Enchantment Learning & Living Blog

Welcome to Enchantment Learning & Living, the inspirational space where I write about the simple pleasures, radical self-care, and everyday magic that make life delicious.

On Why I Won't Wait on the Sidelines to Dance

March 13, 2015

Because I don't need permission to dance. I will not waste precious time sitting on the sidelines waiting to be asked to the floor like some forlorn teenage girl at prom--not when I can be a song beating out the rhythm of my joy.

I have allowed myself to sit too long on these foldout chairs, a would-be-wallflower wilting under the silence, the invisibility of my own hesitation. It is no longer enough, a small voice inside me whispers, to sit and observe. Abstaining from the pleasure right in front of you is no virtue.

And it is a pleasure, a pleasure to never be without a dance partner because they see you are unafraid of hips and hands and feet and sweat. It is a pleasure to twirl around the dance floor, allowing each turn to peel away one more petal from that old wallflower until you are the boldest expression of your dance.

You are no longer vulnerable when that last petal falls to the ground, forever banishing those years of sideline-sitting because in your desire to move your body there is freedom. There is power in your grace, though it is your job to follow. And even if you lose a step or fall out of rhythm, you are on the dance floor all the same.

And you will stay on that dance floor (those old foldout chairs a distant memory of some other woman).

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

I Used to Write on Napkins

March 10, 2015

Beside you sits a wrinkled napkin, a yellow-brown ring half-formed around its center--the offending tea cup sitting just beside it now. You cannot say why it caught your eye as you loaded up the papers you'd been grading, getting ready for the next item on your to-do list--only that it stirred something inside you, loosened an almost forgotten fact from the crevices of your mind:

You used to write on napkins. Even used-up ones like these. Just out of braces and feeling oh-so-adult with your new teeth and your after school hostess job, you decided you had stories in you. But when to write? (An even bigger question than what to write--you figured that would answer itself, so long as you could convince the ever-moving clock that words were worth your time.)

You were still under the vague impression that writers--"real" writers--must devote every moment of the clock hands spinning around its face to build stories out of ink and fantasy. But you were a high school student (an identity you only grudgingly admitted to) and a pub hostess (perhaps, you hoped, you looked more worldly than your 17 years). And you lacked the funds to run away to Paris to write. So you squeezed your scribbles in after cleaning tables and seating customers, in those brief stretches between filling water glasses and folding napkins--those napkins again.

You kept the cloth ones for the customers and contented yourself with the cheap cocktail napkins to scrawl across. On one frayed edge was the start of your first novel (mercifully gone now, buried deep inside your creative compost); on a crumpled corner, a nonsensical story; on the inside flap of another napkin, the quick sketch of pub scenes, like the couple getting too cozy in a corner table, or the boisterous bar-side conversation of friends.

You would stuff these worldly scraps into your pocket like someone would a crumpled tissue and pull them out when you got home smelling of French fries and cleaning solution. Carefully you would untangle them and stack them upon your writing desk to cure overnight. Perhaps tomorrow they would yield the seeds of a story.

Now, you eye your watch--those hands winding around fat numbers--and glance back at your napkin. You still have a few minutes before you really need to go. So you settle in, however briefly. You take up that napkin and a pen--and you write.

The Body Beautiful

March 6, 2015

Your body is a story shaped by bone and wrapped in tendons and muscle. You are too often afraid of it, this story, afraid to pull back the skin-like cover and really feel the histories embedded in your marrow.

It knows no other truth but the physical, the raw power of experience; it is made up of living memories, proof that you are nothing but delicious nerve endings and pumping blood, feeling everything, holding back from nothing. You are each of its curves and scars, a moveable history of your journey through this world. The baking burn on your arm, faded now with time, the puckered quarter size mark next to your belly button, the smattering of beauty marks and freckles across your skin are parts of a tattoo mapping the person you have become.

Inside you is another universe still, a hidden map of the people you once were, the places you once lived. And deeper still are the tiny organisms, those worlds with worlds, that make up you though you cannot conceive of those tiny seeds all piled within you.

Too long have you been asked to sit in your chair or idle away hours in empty stagnation to contain the power of your body, to silence the stories. But your body, your body wants to move, to lift you from that frozen seat and see if you can experience--if you dare to experience--those seeds bursting to life inside of you peppering your history, your memory with new life, new vines in your veins mapping new roads in your ever evolving story.

Reflections on a Snow Day

March 3, 2015

The universe gives you a snow day. Although you don't have to teach (it's your work-from-home-day, after all), the thought of classes being canceled gives you permission to throw your carefully scripted plans out the window. No need to be at a desk today. Your kitchen is calling you.

You make soup, so much soup and pots of pinto and garbanzo beans until your home smells like comfort and your freezer is stockpiled with spoonfuls of love for those days when you won't have energy to conure it yourself. You even pickle green beans to the backdrop of Spanish guitar music and once naked tree branches dusted with tiny white pearls outside your window. It is as if the crystal blanket across the city has given you permission to care for yourself.

That night, you sleep under the soft kisses of snowflakes and awaken once again to a city cleansed of its busyness by ten inches of snow.

You venture out into that wilderness armed only with a strong cup of coffee and hiking boots, past iced-over streets and neighbors shoveling their sidewalks in their bathrobes and snowshoes, towards your neighborhood park looking like nothing if not an open prairie. The scent of winter and cedar burning fireplaces fills the air, as does the stillness interrupted only by the chatter of birds oblivious to the snow piled atop their homes.

In a few hours, this quiet expanse will be taken up by kids rolling together snowmen and falling back to etch snow angels into the earth. But for now, it is just you and a lone cross-country skier in this vast morning.

You cannot help yourself: you cut across the safer street paths where your feet can land between car grooves and into the unblemished snowfall of the park, though you know it will take you calf-deep into the snow and your shoes and socks will soak through. No matter. You are on your way to a blazing fire and hearty breakfast with your family--and what is a snow day for if not plunging into nature headlong?

Later, after the snow is nothing more than a memory and puddles under the sun, you still soak up the gift of your snow day as you soak in a bath piled high with bubbles as fluffy as the snow you trekked through this morning. For a day--two, really--the snow stopped time, allowing you to tune in to what really matters: early morning walks and luxurious family breakfasts, lazy schedule-less days and long naps.

The universe gave you a soul day.

On Body Wisdom

February 27, 2015

Every day it speaks to you, sometimes even in your dreams. It speaks of long-held memories buried deep within the tissues of your muscles, of the hope ready to spring into action coiled at the base of your spine.

It speaks to you about the wings making their way out of the crevice between your vertebrae and shoulder blades. It reveals the scars engraved into your hip sockets. Scars so old you didn't even know they were still there--until a movement, a memory stirs them up again and you can begin to release them as you would weeds from your garden, gently loosening their roots from your soil.

It is limbs and torso that tell you when you need to move, to dance, to release yourself, free yourself from the bonds of the day, the shackles of limited logic. And when you must be still, your body tells you to be still, still enough to hear only the beating of your heart and the new seeds you planted cracking open to lay down roots where weeds once were.

Your body is the deepest wisdom. The surest answer found in the physical expression of your soul.

On My Bookshelf

February 24, 2015

You find yourself gazing at this six-tiered monster, three cases wide, stuffed full of stories with no plan, no pattern. You used to be so careful with your books and their placement. Once they were arranged alphabetically; another time by theme (here the epic fantasy series all the books stacked together in one fat row; there the collection of poems next to your Victorian women authors); and yet another by height. You went so far as to separate your hardbacks from your paperbacks once, but that formality didn't last long.

Now they sit squished together, Victorian authors with the sword and sorcery, the poems mixed in with your cozy mysteries amidst knick-knacks and treasures, just as your sister haphazardly placed them when she unpacked them from their moving boxes. You cannot look upon your shelves now without seeing them as another sister-memory sewn into each book spine. These precious books, collected over the years, are stuffed into each shelf like paper sardines--you almost do not have enough room so your books must shed their modesty and take up house with a kaleidoscope of other words. Yet you cannot make yourself bring order to this joyful chaos.

You wonder what they have to talk about, the Collete novels that kiss your collection of fairy tales and hold up your cheesy romances written in Spanish. You wonder, too, if those stories begin to bleed into one another with their covers pressed so tightly against themselves. Your bookshelf seems to sign and settle, breathing in the weight of so many stories upon its back, within its skeleton.

It is a map, in many ways, of the stories you will write, a tangled ball of words that you un-knot from your writing desk to spin into new beginnings.

I Live in Stories

February 20, 2015

I live in stories.

They frame my world so that each turn of the corner is the prospect of a new adventure, each long-held gaze, a mystery to uncover. I hold on to the power of narrative in the hopes that it will shape my life, guide it along the path of the heroines that have come before me. It is never enough to simply do but to record each action, shape them into some semblance of a plot, that tenuous thread that turns ordinary moments into synchronous events.

I live in stories because I am uncomfortable anywhere else.

I am made up of the words and books I devoured as a child, and later still, as an adult. In my veins are the ink and pulp that shape the worlds I carry into my own. The spine of the leather-bound book on my desk is my spine, holding together pages upon pages of written memory with glue and vertebrae. I do not know how to be anything other than imagination and so flail, often wordlessly, hopelessly when I brush up against the literal--that heavy brick that does not know the meaning of wings.

I live in stories because I know that my life is a mercurial entity, always twining its way through this world in a curious expression of abundance and experience bound by the layers of what could be.

I live in stories because I know that I am a story.

On Enjoyment

February 17, 2015

You will never understand those who are too stingy with it--squeezing it in on the weekends, stuffing themselves full in a panic as if Monday might steal their ability to enjoy the world. They ration it out across each evening, Sundays through Thursdays, push it out of their nine to five days. It is as if they feel their supply is limited, that they must bottle it up, store it in a small jar in the back of their pantry and save it for some other day.

But that will not do.

Enjoyment is too precious a necessity to sit neglected on some dusty shelf. It must be brought into the light and savored every day. You cannot live without the lush, bubbly feeling that tickles your senses like a glass of champagne in your belly, getting you drunk on the pure deliciousness of one moment experienced fully.

You will not turn away from such bliss, nor wearily resign yourself to a stint (a week? a month?) at more chaste living as if you were perpetually half-ashamed of your hedonism. No, you will call to it, search for those pockets of enjoyment in your day to day.

You will revel in the early morning bird song, that melodious foreshadowing of spring. You will relish the stolen afternoon planting your radish seeds--perhaps too soon, but the warm weather has made you reckless--and the feel satisfaction of unscrewing the lid to your mason jar lunch, all that spinach stuffed into such tight quarters a welcome sight come noon. You will even take pleasure in the afternoon call to the plumber that keeps you home to write and tend house, bringing you back to you.

Enjoyment is a big-hearted creature, growing bigger, bolder each time you seek it out. It will take over everything if you let it--and you should. Get drunk on the sunset. Let the hum of your daily work wash over you, a rhythm made up of pen on paper, classroom to office. Embrace the heady perfume of your dinner cooking on the stove, the lure of a half-finished book on your nightstand.

Enjoyment is found everywhere, in everything, unapologetically revealing the seemingly mundane as nothing short of magical.

Everything's Coming Up Roses Tea Blend

February 13, 2015

This tea is like a cup-sized celebration of the bounty in your life, the eternal spring in your heart, and the perpetual enjoyment of love and life. It is also a perfect February tea as it's laced with winter's warming spices yet heavily perfumed with roses--the promise of a new season.

I used two types of rose petals here; the soft pink ones give a light floral aroma while the red petals offer up an earthy flavor that pairs well with the black Assam tea. Calendula lends a pop of color. This tea is a thoughtful Valentine treat for the tea lover in your life that you love to love--try saying that three times fast--or for anyone who needs to be reminded that everything is, truly, coming up roses!

Ingredients:

1 cup Assam black tea

1/2 cup red rose petals

1/2 cup pink rose petals

1/2 cup cinnamon bark chips

1/4 cup calendula

1/8 cup cloves

Combine ingredients in bowl and transfer to a mason jar or other airtight container. Store in a cool, dry place. Makes almost 3 cups. Enjoy!

Health benefits of ingredients:

Calendula: anti-inflammatory, aids digestion, reduces swollen lymph glands, soothes irritated skin.

Cinnamon: antiseptic, aids digestion, calms nervous system, anti-inflammatory.

Rose petals: soothes skin; mild sedative and natural stress reliever; rich in vitamin C.

Clove: antiseptic, antioxidant, aids digestion.

On Tenderness

February 10, 2015

Tenderness--that timid little beast full of its own kind of ferocity. It dares what no one else will: to reach beyond the safety of its armor and the armor of others to stop the world with a soft caress, a squeeze of a hand, or a gentle whisper of things half-said.

It is enough to acknowledge and be acknowledged it says. Enough to cast aside the temptation to perpetually coat your words in irony, your face in schooled ennui. Tenderness does not just wear its heart on its sleeve but carves it upon its skin, a reminder that there are blood and bones beneath our shells, and --tucked behind a living cage--a full beating heart.

It might feel like a bruise at times, that carving, or a pulsing scar, but that is only because it must feel, always feel everything around it so as never to be fossilized by urbane manners or cool posturing. Those things do not touch it, will not touch it. Must not touch it.

This little beast knows that to cast aside its armor, so shoddily made of unfounded fears, is to become stronger--to offer itself up to the world as a song of muscle and memory so as to see whose soul beats in time with its own.

There, there lies the naked power of tenderness.

Aphrodite's Sugar Scrub

February 6, 2015

Valentine's Day is a celebration of the love in your life--and not just romantic kind. It's about sharing your gratitude for the people who make your day a little brighter and a little sweeter. What better way to honor this love than by giving them this sugar body scrub to shake off the winter blahs?

Full of cinnamon and roses--long considered natural love potions--this scrub inspires us to invoke the divine Aphrodite and to relish the simple hedonism of a long bubble bath (maybe with a buddy!), pampered skin, and a rosy outlook on life. Pair it with my Aphrodite's Bath Salts, and you've got a match made in heaven!

Ingredients:

1 cup organic sugar

1 cup olive oil or coconut oil

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/4 cup rose petals

30 drops cinnamon essential oil

30 drops rose oil or rose water

10 drops clove oil

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and store in a mason jar or other airtight container. Makes about 1 cup. Enjoy!

Aphrodite's Bath Salts

February 3, 2015

With Valentine's Day around the corner, you might be thinking about what to get for those special someones in your life beyond a glitter coated heart-shaped card, a box of chocolates, or a bouquet of roses--all wonderful, natch, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to shake things up. And let's be honest, they've probably already used the treats you made them for the holidays! I like to think of Valentine's Day as a time when we can try a little tenderness, as the song goes. That includes pampering the people that fill your corner of the world with love, light, and happiness.

And who knows? If you want to treat an extra special someone to some TLC, the aphrodisiacs mixed into these bath salts might just make things a little more interesting. The clove and cinnamon oil are antibacterial and add a warming energy to your bath, while the rose petals bring a touch of romantic glamor as well as skin-softening and toning qualities. Adding rose oil and powdered cinnamon just takes this delectable soak over the top!

Ingredients:

1 cup Epsom salts

1/4 cup olive oil or coconut oil

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/4 cup rose petals

30 drops cinnamon essential oil

30 drops rose oil or rose water

10 drops clove oil

Combine ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly mixed. Store in an airtight container indefinitely. Makes about 1 cup. Enjoy!

On Turning Thirty

January 30, 2015

Thank sweet baby Jesus.

You're thirty. Or better put, your twenties--that hellish brutal decade--is over. No longer living hand to mouth. No longer surviving off of hope and credit or talking yourself into stupid or dangerous or stupidly dangerous situations because "that's what people your age do." Maybe they do--and maybe they shouldn't--you really don't care anymore. Just like you don't care about trying to prove you have nothing to prove.

You don't want to save the world anymore either. Or give yourself over to A Cause. You have learned that your happiness stems from tending your own little corner of the world and nourishing the relationships within it. Let others find their own path because the only one who can save them is them--just as only you were the one who could pull yourself up from the muck of your twenties into the bliss of the here and now.

At thirty, you simply do not have the energy to be anything other than who you are. And now that you know the delicious power of self-respect, you can't talk yourself into trying on those other identities like so many cheap, ill-fitting dresses. So you now wear your loud colors and your wild hair and too many rings stacked upon your fingers--and polka dot dresses because why not? You dance and you read books indiscriminately (what's a canon except for a collection of books that at one time or another were considered trash?). And you celebrate the fact that your life is made up of listening to your jazz records and cooking marvelous family dinners and star gazing and writing things people read and always, always being open to the unexpected.

So you will light your birthday candles (all 30 of them) and make your birthday wish and eat your birthday cake and with each bite, relish that you have found it: that ephemeral thing called Happiness. Day in, day out--that's where the magic is at.

On Bravery

January 27, 2015

Bravery.

The act of planting a small seed in soil you aren't sure is fertile enough--but hope, desperately hope--that it is. And the seed, a small husk holding only a new possibility, that fragile little flicker of promise--of what, you might not even know. Yet you still dare to image another way of being.

Bravery, vulnerability's bold lover. Not in donning armor but consciously, when the moment is right, casting off that thick chainmail and exposing the tender skin underneath to wonder, to the simple chance that there is life beyond the mundane. It is in that tentative first step into a new way of living. Pushing past the fear, the little whispers that try to keep you tethered to the safety of the un-evolving.

It's in taking the risk to believe that you are on your path even as you wonder if it is a path at all (you only see a faint ribbon of dirt half-buried in bramble). No matter. You will make it one. You have made it one. Your feet moving forward--first one, then the other--do so in response to the prompting of the loose earth beneath your feet--it calls to your soles--soul--as your soul calls to it. And that is enough.

Things that Make Me a Burquena

January 23, 2015

Soy de Burque. Me. I am of these streets and this sky.

It's in my love of big earrings and cruising down Central--though my car, much as I love her, will never be pimped out quite like those classic trucks, ragtops, and other vintage rides lovingly restored and paraded up and down that old main street on Sundays like a row of chrome peacocks.

I can feel the magical and mystical permeating these streets as if the land were infused with an otherworldly essence completely at home in this off the map desert town. The people, too, are a little off the map--valuing good food as much as good karma, chakra-opening yoga, and mind-opening microbrews.

Yes, my favorite big small town where the best places to eat are usually in some old adobe or restored historical building and you can pretty much find someplace to salsa dance every night of the week. It is because I cannot live without freshly baked bread from the panaderia on Mountain Road (yes, the panaderia, because really there is only one worthy of the name). Or because I could never stay long in a place that doesn't understand that I go both ways--red and green--and never in a city, never with a person that doesn't know what that means.

I need to feel the beating heart of this city as I wake every morning and go to sleep at night, feel the raw power of Mother Nature--the river, the mountains, the cottonwoods--just as part of this town as our adobes and streets, keeping us rooted to our desert land. I take pride in the fact that my freeway can touch the heavens as it bends and curves over the city in a blaze of turquoise and concrete.

It is in my love of the people warm as the sun that bronzes our skin. We live with an unapologetic ferocity, wearing our passions--those messy, violent things--like badges of honor, refusing to be silenced, refusing to be anything other than loud, open, dancing, breathing bundles of humanity.

Me. This city is me. Soy, soy de Burque.

Things that Make Me a New Mexican

January 20, 2015

Your bones seem to be made up of sun and clay, formed out of days curing in the desert heat. The landscape is made up of infinite colors--ochre, mica, taupe, sienna, layered together to form hills, plateaus, and muddy river beds. The colors are never still, never just brown, never just layers of settled dust (regardless of what those outsiders say).

It is the smell of pinto beans cooking on the stove and the necessity of homemade tortillas (are those store-bought discs really worthy of the name?). It is knowing the difference between "chile" and "chili"--the former in your blood, the latter, a sacrilege. It is knowing that tequila and tamales are the best medicine, though you know your way around the herbs in your garden, a gift from the curandera magic running through your veins.

And then there's the turquoise. It has taken over the sky, filling up the city corner to corner like the dry desert air fills up your lungs, chasing out the soul sickness that settled between your ribs when you lived--briefly, the desert always called you back--in a damp, dark place. Plus the sun. Always the sun. Always the sky that goes on forever making it impossible for you to hide from yourself.

It is your collection of rocks and crystals, each stone a link in your connection to the land, and the faint smell of burning sage in the air to cleanse your home of stale energies. In the bright colors you scatter across your home and the big earrings that will always call to you. In the different colors that make up you--brown, red, white--never quite at ease with each other and yet part of the same soil that birthed you.

Yes, it is the sun you must have, and the wide open sky above you, and the desert earth beneath your feet. Only then are you whole.

On Everyday Enchantment

January 16, 2015

Enchantment. A spell wrapped in a noun. Three syllables. One state of being.

To live with Enchantment is to see beyond the brick and mortar that make up your home and into the magic infused within its frame. It is to peel back the layers of your day-to-day and search for that elusive energy that winds its way up your spine and outward into your life.

To learn from Enchantment is to listen to Coyote's call when he plays his tricks. He is a messenger really--there to make you listen. To trust in the power that is you, that is the earth; the power that is the beating of your heart, a rhythmic tattoo that forever pounds out your path regardless of how many times you try to stray from it. It is to absorb the wisdom of the moon and the stars, and the prophesying of the seeds burrowed deep in the dirt.

It is to conjure. To create. To believe that the bulk of your day--the most important parts--occurs in the moments and spaces others can too easily overlook. Because when you are looking for everyday enchantment, it finds you. Always. It nourishes you. It makes its home inside your skin and feeds your soul.

Yes. That's Enchantment. A spell wrapped in a noun, planted in the earth and nourished with moonlight, roots stretching to the underworld and leaves unfurling towards the heavens, creating a waking dream in the here and now if only you are open to it.

On Wings

January 14, 2015

You felt them growing underneath your skin right along your shoulder blades.

At first, your thought it was only tight shoulders, muscles that needed to be loosened. But at the pain grew and little bumps began to form on either side of your spine, you knew. And when the skin broke revealing bits of blood and bone and feathers you could no longer deny your wings.

They grew out of hope and lessons learned the hard way, out of holding on and letting go. They are nourished by the warm caress of the sun and a growing sense of self. Delicate, yes. Ephemeral spans of imagination and bone. But strong, unbreakable as they unfurl from your back and stretch wide, parts of them still coated with the blood and skin they took as they pushed their way out of your back.

They are an almost weightless pressure now against your shoulder blades, a whisper of feathers and tendons behind you that will only grow stronger, bigger each time you dare to be just a little more you.

On Living Soulfully in the New Year

January 9, 2015

This time of year is always full to bursting with new year's resolutions--most of them overwhelming and along the lines of do more, be more, work harder, push harder in order to feel like we are Living Well or Growing.

This is probably why most of these resolutions get tossed out the window by the end of January. They're too much pressure! I can't just eat mung beans and green smoothies morning, noon, and night or pump iron two hours a day to prove my commitment to my health, nor can I glue myself to my writing desk or force myself fill every bit of free time I have in an effort to nourish my intellectual growth.

In fact, I'm convinced that these goals are as detrimental to us as eating fast food, never exercising, and giving up on learning new things in our day to day lives. Why? Because they don't allow us to truly find the fullest expression of ourselves but merely perform our desire for change to others. And in performance lies pressure--we want to show the world that we can be the best of the best, whatever that means to each of us individually.

As I've been mulling this over the past few weeks, I've decided to shape my own new year's resolution on this simple concept: Living Soulfully. This ephemeral idea cannot be measured in terms of how many hours spent at the gym nor how many words I commit to a page, but in how I feel when I wake up in the morning. Am I full? Do I feel like I am living authentically? Do I feel like my soul is nourished or am I, as Bilbo Baggins once stated, "like butter scraped over too much bread"?

In essence, this resolution deviates from its do more, be more cousin and insists on the value of doing less, listening more. And so I will. I will tune out the white noise that says I must be this or that in order to be considered a successful, healthy woman and instead listen to what brings me joy each moment of each day.

That is a resolution worth keeping.

Join Me for Another Year of Blogging Adventures!

January 7, 2015

Well, I'm back in the saddle after a few days off of writing--which, to be honest, felt a little strange since I was so used to writing every. Single. Day. Yep, I did it! Last year I committed to writing a blog a day--that's 365 inspirational posts!--on the little things in life that give us pleasure like an afternoon cup of tea or reading in bed. I even sprinkled my posts with healthy recipes (Chickpea & Mushroom Salad anyone?) and DIY beauty treats (hello E asy Peasy Baking Soda Face Scrub!) to celebrate the small acts of self-care we can fold into our everyday life which makes it all the more enjoyable.

Whew! What a year it was! If you want to look back on that journey we took together or read some of the posts that you didn't get to the first time around, you check out my Blog and Recipe Indexes.

Fear not, however--a new year does not mean I'm giving up on my blogging. In fact, it means the opposite: I'm looking forward to more writing adventures! Instead of daily posts, I'll be blogging bi-weekly, typically on Tuesday and Friday. There will still be plenty of flash essays on everyday magic and new recipes to enjoy throughout this year, just a little more spread out. Now is also a good time to subscribe to my blog (simply enter your email address in the box provided below or click here and enter your email address) to get each new post delivered to your inbox.

As always, thank you for your support and for following me last year as I embarked on this wild journey of blogging and savoring the everyday magic that surrounds us if only we take the time to look for it. Here's to another year of enchanted living and learning!