From the Editor

Summer 2013:
5 Ways To Revel With Us

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Revel Life Screen Shot

 

The lazy days of summer are here and, if you’re like us, you’re doing a thousand and one things, between juggling your career, family, and social life with friends and making time for summer downtime, whether that means jetting off for a beach vacation, or perhaps something more educational or culturally enriching for you and your brood, or just lounging in the yard or by the pool. We’ve all got 99 problems but a vacay ain’t one.

Summer finds me juggling a lot more balls then usual — a trend I am very much looking forward to continuing. I’m blogging here and at Huffington Post, making the occasional appearance on HuffPost Live, where I pop up from time to time to gab with friends and colleagues in entertainment, writing my first novel and, for reasons yet unknown, sticking my baby toe back in the TV and film pond with some new original work and my random thoughts of one day turning the fiction I’ve discovered I love to write into a movie or, better yet, a movie franchise. Add to that my efforts to pump up my home and family and social life and my hands are full. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The challenge of course, is how to juggle all our balls well. It’s something we all face and from what I can tell, the best answer going is to accept that you can’t do it all at once. What you can do do whatever you’re doing now really well and keep an eye on things you might do next. Take small steps towards those things today and when the opportunity to go full throttle arises, give it your all, but until then, don’t fret about the things you can’t do. Rather, do the things you can with your whole heart and soul. Whatever you can do is always enough because, one, it has to be and, two, it actually really is. Sometimes we think we have to do 10,000 things to reach our goal, but the truth is, all we really have to do is a smaller number of the right things. Knowing what the right things are isn’t always easy, but if you relax and learn to listen to the still quiet voice of intuition, your answers will come. Instead of driving yourself into the ground trying to cover all the bases all the time, you’ll know which things you actually need to do to meet up with the happy accidents that, let’s face it, play a major role in the successes we achieve in our lives.

Speaking of successes, we’ve received a lot of wonderfully supportive comments from you on Twitter, Facebook, via email and sometimes even in person and it means the world to us. The work we do here is all about connecting with other people in real time and it means a lot to us that you are out there reading. One of our goals for the coming year is to engage with you even more and to gradually grow our readership of like minded people. And so, as we kick off the lazy/super busy days of summer, we thought we’d share some ideas for how you can engage with us even more. So here goes:

5 WAYS TO REVEL WITH US AT REVEL IN IT MAG

One. Subscribe to our RSS Feed by clicking on the “Subscribe To Us” icon at the right side of your screen to receive a notification whenever a new post goes up. We usually post between 2 and 5 times each week.

Two. Follow us on Bloglovin’ by clicking on this Bloglovin’ link or on the “Bloglove Us” at the right of your screen. Bloglovin’, if you’re not familiar with it, is a place where you can subscribe to all the blogs you follow so that you can read the latest posts from all your favorites all in one place — a great boon for any blog lover with a busy life. I read everything from The New Yorker to The Coveteur all in this one place.

Three. Like us or Follow us on Facebook (to receive updates on our latest posts and other content directly in your Facebook feed), Twitter and/or Pinterest  by clicking any of the links just provided or by clicking the “Like Us”, “Follow Us” and “Take An Interest In Us” links at the right of your screen.

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May 2013:
May Flowers

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Bouganvilla from Apartment 34

 

Wild Flowers

May flowers. Life comes back into bloom and we with it. At least that’s how it should be. Years ago, the week I turned 24, I spent five days on Maasai Mara game preserve in Kenya, where I was living that summer. We stayed at a lodge that was right at the equator. I remember looking up into the sky one night and thinking, “so the world really is round.” Above me, the sky opened out like a giant, star-filled bowl. Save for the lights at the lodge, which were kept dimly lit, there were no electric lights for miles. In their absence, I was dipped in a profound presence that is always with us, but that we mostly can’t feel, with our bright lights and busy lives. That moment has never left me. It’s what keeps me living, the best I can, with the rhythms of the seasons, even though technology means I don’t have to. The thing is, I want to. Life is so much richer that way. We are part of this, after all. Part of this ecosystem, not masters of it, and the more we sit in that reality, the more we feel the gift that it is to be connected, to one another, to this planet, to ourselves.

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April 2013:
Make It Rain

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Make It Rain

You know the old adage, April showers bring May flowers. It’s an unoriginal one, but lately I’ve piled a whole buffet onto my plate. So forgive me I riff a bit on an unoriginal but no less apt idea. It’s April. Where you are, maybe it even rains. Though this might seem like bad news, it’s what we need if our garden is going to grow, a garden I hope you’ve filled not just with flowers, but also with food. Beauty and bounty both. In many ways, that’s what we’re over here reveling about. The pendulum swings. We learn that the love of money (but not money itself!) will bring you to your ruin, but so, I’m here to attest, can the obsessive love of purely spiritual things. We are spirits in a body, so let’s not forget the body part. Let’s not forget our precious lives. Let’s not forget that we are in the world. This is no time to retreat into ephemeral things. The ephemeral things will be there when you’re gone. As far as I can tell, they’re the only things that will be there when you’re gone (though I’ve yet to have any one leave this world and then report back).

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March 2013:
Fertile Ground

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Family On The Lawn

Spring is about fertile ground. The season begins at the Spring Equinox on March 21st (one of two days, the other being the Fall Equinox, when the the hours of daylight equal the hours of night), but we’ll be celebrating all month long.

In the Wicca tradition, the Spring Equinox is celebrated with the holiday of Ostara, a word that’s believed to derive from the Germanic word Eostre, from which derives the word Easter, the Christian holiday of the Resurrection. Spring is also home the Jewish holiday of Passover, commemorating the Exodus of the Jews out of bondage in Israel.

Back in my New York days, the early days of spring were among my favorite, precisely because they hinted at things to come. The daffodils would pop their heads, up through the little squares of soil around the trees that dotted my sidewalk. I’d get a fresh burst of energy, as if, like the daffodils, I could sense the coming light.

Spring is a time of renewal and new possibilities, literally and metaphorically. It’s when we sow seeds in the ground rather than the greenhouse — and it’s a good time to sow new seeds in our minds.

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February 2013:
Let Love Rule

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Couples Collage

It’s February, and we can’t stop thinking about love. Not the love of hallmark cards and chocolate hearts. The love that moves mountains, the love that changes the world. It’s this love that Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of when he prophesied that “unarmed truth and unconditional love” would have the final word. It’s this kind of love I think of when I contemplate the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear not one, but two landmark gay marriage cases later this year, United States v. Windsor, challenging the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), that shameful law that restricts marriage to the union between one man and one woman, (thereby denying gay couples who choose to marry the equal protection of the laws), and Hollingsworth v. Perry, aimed at overthrowing, for once and for all, California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 voter initiative that amended the California constitution in response to the California Supreme Court’s decision in In re Marriage Cases to strike down California state statutes prohibiting gay marriage on grounds that they violated the California Constitution.

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