Dedicated to supporting and promoting holistic health practitioners (and others!), Brave Harvest will help you connect and communicate with current and prospective clients.  Writing and editing your website and newsletters…  Designing your print publications… Marketing to prospective clients…  Managing your presence on social networking sites…

More services to come including full “agent” services for teachers and practitioners interested in expanding their healing touch through classes and workshops.

My own website is still in process, but for now, please check in at Facebook.

I’ve got enough inner geek to see me through social networking and basic website creation, and I know I have a good eye and enough skill with InDesign to make some darn good publications.  And is describing a Vinyasa Yoga class in two sentences the coolest way to play with language that I could ever be paid for?  YES!

So, during the long drive home from work and picking up my Angel Baby last night I thought back to my word of 2010: COURAGE.  This whole enterprise is requiring buckets of the stuff, and I need to remind myself to dig deep and replenish the stocks at least once a day.  And so, the newest incarnation of my fledgling business’s name has been born:

Brave Harvest Holistic Promotions

Woke up this morning and I still like it.  It’s making me feel brave enough to move through the day despite all the nightmares and the fears of AM I INSANE to try to pull together a business while I still stick to the security of the day job AND play mommy with all my heart and soul?

Someday my husband will forgive me for chaining him to the kitchen where he creates the nourishment that keeps this Fierce Mama Machine moving along…

What do you think of

Harvest Born Holistic Promotions?

The latest (maybe the greatest) incarnation: Harvest Holistic Promotions.

Kinda love it, kinda worry that it doesn’t roll off the tongue the way I would like. In that case, I start to lean towards Harvest Ridge Holistic Promotions since we happen to look out on the gorgeous Shawangunk Ridge here in the Hudson Valley.

P.S. Think it is a concern that “Holistic Harvest” is the name of a California cannabis club??

I need your help, dear blog readers.  I am building a new business supporting and promoting holistic health practitioners.  Thing is, I can’t decide what to name it.  Do I go for clever and make people say “what an intriguing name!  whatever could they do?”  Or, do I play it safe and throw another soothing, but semi-generic name into the alternative healing soup?

Please leave me other questions and ideas in the comments section!

I miss you all!

Full of run on sentences and long to do lists and tasty bedtime reading: Time Management from the Inside Out by Julie Morganstern (shockingly, I have not wanted to throw it across the room! I need her help!).

Someday, I’ll be back – PROMISE!

But, this morning I woke in time for a solitary cup of tea and the chance to watch the fullest lady moon set in the western sky just as the opposite horizon gave itself over to the sun’s glow.  And before that, when I filled up the kettle from the fridge’s water dispenser I realized exactly what I would tell Moira when she someday asks me what she should look for in the person she will marry.

She’ll know she’s met “the one” because the perfect soul mate will always light her way.

Sometimes when stumbling about in the rocky trail of becoming, it is easy to feel isolated and lost even when someone you love more than life slumbers beside you.  But then you need to look around you and find the light shining from most unexpected places, always burning somewhere to guide you home.

In my case, it was the glow of the LEDs on the water dispenser that my husband installed last winter.  Filling up that bedtime glass in the dark kitchen always led to spills and muttered curses, and so he made a little addition to our brand new monster of a refrigerator.  This morning as I filled the kettle in the thickest darkness, that of a January morning at 5 a.m., I was more grateful for its light than I ever had been at nighttime.  I knew I had found the one who would always light my way and that he slept upstairs, sheltering our most perfect creation.

For us to be “Glaser women” is to define us by virtue of my mother’s marriage to my father.  As far as we know, that name reaches back to a Heinrich Karl Glaser from Ulm, Germany sometime in the mid 19th century.  Seeing as my mother is French and Irish, all by way of Canada, this name describes nothing of her origins; it just sums up the last 35 years she has spent married into my dad’s clan.

Plus, by virtue of my own marriage three years ago, Glaser has been swallowed up to be just a middle initial for me.  Both Moira and I are known to the world as Goudy and so we align ourselves with a bunch of strangers whose histories I cannot know.

After all of the discussions about what we would name our daughter, it seemed that there was nothing more important than the word that would proceed her into the world.  To make her “Moira” was to honor all of the Maries and Marys in the families, but it was also to make her a unique creature.  We were offering the first word in a long and yet unwritten life.

What a paradox – to have one name so carefully chosen and another to be an accident of history.

No matter how far I can reach back, each successive grandmother is identified by the man her own mother married.  These men were key, of course, from their initial microscopic contributions to the ways that they supported and loved the web of women before us.  The men who are in our lives now, who gave us these names that start with G, they are incredibly vital to the people we are, but when we are a tiny community of women in the kitchen, we need a new name.

It seem that patriarchal titles look back, always with one foot lagging in generations of sires we have never met.  To sit with my mother and spend a day marveling over the brand new life in our midst makes me realize that there is a way in which matriarchal time always looks forward.  We take strength from the women who came before us, but we look at the world with fresh eyes with the birth of each baby.  What unifies us all is not a shared name, but a shared creation.  In this case, a little girl named Moira Jacqueline.  So for now, until the next babe enters the world, we are all Moira’s Women.

Even if you are not a mother or even a woman, how does this change your life, to tell time and find a name by looking into the future rather than pulling around someone else’s past?  What if the keys to identity were not already written but were always being born fresh into the world?

Here we go again on a dizzying upswing.  Possibilities are stars and I am hurtling through them at lightspeed.  Somebody told Chewie to punch it, and it seems the hyperdrive is working just fine.   Opportunities are endless.  I can zoom onward, my heart in my throat as I watch all these amazing chances streak by my windows.

But, wait, help!  It’s all flying by too fast and I can’t connect the dots of stars if they just look like trails of laser fire.  And I might be moving at stunning speed, but do I even know where I am going?  Euphoria is sweet, but I’m risking my sanity, achieving all this altitude without sufficient oxygen.

Reaching such velocity and then slowing to the inevitable crawl between these frenzied trips beyond the atmosphere of my every day experience is nothing new, but traveling through life as a new mother is making the ride more brilliant, terrifying, and death-defying than ever before.

This is passion, this is euphoria, this is limitlessness.  And it can be as difficult to harness and capitalize upon as a passing comet.

Christine Kane has a guest blogger who writes about passion today.  She names it, desrcibes it, and invites readers to uncover it in themselves.  What she does not address is how to harness it so you don’t just feel like a helium balloon, rising so fast you forget the feel of the earth.  It’s only the combination of a pair of boots firmly planted in the mud of daily life worn with a set of passion feathered wings that stuff really gets done, that the necessary changes happen.

For me, passion is hope, ever springing eternal.  My task is to capture all of this fabulous momentum and distill it into a potion I can drink each day, a little draft I can add to my morning tea to keep the sweetest adrenalin pumping even when real life is trying to tell me it is impossible to fly.

What happens when we all find out that Al Gore has been right?  What happens when people really start to run out of water?  How many links in the chain have to break before our global network of food distribution?  How many days of product are in an average supermarket?  For a proud liberal, why do I have a funny perspective on guns that I don’t talk about much?  In what part of the psyche and the spirit should stories like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest reside?

Ach, Marisa!  What are you doing to your dear readers on a Monday morning?  The sun isn’t even up yet and with gloomy thoughts like this you are practically daring it not to rise!

Fear not, if you are anything like Mom and me you will plunge into your seas of worry and dredge up all of your 3 a.m. thoughts even though it is the middle of the day.  But then you’ll get up for another cup of tea and the phone will ring and you’ll pay the cable bill or head to the dentist and you’ll pretty much forget this little dip into the nastiest recesses of your “what if…?” consciousness.

Of course, we all do this.  I, for one, have no idea how I would get through each day, full of all sorts of mundane beauty and banal ugliness, if I was truly tuned into my concerns about the state of our collective future.  It is pretty much impossible to fully enjoy an infant’s laugh if you allow yourself to focus on all the evils that might endanger it.

And so we engage in these impassioned discussions and stir up the sediment that our modern, Western, wasteful lives have created in the riverbeds of our awareness and then we start making dinner.  The conversation I had with my mom was so amazing and touched on so many important topics, it had me wanting to take meeting minutes.  But, I had my hands full with the baby when I was not clearing up the endless piles of clutter and I never got around to writing til right this Monday morning minute.

If I had had the chance to play scribe and record the litany of ills and the faint glimmers of solution would we be any closer to solving any of the world’s problems?  The tragedy of the whole conversation was that, as much as we were both so invigorated to trade ideas mother to daughter and back again and to flow along in the tides of conversation, we really felt pretty powerless.  Talking about Washington’s party politics and the conservative pundits’ maniacal desire to debase our president’s every action and motive left us rather deflated.  We were saved by a gently shaken snow globe of a January day  and by an infant just discovering her voice.  A baby who has not yet had to worry about the lies that the media propagates and the impossible search for truth.

We are not powerless, of course.  We have the loving bonds that allow us to dive deep and surface together.  It is as true that enough of these conversation will change the world as it is necessary to believe that they can.