Happy New Year! 

Don't we all love new beginnings -- the freshness of the possible, the hope of a blank page? 

All writers, I believe, write "for" someone -- that singular person who reads our words from their heart, feels our ideas with their whole soul -- that person whom we know "gets" us. For me, as I have begun to live and write myself back to joy, that person has been Mary Wright. 

In my seminary class yesterday, we were asked to call to mind and share one holiday memory. 

A photo album of childhood Christmases flickered through my mind -- the Christmas in Boston when my dad was trying out his Broadway-bound musical, Darling of the Day. I was five, and that was my first Christmas away from home -- the first time I saw snow! The three Christmases we spent in London, perhaps the most glorious place to celebrate Christmas on the planet. The British LOVE their Christmases, and the lights, the caroling, the holiday parties all seemed magical to a little girl from Beverly Hills, where the annual Christmas decorations adorning their light posts were oddly interfaith plastic doves bedecked with blue tinsel that reminded me of cartoon seagulls and exuded an anemic artificial holiday cheer. 

As I pointed the cursor at the blank page to write this third and final blog in my Camp Vincent trilogy, I had a little giggle when a few lines of a poem popped into my head from my all-time favorite trilogy — Lord of the Rings. But of course, they came (sincerest apologies to JRR Tolkien) in a playfully revised version to reflect our glorious Camp Vincent experience: One Thing to rule them all, One Thing to find them, One Thing to bring them all and in this legacy to bind them. .  .That Thing, of course, is YES.

This past weekend was the first since I began this blog when I did not post anything. I have not missed one weekend (even on my summer vacation I posted a little hello!) since April. But frankly, I ran out of steam. Well, more accurately, what remaining steam I had I used to drive myself and many boxes of cookbooks across the Mohave Desert to a fundraiser at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College on Saturday night. Then on Sunday, with my last little sputters and puffs, I did two media interviews and two book signings.

I had a partner who told me that my nickname should be Yeah But.

Although I no longer remember whatever equivocating response evoked my new nickname, I remember precisely where I was walking and exactly how it felt. 

It stung! 

It stung the way only kindly-spoken truths can. 

And. I’m sorry to say. My response was. Yeah. But.

This blog is about LOVE. Pure and simple. Really, what else is there to write about anyway?

For the past nine months, I have traipsed around the globe talking about choosing Love, expanding into our lives, practicing joy, saying yes yes yes yes yes! Whenever someone comes up to me after I speak and thanks me for saying something that has inspired, I often find myself replying, “I talk about what I need to hear.” That’s true. I am saving the only life I can — my own. I am saving it by choosing Love.

I am an exit row kind of gal. Not, as you might suppose, because I want to be the first one out of the plane in case of emergency, but rather because I have ridiculously long legs. Put it this way -- my dad was five inches taller than me and we had the same inseam. I'm all leg, and in the regular coach seats, neither the person in front of me nor I enjoy my knees being crammed into the seatback in front of me.

This evening our London Legacy Tour, celebrating the life and films of Vincent Price in the United Kingdom, drew to a close, and I said goodbye to a wonderful group of people with whom I shared the last five days! What fun we had together. . .it was very hard to see them go!

Open your eyes, 
Dream but don’t guess.
Your biggest surprise
Comes after Yes.

Those were the last four lines of last week's blog. They couldn't have been more prescient! My little idea of creating a ritual to honor my dad's legacy of Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes winged its way out into the ether and burst into blossom in thousands of people's hearts. . .who said YES!

My father passed away 22 years ago today. . .six days before Halloween. Last week, it popped into my head that I wanted to do something special to honor him. 

This is probably one of those “you had to be there” stories, but I’m telling it anyway.

I met my friend Carly — who is getting married this weekend, so a big shout of of LOVE to Carly and Jordan in Mexico! — at Gail Larsen’s Transformational Speaking intensive this past February. On our last day together, we each had to give a new 20-minute talk. Carly, a holistic nutritionist with a deeply integrated spiritual message, is also a Jersey girl with an irreverent sense of humor, which she uses to give incredibly dynamic talks about changing our relationship with food.

That day, she shared something that has helped so many of her clients walk away from the seductive siren call of that donut or slice of cake, which tempts us all.

Carly said, “I have a really simple acronym. It’s STOP.” 

I have been on the road for two weeks now, in a different city almost every night, and I have many miles to go between now and mid-December.

I'm having such an amazing time doing what I love to do during my favorite season of the year. My joy quotient on this trip has been incredibly high!!! Every day has been so rich with blessings, filled with wonderful people and incredible experiences. 

These past weeks I've been writing about my realization that I have not been speaking my truth, listening to my heart, living an authentic life.

The other day, as I was flipping through my open webpages on my iPad web browser, suddenly -- truly out of absolutely nowhere -- a blogpost I wrote four years ago popped onto my screen. I literally have no idea where it came from -- and in fact, I thought I had gotten rid of that website years ago. It was the weirdest thing!!

So, I read it.

Last week I anticipated writing a two-part blog about what I am learning from Brene Brown’s new book, Rising Strong. I was wrong. I’m going to be writing about and learning to rise strong for quite a while!

Apparently, the hardest part of this process — the part that everyone wants to avoid — is the one part you cannot skip. It is the “messy middle" between the inciting moment (the thing that gets us off our asses and out of our old stories) and the resolution (the place where the lessons learned bring some form of new life). That messy middle the heart of the matter. . .and it takes as long as it takes. That’s all there is to it.

The beginning of this week was tough, tough, tough, as I came crashing up against those kinds of D-E-E-P issues that most of us spend a A LOT of energy trying to avoid and evade. So, when they do surface — almost always against our will — it can feel like a disemboweling, as though our innards are being turned inside out. By Tuesday, just two days into the week, I already felt like Michelangelo’s terrifying vision of St Bartholomew, left holding my own flayed skin.