Just Do It Already! A book in the making.

Five years ago, I was getting over the end of a six-year relationship, making a freezer-full of homemade pizza for my mom during another Midwestern Polar Vortex, and watching a live Michael Franti concert on YouTube. And all at once, those things somehow came together into one operatic epiphany—Ahhhh haaaa!!! My Work in the world is to be and spread love!!! Duhhhhhh.

Not a career path, but an answer to the question I’d been asking for at least 25 of my 37 years.

And finally, everything I’d been doing in my life until that point no longer felt like disparate whims, but were bound together by that one focus: LOVE. Writing, teaching, baking, leading wilderness expeditions, making healing potions, cooking… all were in service of love. Holding space for others to feel love by sharing what I most love to do and make.

A year later, I was sitting along Devil’s Creek near the Breitenbush River and was shazzamed by the wild beauty of the place—A bluegreen pool big enough to actually swim in, a wide waterfall, and a big ol’ mossy rock for naked sunning. Just then I got another cosmic wallop—”Oh, Beauty! Your work is to remind the world what a beautiful place it is!”

And so I started to draw.

Beauty is love made manifest.

Four years have passed. I’ve spent most of them at Breitenbush Hot Springs where I cooked and baked and led writing and meditation programs, along with a million other wonderful hot-springy and living-in-the-woodsy things. With the help of many loved ones, I learned about love and heartbreak and all the unconscious shadow stuff that can drive our shows completely if we’re not careful. I’m learning how to ask for what I want, how to assert kind boundaries, and, perhaps most importantly—how to be in love with my very own self most of the time.

I have a lifetime of work yet to do in all of those realms, but my beloveds and I have learned a lot over the past several years about opening our hearts, receiving love, surrendering to beauty, communicating with integrity, and filling our cups full of love from the INSIDE so that we can spread it far and wide without depleting ourselves.

And now it’s time to share what we’ve been learning in the form of a book offering practical actions for injecting more love and beauty into your own life.

The idea crystalized in the steamy sauna at Breitenbush last winter. My body felt so good, so relaxed, so warm on the frigid night. I felt big gratitude for the depths of pleasure my human body is capable of feeling from SO many things, and an awareness of how easy it is to forget to FEEL those pleasures—or deny them entirely—for days, weeks, or years at a time. I gotta remind people of all the delights their bodies are capable of experiencing! That’s it! My book about love!

“The Body’s Delights: Recipes for a Year of Love and Beauty” was now my little zygote.

It’s taken another year to get started in earnest on this project. My vision: A book of 52 “recipes” for practices, projects, foods, beverages, healing potions, and writing prompts that have helped bring more love and beauty into my beloveds’ and my life, and will hopefully do the same for you. If you do one a week over the course of the year, you might just find yourself shimmering by your next birthday. Or at least on closer terms with delight.

To bring this thing from my zippity-do-dah brain closer to the earth, I wrote the name of each recipe I wanted to include on tiny pieces of paper, folded them in half like I would for a game of charades, blindly picked one at a time, and wrote wildly as much as I could about each one. That part was fun and free, unfettered by expectation and mostly done with coffee in the sun room at The Woodsman’s parents’ house in Arizona this January.

And now I’m back in cozy rain-snowy Oregon, transforming my barely legible—and often quite wordy—freewrites into hopefully aesthetic, succinct recipes no more than two pages each. When I told the wise and wonderful Liliana Barzola that I hoped to finish this project by November, she basically said—No. It doesn’t need to take that long. Finish it by the beginning of the summer. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just do it already!

So I am just doing it! Accepting imperfection. Letting it evolve on its own terms. And showing up every day for it. And I’m going to share some of recipes drafts—and the process—as I go. Because it holds me accountable to it. And because I am one of the many, many of you beautiful people working on a project that’s been hovering in mindspace for a long while and I want to be in community with you. And because I’ve always been interested in the process of creation as much as the product. And because I don’t want to wait until this is done to spread some recipes for love and beauty!

Come back every Monday for a new recipe. Start your week with a dose of loooove!

xoox Becca

Check out the final product, The Soul’s Delights!