Creativity, Busboys and Good Mistakes

*Monday, Oct. 17, 2011: Today I am grateful for the time I got to be creative. As a house, we decided to make our own mailboxes for our house so sorting mail is a little easier and less cluttered. So I took this as an opportunity to let my creative juices flow...I locked myself up in my bedroom and began painting. I forgot how much painting centered and relaxed me. I miss painting so much! I just started going and my inspiration came from a Spirituality night I led last year in my Bridgeport community. I took the image of a heart, bursting with color and painted it on my mailbox as the background. When we did the Spirituality night last year, using that image, we decided to paint the same image as a mural in our basement and the picture below is the mural we painted...at least 1/2 way finished mural... I painted this image on my mailbox because it's 1) colorful and 2) a good reminder of how I should let my love flow...openly, without reservations. I am grateful for the few hours I got to be creative tonight.



*Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011: Tonight Colleen and I tagged along with Brittney to open mic night at Busboys and Poets. We went because Brittney asked us to because her client that recently past wrote a poem and one of her co-workers was reading it at the open mic night that night. So we walked into Busboys and Poets and was flooded with the cool ambiance and funky people in the room. Each poet got up and gave their slam poetry, sang or recited prose and then Britt's co-worker got up there. He prefaced the poem with it's author's story...he told of how the author was a friend, a father figure and a brother to everyone he met. I'm not going to lie, I started to tear up a bit as he spoke. You could just feel the love radiating off of each of the listeners as Britt's co-worker shared this special treasure with us. It was beautiful and I was so grateful to be a part of it. I never knew the author but from seeing/hearing the impact he had on Britt and listening to his poem last night and feeling the outpouring of love surrounding the reader, I can't help but feel like he was a part of my life.



*Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011: Alright, let me set the scene for you. So this morning I got to sleep in an extra 20 minutes because I had a scheduled meeting for Older Adults with HIV/AIDS at 10am. So I got up, got ready, double checked to make sure I had my business cards and then went on my merry way. When I finally got to my destination, I got up to the 4th floor and told the receptionist that I was waiting for a meeting with fill-in-the-blank and she said, "Oh yes, his meeting will be right in through these doors, you can go ahead and go in." So I went in...there were already three people sitting and waiting so I just sat and waited as well. Needless to say, the meeting I sat down to was about HIV/AIDS but not for the elderly. It was about a grant available for agencies in the DC area. I went to the wrong meeting! So when I got back to my desk, I typed up the minutes of the meeting I attended and then got really nervous as I went to break the news to my supervisor the mistake I had made. When I told her, she laughed and just said, well talk to our development guy and maybe we can get on this grant. Long story short, I went up to talk to the development guy and he told me that he was actually supposed to be at that meeting but couldn't make it...funny...but it gets better. I found out one of our volunteer activists went to the meeting I was supposed to be at...so God works in mysterious ways and now we have a possible $500,000 grant at our feet so I am thankful for good mistakes today.