My friend Bob loves working with wood the way I love working with words. A few years ago, Bob made me a gorgeous bowl, about the size of a salad bowl, although I don’t eat salad out of it. I keep Bob’s bowl in my writing room along with my other totem treasures. I’ve used it for a few different things, but nothing ever felt right, so mostly it’s been empty.
At the end of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth course, one of the suggestions was to write out our favorite quotes, put them in a basket, and look at one each day. I’d already written my quotes on pastel colored index cards and pinned them to my cork board. Instead of buying a basket, I plucked Bob’s bowl from its shelf and put my quotes inside the bowl. Perfect…except the size of the cards was a little wrong. As I shuffled through the bowl of quotes, each day they got a little more crinkled at the corners.
This morning, I used my writing time to plan, dream, and take notes from Martha Beck’s Steering by Starlight. I kept finding more quotes for the bowl. And I thought it would be fun to cut all the cards into squares or octagons while I added the new quotes. Bob’s once empty but beautiful bowl now brims with wise words, none of them my own. Sometimes a girl’s just gotta play with colored paper and scissors.
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