Drops of Inspira

 Hello! I'm just popping on to say that I have successfully moved blogs! This current blog here on Blogger will remain up for the foreseeable future, but it will be dormant.  If you want any current news, please head over to Substack and subscribe to my blog there. Here is my link for that:  https://dropsofinspira.substack.com/   Everything I posted here, should be there in the archives as well. The differences are: 1. It's Substack. 2. You'll have access to new posts and if you subscribe, they'll show up in your inbox whenever I post. Thanks again for reading! Hope to see you over on Substack. - Julia Garcia / Arysta Henry

Hello! Last year, I mentioned that I was considering moving to another platform in the new year, and after some consideration, I've decided to move this blog over to Substack. Probably within the next few weeks. I don't know what will happen to my Blogger account. From what I've read it will transfer everything over so hopefully all the old posts will still be able to read, but in any case, this blog here on Blogger should still be around. I just won't be posting here. I assume it will take me a few weeks to work out the kinks of Substack, but hopefully I will be back online by the end of March if not sooner.  So, what does that mean in the meantime? After today, I'm going into radio silence as I work on transferring things over and working out the details.  Hopefully, when all is finished, I can post over here that everything is ready, and those of you who follow this blog can just pop on over there and things can continue like normal.  Thank you for bearing with m...

 Hello, Admittedly, this post is a bit of a vent for me as well as a lament. I had an experience my local library this week that made me very sad and feel lost in a place that was always familiar to me. Goes to show what happens when you leave for a few years. When you come back, you come back to new terrain. Things just don't stay the same. I've written about my old library before. When I was little, it was in an old one-room schoolhouse, and I loved that place. I spent hours there with my mom and siblings pouring over books and taking home mountains of them to read.  The thing about that library was that it was familiar. Back then, the books seldom changed. You could always count on finding old favorites in the exact place they were before. Inter-library loan wasn't as functionable as it is today. But I liked that.  Furthermore, the library was full of informational books and classics. I knew exactly where to go to find books on dolphins, otters, whales or underwater ar...

  Hello! I wanted to bring this to everyone's attention last week, but things were a bit chaotic at my house so I'm talking about it now.  When people think about February, they normally think of Valentines' Day . My entire time growing up, that's all I knew. When February came around, the world went crazy with pink and red hearts, chocolate, teddy bears and people in love.  As a kid, somehow I got a hold of old-fashioned valentines cards and would give them to my parents and siblings, writing in them with red crayon. Scandalous, I know. How dare I ruin those beautiful cards with my childish scrawls? As I got older, I watched those around me fall in love, get married, or break up. Meanwhile, I stayed single and made heart sugar cookies for me and my family.  It wasn't until about five or so years ago that I discovered that the same month that houses Valentines' Day , is also International Friendship Month . Which is pretty awesome. I mean, a whole month that cel...

 Hello! It's been raining in my corner of the world. A lot. Normally, the small mountain town where I live gets rain only a few times a year. In the past week, the weather has been saying that we've had as much rain as we normally have in three months. And the storm is not done yet. Next week, we get more rain. All week long. Right now, it's crisp and very cold. Thirty-five degrees with an actual feel of twenty-nine degrees.  Despite the cold, and the wet, it's actually very beautiful. There's something to be said about rain-washed peaks, fog and crows in the early morning. The buildings' colors stand out in stark contrast to their bleak surroundings, looking for all the world like a water-color painting.  As the rain was coming down, I paid special attention to the way the drops hit puddles, popping and splashing in cheerful, chuckling laughter the way only raindrops could laugh.  Water rushed down the street, catching bits of oil from parked cars that gave it ...

  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 (...

 

  Hello! I'm going to take a brief hiatus for the holidays starting next week, so this will be the last post of the year. I'll be back in 2024 with new content, but for now, here is a poem to wrap up the year: That's all for now. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you all in 2024. Julia Garcia / Arysta Henry

  Hello! First off, you're going to notice something a little different. The graphic at the top is something I made with Canva that is supposed to be like the newspaper in my WIP (Work-in- Progress) Drops of Inspira.  In my WIP, The Underground  is a newspaper for members of The Underground, a group of members of the resistance against the governor of Inspira who have had to go into hiding or risk imprisonment... or worse. So, I thought I would name my little "life updates" in my blog after that with the goal of sometime in the not-too-distant future starting a newsletter with the same name. So, without further ado, let's get to the updates. Aha! You haven't seen this graphic in a while, have you?  So... Life.  This past year has been an absolute whirlwind.  I've gone from a year at a toxic job to the job I left two years ago. It's been a change for the better in many respects. My memory is strengthening (I lost months of memory from the stress at my last ...

 Hello and Happy December! A little-known fact about me: I will wish everyone I meet a happy first of the month for every month. Why? Because I love celebrating the little things. The first frost. The first of every month. The first fire of the season in our wood-burning stove. The first daffodils. The blue-eyed grasses. New paints. First drafts. The list goes on. I figure the little things should be celebrated as much as the big things. Which is why, I think, that I love traditions, particularly those my family celebrates December with. Here are a few: We always get a live tree. We used to go as a family to get it, but these days, we just gather as many of us as we can and go down the mountain to get one. We string popcorn for the tree while watching It's a Wonderful Life. The first movie of the season is usually  Elf. I always wrap gifts in shiny blue wrapping paper. I do this because as a little girl, I heard Pretty Paper sung by Randy Travis and there was a stanza that sai...

 Hello! Here at the end of the month of November 2023, I wanted to write a poem. Those that have followed this blog over the last couple of years know that I used to write poetry and post a poem a month, usually on the 15th of every month. Since my unplanned hiatus last year, I haven't really written any poetry except when my cousin and grandpa passed away, but I wanted to try and stretch those muscles again today. The results aren't exactly what I hoped for, but I'm thankful for the words all the same. I'm learning to be thankful for the struggles as well as the blessings. These little things that don't seem the best. I know I could do better, but right now, my poetry muscles are tired and out of practice. And that is okay. So, here is my little poem born out of the darkness of sadness and healing. My reminder to myself that the simple act of giving thanks is like sunlight. It makes me warmer and happier and should be scattered liberally. And that's a wrap! I...

 Hello! Thank you for joining me for another Monday! Today I'm discussing another area I feel woefully inadequate to write about: being thankful in every season.  When I was thinking about which aspect of thankfulness to write about this week, I really hoped to write about something a little more cliché. Something more happy. Something easier to write about. But as I thought more about it, the theme of being thankful in every season kept coming up. Songs about it kept playing on my Spotify. It came up in conversations with my friends. It came up in my prayer journal early, early this morning (like 2:30 early. Hello insomnia.). And it came up this morning. Being thankful is easier when the sun is out, the sky is blue and things are going our way. It's easier when there is plenty to eat and when our bank accounts aren't running on empty. It's a lot harder when we're sinking under depression, running from anxiety, sobbing in choking grief, our pantries are running empt...

 Hello! One of my favorite holiday movies' is White Christmas   with Bing Crosby. Mostly, this is thanks to my mom. Her father loved Bing Crosby so she carried that love over and shared it with me.  There are a lot of songs in that movie, but one of them has stuck with me. Or rather the refrain has: "When I'm worried and I can't sleep I count my blessings instead of sheep And I fall asleep counting my blessings" Too often, I worry. It's a human thing. We all do it. But when I worry, I tend to tunnel inward. To bury myself. If it's strong enough, the worry turns into anxiety and if it's very bad, it turns into a full-blown panic attack.  You see, if I worry, then I'm looking at myself to fix my problems, which I can't. When my focus isn't on God and is on myself, I spiral, and all I can think about are my misfortunes. Things look worse than they probably are.  Instead of worrying, something that I can do is to count my blessings. To list thi...

 Hello and welcome to November! November has to be my favorite month of the year. Not only is it the month of Thanksgiving if you're in the United States, but it's also the month of my mom's birthday. I grew up very close to my mom, and she's still very important to me so her birthday is always a cause for me to celebrate, to give thanks that she is with me for another year. Speaking of giving thanks... That is the topic of the blog for this month. Giving Thanks. Yes, I know it might be a little cliché, but it's also something I think, that we don't do often enough. For some reason, as a society we all seem very entitled. We have rights. We even have a Bill of Rights. We feel that we are owed certain things and we get angry when we don't get them. As a society, we are very entitled. But listen. We are not actually owed anything. And for what we are given, we should give thanks.  We should give thanks the year 'round, but let's start with this month. ...

     Hello! Last night I was talking about where we want to be and the frustration that we feel because we haven't achieved that status yet. And I think we all go through those moments. Life always looks greener on the other side of the fence. Because if and when we do achieve those things that we want, we'll find something else to achieve.  It seems we need patience for progress.  What is progress really? It's moving forward a step at a time in the direction that makes a difference. But did you catch the word step ?  Even if we run, the motion is made up of small steps.  Our own lives aren't made up of giant leaps and bounds. It's made of small steps. Those steps are life. The moments in between that we don't think much of. The moments that we don't see because we are too busy being impatient.  What if we just slowed down and valued the small moments? We're so busy looking forward that we don't take time to look behind and see how far we've come...

 Hello! When I was thinking about patience this last week, I kept thinking about taking the time to breathe. Maybe because there's been a lot going on in my life. Things going along at such a rapid pace that I feel disoriented and desperately needing things to slow down so I can catch up and take in a breath. The problem is that we live in a world where things are in a constant state of movement. We pride ourselves on filling our schedules to the max and then some. When people ask how we are doing or what we are doing, we often reply, "I'm busy" or something like, "my week is so full."  I'm looking out at the main street of my small town right now and noting how busy it is.  Earlier, I was talking with someone about how busy it is compared to even three years ago. Three years ago, it didn't start getting busy on the weekends until 11 in the morning, Today it was busy at 9 and according to him, it's been like this all year. What happened to the sl...

 Hello! I know last week's post was a bit heavy, so this week, I wanted to tackle another angle of patience that is near and dear to my heart: Patience and How it Affects Mental Health. If you've followed my blog for awhile, you know that I struggle a lot with both anxiety and depression. As a kid, I never thought I would be dealing with either, but it happened.  Lately, I've been fascinated by just how much impatience takes a toll on the mind and body.  Did you know that impatience can raise your blood pressure, raise your cortisol levels and adrenaline? When these are raised, your body enters a fight or flight response and your stress levels raise. When your stress levels rise, your body is prone to physical illness as well as mental illness. Many illnesses start in the mind. It controls more than we realize. And no, I'm not saying it's all in your head. That saying is one that has been going around for far too long in my opinion. It basically means that the sick ...