and soccer team, why I hadn’t been asked if I wanted to do them. She told me I’d shown no interest although when I asked to join summer track after sixth grade she signed me up and took me to buy a very new thing, running shoes.

Surfing had been something I never thought I would do, after all, in that time you didn’t see girls on surfboards like we do now, and having had the opportunity three times, that was great.

But Lois knew there was no reason I couldn’t do more of it. And she was right. She, Sam, and I took what I called a “family outing” to the surf shop and I rented a board and a wet suit. I found a bikini between Target and TJ Maxx. I took one lesson and then for those few days I was in LA, I drove down to the beach attempted to get up on the board. Even if I paddled around, even if it were a cloudy and dreary day (it was June gloom), I got out on the water, shivering, and did it anyway.

By the time, I returned to Chicago– where I was living at the time– I called Jamie, the surf shop owner and a board maker, and asked him when he could have a board ready for me.

Why not? I thought.

I won’t say that I’m any great surfer because I’m not, but the lessons from surfing, from the ocean, have taught me more in those eight years since I got the board than in most of my life.

All because of two words, one question. Listen. There is always a way forward to more.

Setting My Creativity Free

When I was growing up, we had a big plastic bag filled with crayons. It was a Kmart bag or something similar and we were always adding stray crayons to it. When my sister Karen was in college, she would bring home the green and white dot matrix printer paper– stacks and stacks of it– so Denise and I were never without scrap paper to draw on.

But somewhere along the line, I stopped drawing, I stopped using crayons. And then I stopped using markers. As it was with sewing, I guess I just thought I was busy doing other things and really didn’t give it a second thought.

When I started Chelle Summer four years ago though, one of the goals was to start creating my own fabric designs. This meant, yes, that I had to draw and paint and create. For some reason I found this hard and while I would travel with markers and paper (I stopped taking paint and canvases to Los Angeles, much to the relief of Greg who was glad we had the extra space in the car) and yet I drew nothing. I set small goals, like an hour in the evening of just doodling. Still nothing.

What was this block? I finally realized it had something to do with the freedom that I give myself in my head to do things. While I’m good about writing five days a week, about spending some time each day working on sewing projects, I was having a harder time getting my visual creativity of drawing on paper to emerge from my head.

Finally, one afternoon in the middle of the week, I told myself to take some time and do some creating. From there I started doodling on the church bulletin during the homilies (shhh, don’t tell anyone that– but as I do the church’s social media, I’m also writing quotes down from the homilies so it gives me a better focus than of the crying child that’s keeping me from hearing everything). I spent several hours yesterday working on paintings, something I typical only can do on Sundays otherwise I end up going somewhere with paint on my hands.

Slowly but surely, that side of my creativity is emerging again. The hardest part– like my writing and sewing– is that there is much I want to do. And yet I know that if I spend time on it when I’m not doing other things or even just a few minutes a day, that is moving forward.