Perfection, retreat with my girls, and kitchen table memories

The pressure that occurs when you don’t blog often is the one of “it has to be perfect!” I didn’t come up with that, read about it in a book on writing. In reality, it’s extremely hard to start after a break, hard to come up with “brilliant” when you haven’t been writing down much, hard to be satisfied with your results, because you want the one time you do it to pay off with perfection! I remembered that as I stared at an empty screen and decided to start the blog post with that, to remind myself to just keep writing and perhaps do it more often! I have no idea where this blog post will go, but that’s ok. Talking about writing, I have been writing a few times a week in a paper journal. The journal even has lines, and I, in case you still don’t know, hate lines! I don’t believe in straight lines either, but I’ll save that for another blog post. Writing in a journal was not my original idea either, if you are wondering if I by chance read about it in a book, you’re right! On my flight home from New York, I was reading Maximize Your Potential book and it convinced me to write my thoughts down for myself apart from my blog writing. Perhaps I’ll make the book into a Quotable Thursday series soon, but can’t promise.

On another note, I just came back from a two day retreat with my friend photographers. Monika, who’s been a frequent subject of my blog posts, and Candace, who will make more frequent appearances, just because the girl’s got amazing sense of humor! This wasn’t an ideal week for any of us to make a 3.5 hour trip one way to see each other, but each one of us was so grateful that we made it work! We escaped from our daily lives to Monika’s grandma’s house filled with treasures and memories she’s accumulated in her 90+ years of living. Grandma Mae reminded us of the value of photographs as we browsed through black and white Instagram size photos of her younger years, but even more so of the value of friendships and making time for people you care about in your life! Her dinner table turned into our goal setting meetings, reminding each other to make the best use of our time and live lives without regrets! Her kitchen was the place we made it hard on each other with jokes about tomato soup without water, our all American dinners topped with a serving of amazing Jello, and this is not just any sweet bread, this is Vitaliy’s.Grandma’s.homemade.Ukrainian.bread you can’t buy at the store! This will definitely be one retreat to remember and I’m so thankful for these girls in my life! Monika was the person that made me see that I can’t do it alone, in business, in life, anywhere! I need others. Candace taught me to give proper value to everything in life, relationships, my art, my health, and so on! I love you ladies and can’t wait for our June retreat and I secretly hope it will be in Alaska, although Monterey is equally charming!

And be sure to check out more photos on my IG