a round off is a sparkly cartwheel
The 4th of July parade is a big deal in my hometown. People start designing and creating epic floats months in advance. Marching bands fly in from across the country. And kids decorate their bikes so they can be part of the parade.
One year, when we were 8 or 9, my friend Alex and I decided that we wanted to do cartwheels in the parade. We dressed in red, white and blue and cartwheeled through our tiny town. I don't remember that much about the experience except that Alex's mother wouldn't let us do the entire parade route and I was very disappointed. 🤣
Also, I always found regular cartwheels to be kind of boring so I believe I did roundoffs the whole time. A roundoff, for the uninitiated, is a cartwheel with a twist. Basically, it's a sparkly cartwheel.
And that brings us to the title of this email: The Roundoff. This is a monthly-ish blog where I share a bit about what I'm exploring, learning, reading, eating and more.
Welcome to The Roundoff. I hope reading this feels like doing a sparkly cartwheel.
CREATING: I've got a few secret projects that I am so excited about. I'll be sharing one of them with you very soon. (If you've seen my YouTube channel lately, you may have noticed that I'm up to something.)
Also, today's episode of The Find Your Awesome Podcast is a good one. I talk to Patty Lennon (Santa's sister) about the art of receiving and the truth about money. Listen here, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
OBSERVING: We have baby bunnies! There are three of them in a nest under my office window. I say, "good morning" to them every day and tell them that they are brave and beautiful and that I love them.
READING: I recently finished Cured by Jeffrey Reddinger, M.D. and I highly recommend it. It felt like everything my soul knows to be true about our health, but it's written by an initially skeptical physician who goes on a journey to understand spontaneous healing.
I also read The Magician of Lhasa and The Four Paws of Spiritual Success, both by David Michie. The first one was a fun spiritual thriller. The second one sounds ridiculous. The narrator is a cat--the Dalai Lama's cat. The title is silly. And yet, I found this book and the others in the series to be my favorite ways to learn about Buddhist principals.
EATING: Two of my favorite recent creations were pasta with balsamic mushrooms, spinach, walnuts, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic tofu and (this is a separate meal) crispy potatoes with lentil taco "meat," cashew sour cream and cucumber, tomato, corn and black bean salsa. I also just started making my own cashew milk and, while I want to make a little tweak to the recipe, it was delicious over my golden granola today.
WATCHING: We still haven't turned on the TV since our camper adventure. This was the first time I haven't watched the Olympics in as long as I can remember. I missed it, but not as much as I expected. I find that when I take a break from TV I come to wonder how I ever had time to watch it. Our former TV time has been replaced by playing Shot in the Dark (a trivia game) and Rhyme Out (a rhyming game).
MOVING: I've been swimming, biking, running, strength training and walking, and I've also been having a lot of fun juggling lately.
NOTICING: A few months ago, when the grief was new, it was heavy. It was too heavy to pick up. It was too heavy to embody. It was so big that I couldn't fit it in me. Now, the grief is still very much present, but it is becoming part of me.
We often think that people are better or "over it" a few months after losing a loved one. They're not. We're not. It's just that the grief is no longer outside them. It has begun to settle inside them, to coat their insides with gold the way the Japanese art of kintsugi repairs the cracks of broken pottery with gold. This, my soul tells me, is how we come to amplify the light even more.
I love you.
Love,
Kelsey
FREE RESOURCES:
Blog
The Find Your Awesome Podcast
YouTube
Meditations
Free Human Design Chart
PLAY WITH KELSEY:
Human Design Readings
One-on-One Coaching
SELF-STUDY OPTIONS:
Unstuck Yourself
Inner Critic Transformation
Sparking Joy