Drops of Inspira

  Hello!                   I just read this book this month and wanted to give you my honest review:   This book rose and fell like a gentle swell into the nooks and crannies of my heart.     It started slow and built until it crashed into my heart and lit it on fire.     This is the second book by Amanda Dykes that I have read. I don't know how she does it, but her books always leave me overwhelmed and lit from within. Found and held. It's like someone looked me in the eye and said, "I see you. You are not alone." Readers, what was the last book that you read that made you feel this way? Furthermore, why do you read? What makes you pick up a book and stick with it? Until next time... Julia Garcia / Arysta Henry

 Friday night was not a good one. I spectacularly blew it. I had the biggest meltdown in the history of this month. In this year.  Now, the meltdown was stupid. I will admit that. The house was a wreck, but that doesn't justify a meltdown. During the meltdown, I reached out to a few friends via text and asked for prayer. Besides praying for me, one of them coached me through some breathing exercises and told me to step outside and just breathe. Everything within me wanted to say that it wouldn't work, but I grabbed a plate of food and marched myself outside and sat down at our picnic table and ate. Sometime during the stillness, I looked up and saw this moon. It was stunning. Wreathed in rainbows and clouds, it lit up the night sky. And as I gazed at the moon, everything else subsided and I was able to breathe. I could hear the rumbling of a few cars passing. Frogs began to sing somewhere in the forest and the neighbor's dog barked a few times. The stillness and the relativ...

  Hello! I know this graphic hasn't been aired in a bit. Maybe a year or so. And that is because this graphic is from a time before I almost went under. Almost gave up on writing, life and all things altogether. It's been hard work trying to take care of myself and get back on my feet, but I'm slowly starting to resurface and part of that resurfacing is my poetry. It's rough, but it's here and so am I. It's a good thing to be alive. I can't promise that Poetry 15th will happen every month, but if it the 15th of the month lands on a Monday, I will try and post a poem that I wrote the week before. Here is my poem for this Poetry 15th: Until next time... Julia Garcia / Arysta Henry

  Hello! It's good to meet you here in this corner of the internet in the year of 2024.  I won't bore you with tired jokes about the new year. They were old five years ago.  I had intended to give you my top reads of 2023, but I need to create more graphics for that post so it will have to wait for another time.  So, in the meantime, I would like to invite you to view my word for 2024: Recently, I put out a call on social media for people to leave a positive word beginning with the first letter of their name on the post so that I could carry the words with me into 2024. This is perhaps the third or fourth year I've done this? I don't know. I lost count.  I used to do resolutions, but I broke them during the first week. I used to have a lot of goals, but after 2020, I felt like a lot of those goals were just not happening. More like wishes than goals. I still make goals, but they're not hard and fast goals, like I MUST get these done or the world will end goals (...