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Health & Fitness

Tapestry

As Fabulous Shoe Night continues to grow and open chapters around the country, the irony is that our work is bringing people, and communities, that much closer together.

Believe it or not, sometimes writing my blog can be a love-hate relationship. Surely, much more love than hate, but as busy as I am with Fabulous Shoe Night, fitting time in to actually sit down and write can feel cumbersome. Not because I don't enjoy it … I do, but I suppose it's the way I write. I've got to feel the topic … you know, really feel it.

Often times, when I begin writing a blog post, I don't have much more than a vague theme in mind, or, sometimes just a title, and nothing more. But always, it's something that not only resonates with me, but is somehow related to what is currently going on with Fabulous Shoe Night. Frequently as I write, I feel like I am piecing together a puzzle, unsure of what the final picture will look like until it's completed. It's always a mystery that I must wait to reveal itself, and it surprises me every time.

This is perhaps best illustrated by my "Feathering My Nest" post. (http://fabulousshoenight.blogspot.com/2012/09/feathering-my-nest.html) I began by writing about my need for a dedicated office space now that FSN has become, through a life of it's own, my full-time job. As often happens when I write, the post meandered, this time into my decorating choices, which "revealed" to me my, up until then, unrecognized, wholly unconscious love of birds. How could I not have noticed until I began writing that post that there are birds in some form or another literally all over my house? The post then morphed a second time, with yet another realization, that the frequent visitor on my deck was a bird … a mourning dove, specifically. A peek at Google revealed that the mourning dove is the harbinger of hope, which was the final piece that allowed me to finish the puzzle, and really see the picture, whole and complete. I thought I was writing about my new office when I began, but a deeper meaning was there all along … under my nose, really. I just had to be patient and let it reveal itself to me.

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When I first began writing my blog, I used to ask my husband to read through the posts before I published them on the blog site. Not because I needed approval, but literally, to see if they made sense. I so often felt that when I was deeply within the process of the words revealing themselves to me on the screen of my laptop, that I was too close to see if these pieced together, seemingly unrelated fragments in my head translated to a whole, complete picture in the end. I was deep within the trees, searching for the forest … disoriented, dizzy, lost.

Over time I began to see that most of my blog posts each carry several themes, and my job was to weave all the different ideas swimming in my head into a cohesive picture. It was as if each idea was a different color thread, and my challenge was to weave them all into a picture that made sense, that others could actually see.

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I'd so often sit at my desk, in my new, decorated-just-for-me office, staring blankly into space, seeing nothing around me, as thoughts swirled about that I had to try to capture and wrestle into words. Most of my writing is done like this … staring, motionless, followed by brief, staccato bursts of typing, only to lapse back into repeated long spells of silent searching.

Somehow, despite my fear that I'm incapable of weaving these fragments of my thoughts into a cohesive picture, a blog post would emerge, and not only make sense, but somehow manage to convey what was in my heart about Fabulous Shoe Night. For FSN has colored my life in so many different ways … in wonderful new friendships, and the deepening of existing ones; in personal growth, and the expansion of my many, self-restricting comfort zones; in the richness of hard learned lessons about the not-so-nice side of some people, and their eventual extraction from my life, just to name a few.

And now, it's happening again … as I write, the deeper message reveals itself, previously unrecognized ... in fact, un-thought of. If I take a step back, further back, and look down on the forest, out of the confusing maze of the trees, I see that Fabulous Shoe Night is weaving itself into a beautiful, richly detailed tapestry.

Our chapter leaders are the threads, bringing strength, form and color to the tapestry. I see each of them as a unique and beautiful color, bringing their own special skills, talents, and ideas to the Fabulous Shoe Night model. Through their enthusiasm and hard work, their reach stretches further, weaving, if you will, to connect with different people, encompassing the charities we work with, the women attending our events, and the businesses that participate.

As Fabulous Shoe Night adds chapters throughout the country, the weaving continues as our reach stretches further. For Fabulous Shoe Night is, at it's most basic level, about building relationships. We are bringing people together, in fun, friendship, business and charity, drawing communities closer together, helping those in need, and weaving tighter bonds among us all.

Just as I had no idea of what this blog post would actually be about when I sat down to write it, the intricacies of all that Fabulous Shoe Night is becoming have yet to be revealed. All I know is that the final picture will be more beautiful, richly detailed and fabulous than anything I could have ever conjured up or imagined on my own. I also know that with the love, compassion, and dedication involved as we continue to weave this sisterhood that's forming before our very eyes, once revealed, will take our breath away.


"We cannot live just for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us to our fellow men"   ~~ Herman Melville



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