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​Happy Monday, and welcome to December, Friends! Here's five fun links from around the web that I found that made me smile and feel a bit more playful today. I hope they make you feel a little lighter, too.

1.  This past week, Smithsonian Magazine shared the good news that you can now take a trip back to being a kid and check out the soundtrack to Sesame Street, streaming now via Spotify and iTunes  Go ahead, listen to Cookie Starts with C while eating your favorite cookie. These gluten free chocolate chip cookies  by America's Test Kitchen look brilliant. 

2.  The movie Mrs. Doubtfire turned 25 (!) this year. Where did the time (and the fashion) go? This post over at Man Repeller revisits the movie to see how it's aged and it's pretty fun to look back at the film and themes in ways both serious and silly. 

3.  I have kept a journal since I was seven or eight years old and I am definitely going to do this next time I crack open a fresh notebook to start writing in. Who's your guardian spirit?

4.  I don't usually believe in rules for creativity, but I loved these 33 rules for being an artist over at Vulture. 

5.  More evidence that engaging in crafts and creativity is good for your mental health. Not that you need another reason to plan your next crafty experiment, but still, pretty neat to know that the scientific community is catching up with what our souls have known for a long time: making things just feels good. I've got my eye on a new knitting project.  What are you dreaming of making?

Wishing you all a week full of possibilities and playfulness. Have a good one!

Another brand new week, and no matter if you feel rocking and ready to go, a little worse for wear, or somewhere in between, know that your current state of mind and circumstances are just a season. Whether we like it or not, everything changes and everything shall pass.

Great mood? It will eventually morph into a mood that doesn't feel so great or one that just feels "meh". 

Feeling really low? It's just a matter of time until the tide shifts and you feel better.

Super busy and frazzled with a boatload of commitments, creative projects, and to do's? Time will bring a different chapter that will be slower, simpler, and not as nutty.

In a drought, whether it be creatively, financially, or socially? It won't last forever. Abundance will show itself sooner or later.

It's a season. It's ALL a season. If you're like me, you can get angry about it, deny it, and struggle against it, hoping it will go away. If you're also like me, you've probably learned through hard won experience that fighting against it doesn't make a bit of difference. Just as winter stays as long as it does regardless of how much we curse the snow, our own seasons have their own timelines that aren't moved by our own kicking and screaming. Both have to run their course.

Whatever season you're going through right now, know you're not alone.

Whatever season you're going through right now, know that you are still YOU.

Whatever season you're going through right now, know that there is some action to take to move towards peace, even if that means being still and being with your feelings of being uncomfortable.  

Whatever season you're going through right now, know that it's ok to not be ok.

Whatever season you're going through right now, know that it's ok to feel awesome.

Whatever season you're going through right now, know that it's ok to not be be able to see what's next. 

Whatever season you're going through right now, know that you have the power to make something beautiful out of it someday, even if that someday takes awhile. 

For me, becoming comfortable with uncomfortable seasons is an ongoing practice--sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For me, learning about and practicing radical acceptance has been instrumental in trying to dance with the changing seasons in a way that feels more like a partnership than a wrestling match.  Remembering it's a big experiment is also helpful. 

I've long told myself that I have to be in a particularly "good" season to be creative. Ironically, the Starving Artist myth also encourages us to find our creative power only when we're in a particular "bad" season  of our life. But the truth is that life doesn't happen at either end of a spectrum, but at every single point along the line that represents the entire infinite range of the human experience. If we aren't required to be in a certain season in order to exercise our creativity, perhaps our creativity can become a practice that we engage in to help us express whatever it is that we are experiencing in the current season of our lives and help us gain peace and clarity. If creativity doesn't require us to be happy or sad, but simply alive and aware of what we are experiencing in the present moment, would we give ourselves more permission to express, to make, to explore more often? What joy and healing might be found in that space? 

This week, you may want to take a few moments to sit down in a quiet place and write down a few sentences about how you are feeling and what season you are experiencing. Try not to label the season as "good" or "bad".  What small action could you take right now to treat yourself kindly? What might you do to express how you are feeling? Could you draw the season? Write a poem about it? Hum a melody that sounds the way you feel? Dance through it in your kitchen?

Wishing you all a week where you honor the season you're in, no matter if it feels like a blizzard or a summer's afternoon.  If you have any wisdom for weathering the seasons of life through creative expression, please do share!

This week on Motivation Monday, I want to pass along a wonderful episode from the Team Human Podcast featuring playwright, actor, director, writer and teacher Jessica Blank. You might recognize her as the creator of such powerful plays such as The Exonerated, Aftermath, How to be a Rock Critic, and Liberty City. In this interview, Jessica talks about the power of empathy and storytelling and how exercising these muscles might actually have the ability to change the way we think about the world and each  other.  And who couldn't use more tools to connect with our fellow human beings and affect change? 

I hope your week is off to a great start and that you plan to take your creativity to the polls this week and VOTE. Creativity allows us to imagine a better world and the right to vote gives us a chance to decide to make that imagined world a reality. Every one of us counts. 

 I'm back! I've recently emerged from underneath this pile of clothes, bags, books, thermoses, hangers, and hats to start blogging again, slowly but surely. This mess of mine is starting to resemble the set dressing from the final scene of the Les Mis film. You can almost imaging Anne Hathaway bursting out of my closet and Hugh Jackman swinging down from the ceiling fan, both bursting into song. With Russell Crowe not far behind, believing that if he puts on my pink winter hat, he will be completely unrecognizable. 

Ok, a confession: I haven't actually been living underneath this giant mound that is starting to resemble a modern art installation.  My fall has been one of the most full seasons in recent memory; I've started a new day job, begun teaching a brand new class of students this semester at a local college, filmed part of a short film that I wrote and am acting in, switched to a new therapist, and have been in production for a new in progress play that had a showing at the end of September. The whole experience has been wild and wonderful and though I'm sleepy, I'm happy. Being in so many new situations and simultaneously stepping back from the social media machine, I feel more full of new creative ideas than I've felt in awhile. Do I have the energy to execute said ideas at the moment? That's debatable. But boy, it feels good to feel inspired. I have so much I want to write and make and share, including a big shift I've started to have about the notion of "balance" in a creative life. But I've promised myself the early bedtime I need tonite, so all that will be a post for another day.

A few things I did want to share about some neat events happening soon:

1.) If you are anywhere near Baltimore, why not head to see my documentary play Big Work this weekend? The Baltimore Job Hunters Support Group is producing two readings of the play I co-created with Kate Marple of The Perpetual Visitors Theatre Company tonite and tomorrow at 8:00 PM as a fundraiser for their organization.  You can learn more about the play here and purchase tickets over here.  This is the very first time that the play is being performed by a different organization other than our theatre company, and I'm feeling a little giddy about it. 

2.) If you're in Upstate New York on Saturday, November 3rd, come out and play with me and Kristy Lenuzza of Sow to Speak as we co-teach a workshop, Finding Your Voice Through Creativity! Kristy is such a dear friend and fellow creative and I'm so grateful to be co-teaching a workshop with her that's aimed at women in the workplace and explores how we can harness the power of creativity to find your voice and strengthen your communication and speaking. The session will be held in Utica, NY on November 3rd from 9-11 AM at 4 Elements Studio.  You can read more about the workshop and register for the event here.  I hope you'll join us!

And if you're not anywhere near Baltimore or Upstate New York but are looking for a little something to listen to this weekend, I would suggest hopping over to the Boston Podcast Players website to hear the recent episode that Kate Marple, my  Perpetual Visitors Theatre Company partner and I, were featured in.  Though we wrote our play Big Work more than two years ago, it was such a treat to get to sit down with Greg Lam, the founder and host of the podcast, and chat about the process of making a documentary play about the jobs we have and how they affect our ability to create the rest of our lives. I'm so thrilled to have gotten the chance to share this conversation with Greg and Kate. And? The podcast episode art makes me look like a drawing. So neat!

Take care of yourselves, Friends, and I hope you find a way this weekend to do something you love to do, that makes you feel like YOU. Because who couldn't use more of that? Looking forward to visiting this space again soon.