Category Archives: Levity & Lightness of Being

Meet My New Friend Levity

Levity & Lightness of Being, Resilience & Practice, Self-Care & Soul-Nourishmentjan

Years ago when Gratitude and I were mulling over an appropriate name for our website we landed on Gratitude and Company. We were tickled by the double meaning of the word company; one being business….or like we prefer saying blissness and the other being about friendship and who you surround yourself with.

At the time, we envisioned other friends joining us on our blissness journey. It’s has been surprising who has ended up joining us. When we chose the name Gratitude and Company we had thought that there would be a muse friend for each of the inspired nine ARTbundance Principles™ which Marney Makridakis gifted us in the amazing coaching program we had very recently completed. I just realized that was over fifteen years ago. Time flies when you get to be my age.

As I explored those nine principles Gratitude made herself known and we became fast friends. Gratitude has always felt like the cornerstone principle of the other eight principles: intuition, vision, balance, attraction, choice, action, connection, and service.

Those principles, as yet, have not become muse friends with fully developed personalities. Much to our surprise other muse friends have chosen to join us on our blissness journey instead. Presently Detective Why Bother, Steady Freddy, Epithany and our most recent friend Levity are official “members” of our company.

I realize now we haven’t officially introduced Detective Why Bother, Epithany, or Steady Freddy, so we will circle back to this soon. Today we want to put the spotlight on Levity since she has most recently joined our little circle.

As mentioned in my last post my word for this year is levity. I decided to create a levity journal to assist me in more deeply connecting with the energy of levity. I noticed in challenging moments I tended to too easily forget levity could be very helpful. That’s when my new friend chirped in and made her presence known.

Introducing my muse Levity who is a sweet hummingbird — Meet my newest muse Levity

She’s helping me to remember to make levity a new daily practice just like Gratitude has helped support me with my Gratitude practice and so much more.

More Levity Please

Levity & Lightness of Being, Self-Care & Soul-Nourishment, Uncategorizedjan

Earlier this month, during a challenging moment I forgot that my word for 2025 is levity. It may have helped my stress hormones if I had remembered to see the situation with more of a sense of humor.

First a quick note and a little background: I picked levity as my 2025 word of the year because I was feeling a foreboding heaviness and finding it much more difficult to be optimistic about the future as we approached the coming year. More levity felt like an excellent antidote to this heavy feeling. It has been my natural inclination to take things a bit too seriously. As a kid I was gifted an autograph stuffy called Worry Wart cause I was known to worry way too much. I can seriously identify with the beloved Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore. This inclination while still present today at 70 years young, it has been modestly tempered with a little less worry and bit more optimism most days. My friend Gratitude has helped a lot with that. I’d like to keep it that way if for no other reason than people with a sense of humor and willingness to laugh at life’s absurdities tend to live longer.

My challenging moment was actually a rather silly first world annoyance. Certainly not worth my getting all steamed up about. I was done shopping way before the other two who were “having way too much fun taking their time to see every item on every shelf.” I was tired, hungry, my back was complaining, and the store had no place to sit and wait. And wait. And wait.

In that grumpy moment, I didn’t remember my word of the year. I didn’t remember to consciously invite Levity to come help. If I had, I’m sure it would have played out differently.

Now that I think about it and I’m a bit more rested, fed, and my back is quieter I realized I was likely just earning my karma for making my husband similarly wait and wait and wait while I grocery shopped. Ha! Ha! Im sure I will have many more opportunities to practice infusing some levity into these kinds of challenging moments. Next time Jan!

In the meantime, I believe I will be creating/identifying a muse named Levity who can help me more easily remember during those grumpier moments to find my funny bone, look for the lightness, and see the possibilities. So stay tuned. Perhaps we will introduce her in our next post.

MUYL Blog Challenge: The influence of a Good Children’s Book

Levity & Lightness of Being, Uncategorizedjan

The prompt for today asks us to write about our favorite book and tell why it is our favorite. Or the other option is to write about a book we’ve written and explain why you might find it interesting.

I was amazed!! Last evening when I read the prompts for today I actually had a favorite book pop into mind. This is not an easy thing since I own (and have read) a lot of books that I absolutely love.

I could write a top ten favorite cookbooks, a top ten favorite creative books, a top ten favorite spiritual books, top ten favorite self help, top ten favorite biographies or memoirs. You get the idea. I will not belabor the point. I may even do this if there’s interest. Quite some time ago, I created a resource page where I talk about some of my favorites…you’ll find that here.

The title that immediately popped into my head is a book that is out of print. Although Amazon does have a few copies if you are interested. I was tempted to pick up one of these copies myself, because I don’t actually have a copy of the original book. My mom does. It’s a book that her Grandfather gave her for Christmas in 1938….everyone called him Pa.

Oh that’s right bet your wondering what the title is. It’s Gabby Gaffer by May Justus. It’s a children’s book with delightful illustrations and a folksy charm. One of the things that makes this book special is adults love reading it and get as much out of it as kids do. They may even get more from reading it. It’s kind of like Winnie the Pooh and the Velveteen Rabbit that way (a couple other of my all-time favorite books..yeah I love children’s books..guess I just have never grown up). When it came time to read these to my own children they were the kind of books that were even more fun and/or poignant to read as an adult than as a kid. I understood so much more and got the more subtle “adult” messages woven into these stories. More than once I would chuckled over the antics of Pooh bear and his friends. It was fun seeing our own all too familiar foibles mirrored in these characters. If we couldn’t see ourselves in the character then we certainly knew someone who acted just like that.

Back to Gabby Gaffer and why it’s a favorite. The book itself is such a delight. I could read and reread it and often do. It teaches without teaching (or preaching or being in your face with the message for that matter).

As a kid, when the furnace went on the blitz (and it often did in that old forest service house), I have fond memories of my two sisters, my brother and I crawling under the bed covers with Mom while she occupied us by reading Gabby Gaffer and other books all day. It was her way of keeping us all warm, cozy, happy, and content. I think she loved having an excuse…to tuck us all in and indulge in her favorite pastime reading books.

Then for Christmas ’85, I opened a package from my youngest sister. She had loving taken the original copy of the book and had the book copied in black and white. I believe she used a copy machine. She hand bound the book and covered it with a beautiful print fabric. Then she went back and hand colored each of the pages to resemble the original version of the book. This was before Amazon and the internet. She did attempt to find used copies for each of us, but came up empty handed. So this was her way of keeping the joy of this book (and the memories) alive. Obviously I was deeply touched by her thoughtfulness. I cried tears of joy when I received this gift.

Here’s a little snippet from Gabby Gaffer to give you a bit of the flavor of this wonderful book.

“When Gabby Gaffer wasn’t working for somebody or playing with somebody in Unlucky Village, he was walking in the forest by himself. Folks said he went there to throw away his troubles, but if he took any troubles there to throw away, they must have been somebody else’s. for Gabby Gaffer never seemed to claim any for himself.

Everybody said he was the luckiest chap that ever came to the village, and there were those who watched carefully to see if his luck wouldn’t change by and by, but they got small reward to pay them for their patience. Most of the people in the village had sense enough to see that not only was Gabby Gaffer a most unusually lucky chap, but he brought good luck to many other people as well.’

What I didn’t realized until last night was just how much influence this book has had on the writing of my current book Gratitude’s Journey. I’ve incorporated a number of the things I love about Gabby Gaffer in my own book. One similarity is my book is partly a story that teaches without directly teaching. It is the kind of book that children will enjoy and treasure, but it is really intended for the adult reader who is longing to connect with their inner kid. That has been one of the challenges with writing and designing my book. It could be easily be misunderstood. I know there’s a way to solve this…I just haven’t found it yet. Intermingled with the story ….there are also opportunities for the reader to explore their own inner and outer journey through the practice of art journaling aweventures. This book will charm you, inspire you, and give you nine guiding principles that will enrich your life.