Throwback Thursday: Celebrating Your Life

This is a post from a blog I used to write for my energy medicine practice.  It was originally posted on Nov 12, 2012  and I titled it...

The Vibration of Celebrating Your Life

I have been hearing about happiness lately.

I want to take a moment to write about how powerful the vibration of happiness can be when it is experienced as celebration.

Here's a quick example of what I'm talking about.  I remember getting some really good news about a family member going into remission from cancer.  That's really something to celebrate right?  But it's a funny thing, about doctors.  They seem to be really worried that you're going to get your hopes up.  At least the doctors in this story were displaying that fear.  And because they want you to be ready for when that other shoe drops, they spend a lot of energy preparing you for the worst.

I don't know how it is for you, but I don't really like it when someone rains on my parade, and so after several days of it, I got angry.  I wanted to CELEBRATE what I considered a huge miracle.  So I rebelled.  Don't I always?  I said to myself--and to anyone else who would listen, "Yes!" we are going to celebrate this victory.  "Yes!" we are going to graciously accept this miracle, and be grateful and express appreciation, because this is an amazing gift.  And we need to start living that!

Here's my point.  Don't let ANYONE stop you from celebrating - ever.  The Universe loves to party and I believe  celebrations help us come into alignment with Universal or Divine energy.  I feel that celebrating is one of the keys to overcoming terminal disease.  It changes perception, and ramps up the energy of pure joy.

But this isn't just about overcoming illness.  This is about celebrating your life.  Your loved ones, your passions, what ever you can think of to celebrate.

New Zine

I just finished the template to my latest zine, Where Do The Spoons Go?  An Adventure Story for Flatware.

It goes to be copied tomorrow.  And then it will be available to order from Pegana Press.  Black and White photocopied paper zine.  24 pages in half page format.  Text light with collage.

Have you ever wondered where the missing spoons go?  This story investigates that question.  Very tongue in cheek.  Humor.

The Origins of Tea With Whimsy

Every now and again I refer to Tea With Whimsy in my writing.  Whimsy and I go waaaayyyy back.  Today I'd like to talk a little bit about Tea With Whimsy, where the idea came from and how it has evolved.

Once upon a time, way back in 1992, I began writing a story called Tea With Whimsy.  It was a day dream ramble about a very young woman living alone in Seattle, who finds herself in an Alice in Wonderland type adventure, and I think it's safe to say that it was heavily influenced by old movies and TV shows which featured witches.

As circumstances would have it, we ended up moving a couple of times and I lost track of Tea With Whimsy.  Not only that, I mostly stopped writing anything.  But even though I lost the original story, I never forgot the title.

Two decades later, I discovered blogging.  I posted every day for months when I first began, I was that hungry to write.  But even in those days, though I was writing non fiction accounts of my thoughts and experiences, I began to realize they were a bit bizarre for public consumption.  And because I was writing so much, my creative imagination woke up and wanted to express itself.  I decided I needed a separate blog to write fiction.

I remembered Tea With Whimsy, and thought maybe I could rediscover the story if I began blogging it.  So that became the title of my story writing blog.  

To test the waters, I started writing short story posts.  In fact, several of the stories I wrote for Tea With Whimsy,  eventually found their way into Hearth & Heart.

After a year of posting stories in Tea With Whimsy, I began to have trouble sleeping and so I regularly stayed up late and wrote until I fell asleep at my computer.  That's when Tea With Whimsy became a story instead of a blog.  Starting as a serialized story, it grew and took on a life of it's own.  

Eventually, I fell in love with the characters and their world. The story began to tell itself.  I took the posted fragments and began to work on it seriously and discontinued the blog.   

It was thanks to that blog that I began writing stories again.  Tea With Whimsy led me to write other works which later became Winter Tales, and the Hearth & Heart series.  Now I write daily.  When I'm not creating story content for my zines, I am posting stories for my Patrons on Patreon, or I am writing stories here on this blog for my feature the Saturday Breakfast Serial.

This feature Tea for Tue, is a way to turn my thoughts back to Tea With Whimsy.  By writing about Whimsy, I know it will stimulate me to get back to telling that story.  I plan to use this feature to post updates on how the story is coming along, as well as back ground on the characters.

If you're interested in how Tea With Whimsy is progressing, follow me here, or you can get updates on facebook if that's easier for you, by liking and following  https://www.facebook.com/TeaWithWhimsy/  .  I know it would help motivate me to know you were interested and reading.  And I always welcome constructive feedback.  

Momentary Magic - A Hallowe'en Recollection

A Hallowe’en Recollection

As a kid, Hallowe'en was one of my all time favorite holidays. I loved every thing about it. The mystery, the dressing in costume, the being out of doors after dark, and yes -- the CANDY! Candy was SOOO much better when I was a kid, than it is now.
It was also a way to kick off what seemed to my young mind to be the "Holiday Season". The beginning of the much anticipated triumvirate…Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Somehow, I got out of the habit of observing Hallowe'en. It became a night where my husband Mike and I would watch an old classic monster movie and wait for trick or treaters who never came. And then a few years back I happened to be meditating by the fire on Hallowe'en.
       The sun had set, and though it was fairly early in the evening Mike was asleep in his armchair in the library. I had gone into the living room and was sitting by the fire, staring into the flames, allowing myself to soar over the countryside looking down on Hallowe'en celebrations across the land. It was a nice little flight of fancy. After a while, I got up and wandered toward the Kitchen to make dinner.
I felt someone rush up behind me, and I jumped out of the way thinking Mike was playing a joke, trying to scare me. But when I jumped aside, I felt the energy rush on past me. I looked around at a room void of any person but myself.
“Very funny,” I said to the room at large. But then just to make sure, I tiptoed down the hallway to the library to peek at my husband who was sound asleep, as I expected. He wouldn't have been able to get back into his chair so quickly and not without a tremendous amount of racket.
Was I a little spooked? Only a little because my thinking mind jumped in to analyze what had taken place, and declared "that was spooky".  But my initial FEELING was that the energy seemed mischievous, and more like a prank. There was a spirit of fun to it. Like someone rushing up and shouting "Boo!" --then running away and laughing. Only when I thought about being approached by something unknown that felt so tangible, did I experience a spooky feeling. But more in a fun way. You know?
It reminded me of what Hallowe'en was like for me when I was a kid. The thrill of mystery and the unknown. Being outside at night. Feeling a gust of wind and seeing the leaves blowing through the air and tumbling and skipping across the grass. Sometimes there would be a bright moon, sometimes not. And always the first light snow of the year.
The neighborhood looked so different by the light of street lamps which changed perception of color. The air was full of the scent of Autumn leaves and the freshness of night air. The sound of wind rustling through trees added to the mystery.
And the sidewalks were filled with kids scurrying up to houses, knocking on doors, with the harmonic sing song of "trick or treat" floating through the air from multiple sources.
There was a sense of freedom and a sense of adventure. A night given over to make believe and imagination. A night of heightened perception, and expectations.
Having been visited by a "playful spirit" on Hallowe'en night was a gift. It reminded me what is was that made that night special to me as a kid. A mysterious sense of spooky fun!



This essay originally appeared in my blog Tea With Whimsy on October 24, 2012. This current version was published in Hearth & Heart Vol 1 2015 Autumn Edition  Copyright Rita Tortorello  2015  I wanted to share it here in honor of Hallowe'en.

For more information on Hearth & Heart visit Pegana Press.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

One of my nephews has always been a card.  Today I want to share this little story about his sense of humor.

When he was still very young, say about 7 or 8 years old, he and his dad were driving past a dead end road in their town, with a sign.  Ryan immediately piped up with how sad it was that they didn't have any electricity in that neighborhood.  His dad responded by asking him how he knew that.  Ryan's punch line was "No Outlet".

the Saturday Breakfast Serial part 2

Welcome to the Saturday Breakfast Serial, where every week I post another installment of a serialized original story.

Read Part One of The Desk here

Part Two of 

The Desk

It had been way too long since I had done laundry and it had been building up.  I was standing in the laundry room surrounded by my sorted piles of sheets, towels, and clothes cleaning out pockets and pre-treating stains.  I reached into the pocket of a pair of jeans, that I use for gardening.  “What is this?”  I found myself asking when my fingers closed around a metal object.
I pulled out the key that had been found in the garden and I suddenly remembered the desk.  Would the key work?  Would I finally be able to open the desk and start using it?  And what would I find inside?  Why had it been locked?  My imagination became very active as I put the key on the shelf over the washing machine for safe keeping.  “You stay right there until I get a load started and then you and I are going to see if you fit that desk.”  I found myself speaking to the key.  I was pretty sure that if I spoke the words out loud, this time I wouldn’t forget to try it.
I finished sorting the clothes and got some towels loaded into the washer.  Switching on the machine, I reached for the key, and as my fingers closed tightly around it, a call came through.    “Sorry.  Not home,”  I said in response to the insistent ringing as I sashayed down the hall to the desk.
There it stood gleaming before me in the autumn sunlight streaming in through the window and shining like a spotlight upon the desk.  “Ta da!” it seemed to say.  “Here I am, ready to reveal all my secrets.”
Carefully I placed the iron key in the lock.  But it was immediately obvious that the key was too small for the desk lock.  I tried anyway and gave up disappointed.  Such a build up, for nothing.
I examined the key in my hand.  Well, it’s pretty anyway, I thought to myself and went to hunt up a thin ribbon to string it with for a necklace.

Over the next few days I obsessed over the desk.  I couldn’t get over my disappointment and what made it all the more frustrating, was that it had never bothered me before.  I suddenly seemed to be dissatisfied with everything, and impatient.  I simply couldn’t get it off my mind.  I learned first hand, what it means to have a one track mind, as my thoughts spiraled around and around that one subject.  I was definitely in a rut.
One day I’d had enough.  I had tried every second hand store and antique dealer in town to find old keys.  I tried picking the lock.  I even went so far as to jiggle the desk in hopes that the lock would work loose.
Finally, I decided to just get rid of the desk.  It had consumed my thoughts for weeks, and I was ready to be free.  I had been trying to ignore it, and as I contemplated loading it into the car I realized it had gotten quite dusty.  I decided the very least I could do was to give it one last good polishing.
I made a thorough job of it, getting the caked on dust out of the intricate carving.  Making the golden highlights of the grain stand out.  I was polishing the tall curving legs when I noticed a lot of cobwebs underneath.  I cautiously peeked under the desk for spiders before removing the webs.
“No!” I shrieked.



Come back next Saturday for another installment of the Saturday Breakfast Serial.

Throw Back Thursday-Autumn Leaves

(Autumn Leaves originally posted Oct 18, 2015)

Autumn Leaves (revisited) 

I just looked up from my busy life, to catch a glimpse of Autumn racing past on the wind.  I have done almost nothing this year to mingle with Time as it dons its seasonal garment of falling leaves, damp scents, misty mornings, warm sunny afternoons where the light falls upon the earth from a different point on the horizon, early evenings, and chilled air.

How is it possible to miss metabolizing this? Oh yes, I know what it is.  The illusion that I have a To Do list that will actually get done if I just keep at it. Just a distraction to keep me engaged with busy work. Keeping me busy Doing, rather than Being.

My birthright--my one great talent has always been for being present and Noticing.  Somehow, I have slipped into drowsiness, as I keep my nose to the grindstone, literally focusing on the dust particles of life.  The more I focus, the less I see.

Ducks in a row?  What is that nonsense?  Let them wander.  Let them fly.