For many women+, the pressure never lets up. Work, caregiving, even self care time, it can feel like we are asked to be everything and do everything at once. Sometimes it seems easier to just push harder to deal with whatever is in front of us. In my experience, though, real relief never comes that way. It does come, sometimes quietly and often surprisingly, through creative practices.
One of those practices for me has always been reading, beginning with the simple ritual of choosing a book. Cloud & Leaf bookstore in magical Manzanita on the Oregon coast has been my sanctuary for over two decades. It is where I sat with myself through divorce, all stages of child-rearing, loneliness, betrayal, as well as deep love and connection.
Cloud & Leaf is where I first reached for books on trauma, shared children’s stories with my son, wandered into spiritual texts, brushed up on anthropology classics, and lingered over photography and design. Every Croatian family member who has visited me in the United States has been brought to this bookstore. In many ways, I grew into adulthood between those shelves. Books have been a lifeline to creativity, to wisdom, and to reinventing myself.
It feels natural, then, to return to Cloud & Leaf with another form of creative practice. For years I came here to purchase and take books home. Now the Inner Bonding Guided Journal is on the shelves, and the Courage Cards are here too, tucked in their golden pouches!
To see my own work in the same space that has carried me through so many chapters of life feels tender and a little unreal. Imposter thoughts show up. Who am I to belong among the authors I once relied on for inspiration and encouragement?
Remembering the tools I learned, I turn toward my daily practice to hush the inner harshness. Louder than anything, I feel gratitude. Gratitude that the tools we created out of my own journey might now offer comfort to a person who needs them.