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This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing another spontaneous episode — this time on affirmations, rest, and refilling our personal well.

Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about.

In this conversation, we touch on navigating transitions, cultivating calm, creating opportunities for our interest and curiosity to spark, and the practice of paying attention. Things like:

• Listening to nature sounds and reading transitional affirmations to help get through seasons of personal upheaval

• Assessing your capacity for commitment in a given season based on your needs and responsibilities

• Thinking about and making adjustments or modifications to your plans or practices to reduce their weight on your everyday life

• Practicing physically opening up your shoulders to signal to your body and mind that you’re meeting the present moment with openness and curiosity

• Noticing when you’re burning out and actively creating the time and space to nourish yourself

• Using resources like images and quotes on Pinterest to help calm yourself before bed

• Engaging with beautiful, interesting, and poignant things whose only job is to fill you and your creativity back up

• Studying what has been meaningful to you in the past (in life/story/books/film/art/music) to discover what meaning you want to make in the present and future

• Paying attention to and taking note of what moments spark personal importance and joy in your life, bringing them back to mind, and looking for opportunities to make new ones

We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series and that some of this connects with your own journey!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore shares several affirmations from Julia Cameron’s Transitions. The quote she read is:

• “When the mind becomes quiet, you feel nourished.” - Swami Chidvilasananda (Page 77)

The Verbivore paraphrases a line from Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. That actual line is: “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning. Not the thing that's made.”

Books and Films Mentioned:

• Transitions: Prayers and Declarations for a Changing Life by Julia Cameron

• The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

• Austenland - Directed by Jerusha Hess

• Barbie - Directed by Greta Gerwig

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)