Perimenopause is a powerful transition. And sometimes, a challenging one. I can feel how much my body is changing. There are days when I feel tired — even though my sleep hygiene is solid. I nourish my body well. I move a lot. As a personal trainer, I also want to lead by example.💪🏻 Since my total hysterectomy about a year and a half ago, I’ve immersed myself even more deeply in women’s health — especially menopause, post-menopause, how training shifts, how nutrition needs evolve, and how we can support our hormones instead of fighting them.🙏🏻💛 And still… there are nights when cortisol has its own plan. Last night I woke up at 3:40 a.m.😞 I tried to fall back asleep. Had some water. Waited. It didn’t happen. I could have been frustrated. Instead, I chose differently.🤗 I hadn’t been at my pottery wheel for weeks. Yesterday afternoon I planned to sit down and create — but the weather was so beautiful that I spent hours in the garden instead, bringing it back to life.🌱 So this morning, before sunrise, I sat at the wheel. In the quiet. In the stillness. While the world was slowly waking up.🌅 And it felt like a gift. Of course, I could focus on the disrupted sleep. But I’d rather focus on what was created in that unexpected pocket of time. Now I’m heading to work — and later I can return to the garden without that lingering thought of “I really wish I had time for the wheel.” Sometimes the positive meaning isn’t in the perfect plan. It’s in how we respond to what is.🥰 Maybe one of the most important lessons of this phase of life is this: Don’t fight your body. Learn to work with it. 🤍

Spent the afternoon attaching handles and doing a little carved designs into some mugs I threw a few days ago. Woot woot. Feels good to get them done but most importantly, it feels good to do something creative and getting back into clay. Happy Saturday!!!

Before heading to Antarctica, I managed to finish one last project today.☕️☕️☕️ It started as an idea last Saturday and came together surprisingly fast. On Sunday, a friend and I hand-built ten cups and added our gym’s logo. On Monday, I threw a few more cups, trying to match the same size — again with our gym logo. After that, the usual rhythm followed: drying, bisque firing on Thursday, unloading on Friday, sanding and glazing, loading the kiln again on Saturday — and today I finally unloaded them so I could bring them to the gym to be used for coffee.🔥 Even though I worked with the same reference and the same stencil, every cup turned out a little different. Because of that, I decided to glaze them in 15 different shades of blue. Not every blue came out truly blue — the differences are pretty striking.💙🔷🔵🩵🌀 I’ll show this in more detail in my kiln loading/unloading video. I’m not sure yet when it’ll be edited and uploaded — maybe Tuesday, before I leave. What’s your first impression?

Seems like we're approaching into a really heavy, unusual, winter storm traveling across the United States. Freezing, freezing temperatures that could knock out power. There's only a few states that are not affected by it . California is one of them, although it is unusually cold here. I just wanted to send good vibes to everybody who will be caught up in this. I know a lot of you in the group live in the areas of impact! Just thinking about you! And I hope the news is exaggerating. Please check in When you can.

I’ve been hanging onto a pie plate that I wanted to be very special. I’m not a great artist, but my niece Kara is. She is on bed rest about to deliver a baby this week. So I took her lunch and kept her company yesterday. She sat at the table long enough to letter the saying that I admired in Suza’s recent video. I used underglaze on the decoration and glazed the sides with Ancient Copper. I can’t wait to meet baby Murphy.