Garden gnome or baby Ben?, botanical garden, sf, Canon Rebel XTI

I have been excited about books as gifts this holiday. A few in particular have been gifted to me lately and I want you to know about them!

Life Artist by Ali Edwards. If you don’t know her blog, hop on over and give it a read. Ali is a scrapbook celebrity, a talented designer and also lives and breathes pure inspiration. I think it has something to do with the fact that she is a life artist.

The book is part scrapbooking how to and partly about living creatively and enjoying the simple beauty in life. My kind of girl.

Her life art principles:
It’s about being awake.
It means celebrating everyday things.
It means letting go of your need for perfection.
It means using words and photos to tell your story.
It means sharing yourself.
It’s about being real.
It’s about documenting, telling, celebrating and experiencing life.
It’s about being open and embracing the process of creativity.
It’s about cultivating a lifestyle of creativity and beauty-with you as the creative director.
….

Confession: I fall asleep to most every book I pick up. After about three pages (sometimes three paragraphs) I doze off. I am a slow reader for this reason and often don’t finish books at all. (Full permission from superhero headquarters to sell or giveaway any and all unfinished books! Down with book guilt! Sometimes we get what we came for in the first chapter!)

Anyway, this has not been the case with Karen Maezen Miller’s fabulous book Momma Zen. I fell in love in the first few pages and have been snuggling up in bed enjoying her every word. This is a wonderful gift for your mama friends (and mamas to be) There is so much permission in here to be imperfect… and how enough that truly is.

An excerpt:
Buddhism teaches that all of life and all existences are perfect as they are. I can easily accept that about a bird or a fish or a rock, but hardly about my fellow human beings and never about me, a lowly bottle-feeding mother. You can substitute the circumstances in your own story (you know it by heart) and the comparisons and recriminations remain. How many of your thoughts are about not being good enough? My guess is nearly all of them. And none of them are the means for getting on with your life. They are the means for avoiding your life-detouring from what is right in front of you to make endless mental laps around the ground long ago covered and gone.”

Can I get an amen? I love this book.