HAPPY HOOPDANCE BIRTHDAY!
Amber jumps out of a cake and hoopdances with her friends to wish you a Hoopy Birthday!
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Amber Falls Into Facebook!
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Video #1 of Our Hike of the Pacific Crest Trail!
Check out this video of Porter and Gail Storey’s hike of the Pacific Crest Trail–2,663 miles from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada, over the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington.
For future videos of our PCT adventures (!) fording raging rivers, crossing the Mojave, climbing frozen peaks, how-we-did-it tips, and the “meaning of it all,” sign up for updates under To Stay on the List.
We love comments. ;-D (If you’re a subscriber receiving this as a single post, just click on the post title to get to Gail’s blog and the Comment feature.)
Amber Looks Within
Amber looks within to her own true Nature:
Heart from Haiti
Yo, Polly Propylene here, guest-blogging for Amber, who’s in Haiti. After the earthquake and before the aftershocks, she emptied out her Miracles jar for Doctors Without Borders.
I had nothing to give, so I donated Amber.
She leaves for Haiti, and I sit on my meditation cushion. Lotus position is hard for me, but that’s not why I’m crying my face off.
I sit until I’m not just the bewilderment in the eyes of the children, but the children themselves, ourselves. I’m the women and our fear, the men and our grief. What to do but open to it? Just when my heart can’t break any more, it does. I’m the earthquake. Fear, confusion, anger, grief, one abyss falling into another. Open, open, love, love.
Finally I open my eyes. Amber’s back, with a friend. “Who’s this?” I ask.
“Heart, from Haiti,” she says.
How to Hug a Tree
You know you want to. You’re just waiting for permission, and I’m freakin’ giving it to you, okay??? Okay.
Actually, it’s better to ask the Tree’s permission first. You’ll have your own way, but here’s how I do it:
Namaste, Tree. Yo to the divine in you. May I hug you? I’m feeling the love, but I could also use some grounding right now.
Most Trees will have no problem with that. Heck, they saw you coming a mile away, schlepping your frantic mind full of concepts and circuitous thinking. We could help with that, they’re probably musing, but she’ll walk right by, oblivious not only to us but her entire surroundings.
So say one Tree calls to you, softly enough to pierce your oblivion. For two seconds, okay?? Your first impulse is to look up and down the trail, or the street if you’re in the city, to make sure no one’s watching. It’s an intimate moment, true. But I wouldn’t think ill of someone I saw hugging a tree, would you? And if a lot of people hugged trees, I’d feel more optimistic about the planet.
With your Tree’s permission, hug it with your whole heart and body. As much as you can reach, anyway. Just feel it as it is. Rest your buzzing forehead on its bark. Do the branches of your mind unclench, feel the wind blow through? Do your feet and toes ground you like roots? Your experience with your Tree will be Younique.
What does hugging a Tree have to do with all the big things happening in the world? A lot. Don’t take my word for it, find out for yourself. The main thing is to listen, and your Tree will tell you. When you feel better, thank your Tree.
Feel free to share your own Tree experience or anything else in the Comments. I hope you’ll subscribe to my blog, by clicking a button under “To Stay on the List” at the top right.
Love, Amber
How to Be Happy with a Bad Book Review
Yo, I promised to blog with tips for writers, so here we go. Gail needs an attitude adjustment–it turns out that when you click on this blog’s link to her first novel, The Lord’s Motel, the first review that pops up totally socks. So I had her lie down on Dr. Amber’s couch for a little writer therapy.
Gail: It’s embarrassing, Dr. Amber. It was a pre-publication review years ago, and now everyone who finds it through your blog will know.
Dr. Amber: Embarrassing?! You’ve made a cottage industry out of embarrassing yourself, jumping out of cakes to bust hip-hop moves on YouTube, and falling down mountains in the High Sierra.
Gail: But those were for fun, and writing books is–uh, my work.
Dr. Amber: Did that review ruin your career? Didn’t you get a great review in the NYTBR and a lot of other places and wind up on the cover of Library Journal and have your next book be a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection??
Gail: I know. But why do I focus on one little criticism when people are starving all over the world?
Dr. Amber: Does it make you feel you’re somehow “not enough”? Insufficiently lovable? Not doing enough good in the world? Just a little whiny piece o’ crap?
Gail: If I didn’t before, I do now.
Dr. Amber: Good, making progress. Everyone feels lacking to some degree. We’re socialized to think everything would be fine if we were perfect. But–Not!
Gail: So you’re saying it’s human nature to feel “not enough”?
Dr. Amber: Maybe human, but it’s not nature. Your true nature is Enough. You’re Enough itself. Don’t think about it, just Be it.
Gail: (Speechless)
Dr. Amber: You got it. More later, but right now I got to help Polly Propylene about her bad review.
Dr. Amber is available for future consults. Please subscribe for free under “To Stay on the List,” and feel free to comment below with your own concerns, writerly and otherwise.
Amber’s New Year’s Resolutions
Happy New Year! Hope y’all had as much fun New Year’s Eve as I did with my boyfriend Bunny-Boy. Here we are dressed up to party, me in Gail’s tiara and Bunny-Boy in Porter’s black bow-tie.
I love a big blow-out before I get down with my New Year’s resolutions. Here they are:
- 10. Do my part to make the world a funnier place.
- 9. Vacuum my hair.
- 8. Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of my hand to do it. (I stole that from God, Proverbs 3:27)
- 7. Swing more often from the chandelier.
- 6. Think before I blog.
- 5. Don’t let thoughts get in the way of Awareness.
- 4. Pray for world peace and subscribers to my blog so Gail can establish a web presence that will help her sell her memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
- 3. Hug more trees.
- 2. Love everyone without exception, except William when he wants to sniff my feet.
- 1. Deepen my awareness as a lover of What-Is.
Please comment and tell me your New Year’s resolutions! Even if you’re like Colleen in Gail’s novel The Lord’s Motel who said “My New Year’s resolution is to be less resolved.”
Love, Amber
I knew Christmas was over when….
I KNEW CHRISTMAS WAS OVER WHEN….
I was havin' so much fun I fell into the poinsettia and Santa had to pull me out.
I got into a power struggle with the Angel over my turn to sit on top of the Christmas tree.
I got caught climbing the refrigerator shelves with my butt hangin' out.
It all went to hell in a handbasket, so I put myself in Time-Out.
Subscribe to my blog (button for Email Updates or RSS feeds) for a list of my New Year’s resolutions!
XOXO Amber
Happy Holidays from the Storeys
Porter and Gail Storey couldn’t bear to inflict another holiday letter on y’all, so I (moi, Amber) demanded a blog for Christmas! Porter and Gail are my people, sort of like pets but more trouble. So in 2009, the Storeys did what?
Wished you a fabulous holiday season.
Visited Johns Hopkins in Baltimore where their son Philip is a second-year medical student. That kid scares me!
Rode their tandem bicycle for three days over the Rockies in the Courage Classic fundraiser for Children's Hospital. Here they are at the top of Vail Pass. I made sure that ambulance in the background followed them.
Gail's memoir about their 2,663-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail is almost finished, but no way am I gonna let her send it out until I find what she said about me.
Porter bicycled in the week-long Ride the Rockies, and Gail Nordic-walked over the passes.
Here they are, filled with gratitude for their friends and family on Thanksgiving.
This is me puckering up with my boyfriend, BunnyBoy, under my mistletoe headband.
Subscribe to this blog (click on the RSS Feed or Email Updates button) for future posts on my world view (see what I’ll be blogging about by clicking on the About Amber page)!
XOXOXOX Amber Storey
