#THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE JOURNALISM BUSINESS IN TUSCANY

[dasmondkuss]

You guys have no idea how strong Alois and Dominicus' relationship is. I didn't have an idea either until about 2 hours ago while eating.

Listen, Alois is very independent and self-sufficient. For the most part, he already has a solution in mind for any problem that might appear, and these aren't news. Ever since he was young, how his parent raised him made Alois genuinely confident in his skills. He'd approach every obstacle with pragmatic resilience, so he has rarely needed somebody else to look after him or take care of him. Alois isn't afraid to say 'I need help' either because he had an emotionally intelligent environment growing up.

Nevertheless, none of this prepared Alois for the events that would take place in Morocco. He came from a very sheltered background where emotional intelligence was affordable because the stress wasn't big on his family by having the means to support themselves and even indulge themselves economically, so he never had to witness people lashing out, fights over petty things, or people trying by all means to have the higher ground. When these things began to happen in his life, he was lucky enough to study abroad and avoid all that divorce drama. Of course, even if he had seen those things happening, nothing could have prepared him for the level of violence he was about to experience.

Among the group of students, Alois was the most affected by everything. Despite all the books he had read, all the languages he had learned, and all the stories he had written, Alois couldn't find words to give meaning to his feelings. Alois could not let it out, consuming him faster than anybody else.

That's when Dominicus jumped in.

Dominicus wasn't having a good time either, nothing of the sort. But being the eldest grandson of a big and loud Italian family, Dominicus was raised to endure. In his family, Dominicus had to partake in the care of his siblings and cousins and even split apart some uncles who drank too much wine at Nonna's birthday party. Some of his younger cousins would even call him dad. Dominicus had to ensure everyone was safe, sound, and happy. He was raised to endure and nurture. And he enjoyed that role.

When Dominicus saw Alois in such a level of despair, he immediately took him under his wings. Naturally, this was Dominicus' way of coping with his own horrors and terrors. Instead of focusing on the problems beating him down, he could focus on making someone else's life easier. During the war, under the psychological violence, helping Alois grounded Dominicus to turn back the engine that drove him through his life.

By supporting Alois, Dominicus couldn't feel that Morocco's war could erase his existence. He was still himself despite everything, which built such strength in his personality that he knew deep down that he would survive this and that Alois would, too, because he would guide him through and protect him.

Until they were both hand-tied, kneeling on the floor, watching Julia with a gun aimed at her head.

Dominicus has never felt so powerless in his life. However, he never let his eyes wander away from Alois. He couldn't say anything, but in his mind, he was begging Alois to close his eyes and avoid an image that would chase him for the rest of his life. Telepathy isn't a thing, and Dominicus shattered fully when they shot her. Alois' entire figure was covered with his lover's blood, and his eyes were still wide open, with uncontrollable tears streaming down his face.

Despite Dominicus' own fear of him or Alois being the next one, despite hurting from his friend's murder, and despite the pain of having failed Alois, Dominicus couldn't break. He remained by Alois' side.

Everybody else left, but Dominicus stayed while Alois held Julia and sobbed as if that could bring her back to life. He remained stoic by Alois´´ side, keeping a watch on him for about two or three hours. Alois didn't ease his grip at any moment, but Julia's body was cold and deserved a burying the military wouldn't provide. It became Dominicus' task to separate Alois from Julia's body.

Dominicus bore every insult, every scream, every punch, and every scrape that Alois did while trying to take Julia away from him. If that's what Alois needed, then he would give it to him. But Alois couldn't stay by a corpse for the rest of his life, and he had to tell him the least empathetic sentences for the sake of giving Julia a somewhat proper burial and making it through the next day.

No one could've prepared Dominicus to deal with something like this, but he did. He stayed up all night, dug the grave, bathed Alois, and let him sleep on his bed when the exhaustion made him pass out.

Alois woke up the next day, emotionally dissociated from the whole situation, and in a flat tone, he told Dominicus that he had no idea how he'd make it through but that he would as long as he stayed by his side. Dominicus had no other plan in mind; he wouldn't have done it differently.

When their practices in Morocco were over, Dominicus had to return to Italy, and Alois had to return to Germany. It was hard for both of them, especially for Alois, who was returning to divorced parents and financial struggles. However, Alois started his magazine with the main purpose of giving Dominicus a work visa. It was Alois' daily motivation. He knew that he could live without Dominicus, but not for long, that he would do even more terrible things than he had already done if Dominicus didn't return to his side.

Alois needed him and wanted him back. He worked relentlessly to comply with all the requirements for Dominicus' sponsorship. When he finally got that mail with the notice that Dominicus' visa was approved, Alois felt he had finally won against the British government and Morocco's war. It was that day that Alois stopped having daily nightmares about Julia's murder and that he felt that he could live like a normal person again.

Dominicus and Alois have bonded over various interests, not only trauma. They're inseparable, and the caregiver/dependant dynamic has evolved to be more of equals.

However! Depending on the context, Alois will tease Dominicus, calling him either Papà or Mamma.

And Dominicus will pretend he doesn't like it.

#cw: death #cw: guns #cw: blood #Alois - headcanon #DOMINICUS I LOVE YOU #They will follow each other to the grave #I swear #I knew Dominicus was a 100% Daddy ever since I created him #NOW I KNOW WHERE THE VIBES CAME FROM #They are each other´s light at the end of the tunnel #ALOIS GETS SO SAD WHEN DOMINICUS HAS TO VISIT HIS FAMILY #Wild Alois appears in Tuscany because of ´business matters´´ #THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE JOURNALISM BUSINESS IN TUSCANY #He is welcomed every time tho #NOW YOU´RE ALL GONNA SUFFER ME WITH MY DOMINCUS AND ALOIS BRAINROT #if you read this #i love you #if you have questions im loving you harder!!!!!!!!

[anderson16mackenzie]

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[carmenlire]

Higher than the Big Trees Ch. 44

read chapter one

read on ao3

Taking a picture from the window of the private jet, Alec leans back in his seat as he starts fiddling with filters.

Their flight took off less than an hour ago and as Magnus reads a journal-- one of seven he’d brought along to Alec’s amusement-- Alec posts the picture to Instagram.

It’s obviously taken from a plane with a view overlooking the sunset above the clouds. It’s a pretty cool picture even if it is pedestrian. The caption is unforgivably sentimental but Alec shrugs. He’s entitled, he thinks with a little laugh.

Leaving his phone in his cup holder, Alec leans down and digs out the book he’d thrown into his bag right before leaving. It’s a thriller and from the synopsis, he knows that he’s in for a treat.

Before he can do more than reread the back page, though, the flight attendant is coming over and asking for drinks.

“Just water for me, thanks.” Alec smiles at Selina as she hands him a glass of ice water. She’s flown with him before and is exceedingly good at her job.

Magnus looks up from his journal, raising a brow as he asks, “What are the chances I could get a martini?”

Selina raises a brow right back as she offers, “Vodka or gin?”

Chuckling, Magnus asks for vodka and she returns just a moment later with his glass.

Settling back in his seat, Magnus nudges him with his shoulder. When Alec looks over, Magnus’s eyes are dancing over the rim of his martini as he takes a lingering sip.

“I’ve got to admit, this is nice,” he says. “No security lines, no crying babies or crowded rows of travelers. Be careful, darling, or I’ll get used to this.”

Linking their hands, Alec brings them to rest on his thigh as he sends his boyfriend a droll look. “Traveling is a nightmare under the best of circumstances. Flying internationally? I can’t remember the last time I flew commercial.”

It’s quiet for a moment before Magnus speaks again. “Thanks for taking me on this trip, Alexander. Knowing that I had a few days alone with you after midterms is what kept me sane.”

“It’s as much for me as you,” Alec says with a little grin. “I love travelling but I’m usually by myself or with the crew during tour. Plus, I’ve been working on my album so much that I could use a break, too.”

Magnus laughs. “Well, you certainly weren’t too busy to plan this trip. I’m still afraid that I don’t quite know what I’ve gotten myself into.”

“I was shocked that you let me have carte blanche.”

Leaning into his side, Magnus burrows deeper as Alec lifts an arm to wrap around his shoulders. “You seemed excited at the prospect of planning everything. I was pleasantly surprised when you chose Florence, though. I’ve always enjoyed Italy but I’ve never been to Tuscany.”

“I thought it might be nice to go someplace neither of us had been yet. You know, getting to explore the same city for the first time together? That sounds pretty damn nice.”

Magnus’s voice is soft as he lifts their joined hands up to his lips for a quick kiss across Alec’s knuckles. “You know what? It really does, darling.”

The two of them spend the next couple of hours reading and listening to music through their respective headphones. Magnus scours the latest issue of The Public Historian and Alec has to gently yet insistently pull the magazine away from him halfway through the flight.

Magnus glares at him with little heat and Alec just laughs as he urges him to stand up.

“C’mon,” he says. “We’re landing early in the morning, Florence time, and we need to sleep now if we want to beat jet lag.”

Sighing heavily, Magnus stands and follows Alec to the back room. “I was in the middle of a particularly engrossing article about Australian Aboriginal picture archives.”

“It’ll still be there tomorrow,” Alec says easily as he closes the door that separates the bed from the rest of the cabin.

Their bags are on luggage racks and while Alec just falls into bed, Magnus changes out of his day clothes into a tank and sweatpants. They’d left right after Magnus’s last class this afternoon and Magnus moans a little as he slides in between the sheets.

“God, this feels good.”

Moving over until he can kiss the back of Magnus’s neck, until he can through an arm around his waist and pull him closer, Alec just replies, “You did have a busy day. Get some sleep while you can, babe.”

It seems like no time at all before the stewardess is knocking on the door, calling out that they’ll start their descent in thirty minutes.

Alec groans a little. He hears Magnus laugh and when he opens his eyes a few minutes later it’s to see Magnus studying him with warm eyes.

“Time to get up, Alexander. We do want to hit the ground running, after all.”

They’re back in their seats twenty five minutes later, seat belts fastened, dressed and ready for the day. Their landing is uneventful and as they disembark, Alec throws an arm over Magnus’s shoulders.

“What about our luggage,” Magnus asks as they walk through the gate and right towards the taxi lane.

“Someone from the hotel will pick them up and send them over,” Alec explains and the two of them wait in line for the next cab.

Magnus sends Alec an arch look but doesn’t say anything else and then the two of them are climbing into the back of a taxi.

They’re taken to the city center and dropped off near the Duomo. Paying the driver, Alec is the last one out and as they gain their bearings on the sidewalk-- not too busy since it’s so early-- Alec takes a moment to just breathe.

He really does love Italy and he’s looking forward to the next few days where his biggest worry will be where to eat dinner or how much gelato is too much gelato.

While Magnus had put everything into his hands, he’d told Magnus almost two weeks ago where he was booking, just in case his boyfriend had a secret, passionate hatred for the city and to give them both a chance to decide on absolute musts for the trip.

When Alec traveled, he like to wander around and get lost. He usually only had one or two things he wanted to see or do and everything else was just a matter of getting a feel for the city. By contrast, Magnus liked to sightsee and check things off a list. There were a few museums and sights that Magnus had put on their list in between aimless wandering and Alec was excited. This trip was a representation of the both of them-- likes and dislikes, everything a perfect mix.

He thinks that he heard once that if you were serious about someone, then a good test was travelling with them. Alec can’t help but think that so far-- and yeah, they did just land but still-- that everything was going smoothly and held the promise of continuing to do so.

Friday goes by quickly. They grab breakfast at a little crêperie called La Milkeria. Magnus goes for a savory option while Alec enthusiastically dives into his nutella and strawberry crepes. It’s a great start to the day and the spend the morning walking around the near the Duomo. They stop wherever their eye catches and take an embarrassing number of pictures. They linger at street vendors and wander around an outside market where Alec picks up a few souvenirs for his family and Magnus does the same for his.

They stop and have lunch, lingering over glasses of wine and a charcuterie board. Magnus, the frustrating man, tries to pay and Alec just scowls as he grabs for the receipt.

“I don’t know why you insist on paying for shit,” he says as he reaches for his wallet. “I invited you on this trip. I pay.”

Magnus just stares at him, unimpressed. “I’m perfectly capable of paying for my own wine, Alexander. I wouldn't want you to think I was only after your money after all,” he teases and Alec rolls his eyes even as his mouth tilts up.

“I’d have to be a fucking idiot to think that,” he scoffs and tosses a few euro onto the table as they stand up.

Walking towards the river, it’s much more of a slow stroll. They linger on the river side for awhile, people watching and taking in the scenery.

“It’s beautiful here,” Magnus says as they watch a rowing team go by below.

“I love Italy but I think Florence might just be my favorite city after today.”

Crossing the river, Alec and Magnus pop into shops and stop by a gelateria. They take a selfie with their cups and miniature spoons and this time, it’s Magnus who posts the picture.

The company’s sweeter.

There are a line of emojis after the scant words and Alec rolls his eyes as he likes the picture on his own phone.

“You’re such a nerd,” he mutters under his breath with a grin and Magnus takes a bite of gelato before replying, “You know you l-like it.”

Magnus’s voice falters a little on the latter half of the sentence and Alec frowns a little, though he doesn’t wait a second before sighing and nudging Magnus’s foot with his own.

“Unfortunately, I do,” he teases and watches as Magnus’s face eases into amusement.

In the late afternoon, Alec starts leading them towards their hotel. Arms linked, they stroll along the river and Alec can’t remember ever feeling so relaxed.

They come to the entrance of the hotel and Magnus pauses, a little incredulous. “We’re staying here?”

Tilting his head a little, Alec starts toward where the doorman is waiting. “Yup,” he says. He looks back with laughter in his gaze. “That’s alright, isn’t it?”

“Is it alright-- my God, Alexander, this place looks amazing.”

“They had good reviews on Google,” is all Alec says and Magnus glares at him before shaking his head.

Making their way to the reception desk, it’s only a few minutes before they’re being shown to their room.

Looking around the suite, Alec nods, pleased. “Not bad,” he says absently and reaches for a bottle of water in the mini fridge.

Magnus snorts. “It’s taken a little while,” he says as he takes the bottle Alec holds out with his free hand, “But I do believe I’m finally seeing Alec Lightwood, celebrity.”

“What do you mean?”

Opening the doors to the balcony to let in the cool breeze, Magnus leans against the railing as he takes a drink of water. “This is a five star hotel and even my credit card might wince a little at the nightly rate but to you, it’s acceptable.”

He grins over at Alec, winking. “You’re a travel snob, darling.”

Shaking his head, Alec protests. “Just because it looks nice and I said so doesn’t make me a travel snob,” he says defensively. “I like a nice hotel-- especially when I’m trying to impress someone.”

The last bit is said low as he joins Magnus on the balcony, ducking close to lay a kiss below his ear. “I can’t let it be said that I did anything by half measures, now can I?”

Magnus doesn’t take the bait, instead looking at Alec with pity. “Darling, the summer I graduated from Yale, Ragnor, Catarina, and I toured Continental Europe on a shoestring budget. We stayed in hostels-- and for the last week, we managed to sleep in hotel lobbies when our savings ran out. You don’t have to impress me. If you’d taken me to a hostel this afternoon where we would've had to sleep in the same room as twelve other strangers, I’d be just as happy and excited as I am now. I’m just looking forward to spending time with you somewhere new. That’s it, that’s all.”

“Aren’t you a sweet talker,” Alec whispers before he leans in and kisses Magnus. When they break apart a little while later, the sun’s almost set.

Alec yawns and it turns into a laugh when Magnus pokes him in the side. “Is that jet lag I’m seeing?”

He glares. “Shut up,” he says, hiding another yawn behind his hand. “We’ve been on the go all day and I got three hours of sleep last night.”

“And who’s fault is that?”

“Yours,” Alec says, mockingly scowling. “You act like it wasn’t appallingly obvious what you were doing on your side of the bed.”

Magnus sniffs, turning away to watch the water. “I’m sure I have no idea what you mean.”

Alec’s voice is wry as he merely says, “Babe, not only was your cell phone flashlight on but I could hear the pages turn as you finished reading that journal.”

Grumbling a little, Magnus just throws up exasperated hands. “I told you it was a fascinating article and I knew we wouldn’t have time today. It’s not my fault you’re a light sleeper.”

“I’m not a light sleeper,” Alec laughs. “I’m over here trying to cuddle my boyfriend and he won’t stop muttering about Australian photography. I think anyone would have trouble falling asleep to that.”

Magnus shrugs before he finally relaxes, smiling. He moves closer to Alec and sweeps a hand through his hair so that it’s off his face before tilting his head.

The kiss is soft with a hint of bite towards the end and when Magnus pulls away, Alec chases his lips. When they break apart the second time, Magnus sweeps a thumb over Alec’s cheek. “Sorry that I kept you up, darling,” he says, eyes amused. “I’m sure you’ll sleep good tonight, though.”

Alec huffs out a laugh. “I’m sure you’re right,” he agrees.

The two of them head back inside and get ready for dinner. They’d seen a little ristorante during the day that they’d agreed to go back to for dinner and as they turn the corner of the hotel, he hears the shutter of a camera as a flash goes off in the night.

Rolling his eyes, Alec keeps his gaze forward, though he doesn’t hasten his pace. To his relief, Magnus does the same and it’s only a minute before the reporter seems to have gotten all he needs and they’re left alone.

The restaurant is small and intimate and they pass a few hours at a little table in front of a window. They drink a little too much wine and enjoy food that just can’t be found in the States. It’s the perfect ending to a wonderful day and as they take their time walking back to the hotel, Magnus pulls him just into a small side street and kisses him until he can’t think straight.

He doesn’t know how long they spend there, kissing while people walk by on the main street just a few feet away but when they finally pull apart, it takes everything Alec has not to dive back in.

Magnus’s expression is warm and open, eyes shining in the low light and mouth bruised and red. He’s damn near irresistible.

When Alec takes his hand a minute later and all but drags him in the direction of their hotel, Magnus’s laughter rings out in the narrow street.

Later, when the moonlight drips over their balcony and his ears are filled with Magnus’s gasps, with the way he says Alexander like it’s both a curse and a prayer, Alec kisses that laughter off his lips and sinks into the feeling squeezing his chest.

Alec wakes slowly, the sun shining into his eyes. Jerking his head away from where they’d left the curtains open, he lifts up onto his elbows and rubs his eyes blearily.

He has no idea what time is is but Magnus is still sleeping soundly under him. Shifting carefully so as not to disturb him, Alec rests on one elbow as he watches Magnus in the morning light.

His eyes trace the steady way his chest rises, the way his hair falls over his forehead. Magnus hadn’t taken his makeup off last night and there’s glitter trailing over his cheek, black smudges under his eyes.

Alec’s breath catches and his heart cracks open for what feels like the hundredth time since he met Magnus all those months ago.

Words come to him, unbidden, and Alec leans forward to plant a soft, barely there kiss on Magnus’s jaw before climbing out of bed.

He rummages around his bag for his songbook and then curses under his breath as he realizes he’s not even wearing underwear. Pulling on a pair of sweats with Magnus’s shirt, he slowly opens the balcony door and breathes a sigh of relief when it doesn’t make a sound.

Settling into a chair that offers a hell of a view-- they’re on the fifth floor and he can see the morning traffic below him and the gold tinted river right there-- Alec opens the book and starts writing.

He pours everything out. He remembers the first time he saw Magnus and the first time they properly talked. Everything from the terrible night where he’d felt like nothing more than a goddamn commodity to just last week when Magnus had surprised him at the studio with food just when he’d been about to tear his fucking hair out in frustration over a recording snag.

It could be ten minutes or an hour later when something breaks his focus. Looking up, Alec sees Magnus watching him with a barely there smile. He still looks mostly asleep and everything rushes through Alec-- the words he’s just written, the way they barely scratch the surface of what he feels for Magnus, the sight that he realizes with a shuddering sigh that he could wake up to for the rest of his life.

Before he quite knows what’s going on he’s tossed his book to the ground and is standing. He strides over to the bed and Magnus doesn’t move, just tilts his head to keep his eyes locked on Alec’s.

Alec climbs onto the bed, crawling up until he’s straddling Magnus and Magnus still doesn’t move. His smile grows imperceptibly as Alec cages him in, as he leans down and catches his mouth in a searing kiss that does nothing to dampen the desire that’s lighting him up from the inside.

His hands go to Magnus’s face and he rests his forehead against his boyfriend’s and works like hell to get his breathing under control. Magnus’s doesn’t say anything, just wraps his hands around Alec’s wrists and breathes in sync.

When Alec pulls back and opens his eyes, he takes another moment and sears it onto his memory.

Magnus studies him, brow arched expectantly.

Alec opens his mouth. He takes a deep, grounding breath. His thumbs stroke over Magnus’s cheeks and he smiles.

It’s small at first but then it grows until he feels his own cheeks aching.

“I love you,” he says hoarsely. “I am so goddamn in love with you.”

He watches the way Magnus’s eyes widen, hears the sharp intake of breath.

It’s funny, Alec has a second to think. He’s never said these words before. They’ve never weighed on his tongue like honeyed gold before. He’s never, ever felt this exhilarating, terrifying mix of love and lust and hope swirling around him fast enough to make him dizzy.

It doesn’t feel strange, though. It’s a good fear because it means that it matters. This matters-- they matter.

He’s waited so long to say them, has fought to keep them in when they wanted to fall from his mouth so desperately. He’s bit them back when Magnus made his head spin with want, when he’d done nothing more than text him a silly picture of an adorable animal.

They feel right. Now that Alec’s said them, now that they’re out there, most of him breathes a sigh of relief.

For better or worse, this is the last piece of him. He’s given everything to Magnus and now that his heart is out there, waiting, Alec finds that he’s not as worried as he always thought he’d be.

For better or worse, he thinks.

He doesn’t have long to think it, though, because almost immediately Magnus is grinning, the corners of his eyes crinkling with delight and happiness and-- dare Alec say it-- love.

Magnus blinks furiously and Alec watches as he closes his eyes and takes a shuddering breath. When he opens them a moment later, they’re full of everything Alec’s always dreamed of.

“I love you too, Alexander.”

The words are simple and said on a whisper and Alec shuts his eyes to savor them.

He feels them wind around his heart before settling. He feels Magnus pull him closer and place the most gentle of kisses on his forehead, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose.

Opening his eyes, he meets Magnus’s gaze and it’s silent in the room as they study each other, sharing the same breath.

And then Alec’s laughing and falling forward to nose along Magnus’s throat. “God,” he says. “I don’t know why I waited so long to say that.”

Humming a little, Magnus sweeps a hand down his back. Alec shivers a little as Magnus’s lips touch his ear. “I could say the same.”

“How long have you known,” Alec asks idly as he settles on top of Magnus, a leg thrown over his.

Magnus doesn’t stop his slow touches and Alec crowds infinitesimally closer. “Honestly? Probably whenever you came over to Catarina and Ragnor’s for Sunday Dinner a couple of months ago. You just fit and I realized that the thought didn’t make me want to run for the hills. I liked that you fit in with my family.”

Raising up a little, Alec just gives Magnus an incredulous look. “That’s what Jace and Izzy said at my birthday party last month-- that you fit. I really liked it, too.”

Reaching for his hand, Magnus laces their fingers together. “We fit together pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perfectly,” Alec murmurs and smiles before resettling over Magnus.

“What about you,” his boyfriend asks. “When did you know?”

“It’s cliche,” Alec tries to deflect but Magnus doesn’t take that for an answer, instead poking him in the side until he jerks away, scowling.

“Fine,” he mutters. He doesn’t move from where he’s laying on Magnus and the words get caught against his throat. “It was the first time we slept together. That shit with your dad happened and I realized that I believed you and that everyone else could go to hell.” He laughs shortly. “I figured if I was willing to choose you over my career then you meant a lot to me, more than I even realized. And then after-- after we slept together that night, the words were on the tip of my tongue.”

His voice is quiet, as he adds, “You were perfect, everything I could’ve wished for.”

Magnus doesn’t say anything for a minute but then he’s kissing the top of Alec’s head. “I love you so much, darling. I’m glad you finally said something. I’m glad you feel the same.”

Scoffing, Alec just replies, “Of course I feel the same. I never stood a chance, babe.”

The two of them fall quiet after that, dozing in the morning sunshine. A little while later, Magnus wakes Alec up with a kiss and Alec urges him onto his back as the sun warms them.

“I’m going to make you feel so good, baby,” he whispers hoarsely against the hollow of Magnus’s throat. “Let me love you, okay?”

He feels Magnus nod shakily before he sighs, fingers coming up to curl in Alec’s hair. Alec kisses a path down Magnus’s front, mapping a trail of adoration for just the two of them to see.

His efforts are stalled a few minutes later, though, as a knock sounds loudly in the room.

“Housekeeping,” the maid calls out and both Alec and Magnus freeze at the voice.

They look at each other, askance and a little panicked before they both start laughing. It’s nothing delicate, all gasping breaths and deep chuckles.

“Answer her, Alexander,” Magnus pleads as he wipes his eyes.

Rolling his eyes, Alec doesn’t immediately reply only for his eyes to widen as they hear a key in the lock. Clearing his throat hurriedly, Alec all but shouts, “Busy!”

There’s a pause on the other side of the door before they hear the key being taken out. “So sorry,” she replies. “I���ll be back this evening or I can put the do not disturb card on your door?”

Magnus actually fucking giggles at Alec’s exasperated expression but nonetheless replies, “The do not disturb sign works just fine, thank you!”

They hear a rustle at the door-- presumably the maid hanging the sign up-- before there’s silence.

Alec sighs and all but collapses on top of Magnus, hiding his face against Magnus’s hip. “Oh my God,” he whines. “That could’ve been so bad.”

“At least you’re still wearing pants,” Magnus points out reasonably. “She would’ve seen me in all my glory if she’d walked in without warning.”

Humming a little, Alec starts mouthing against Magnus’s hipbone. “At least we’ll be left alone for the rest of the day,” he murmurs and Magnus’s easy agreement is choked off as he takes Magnus in his mouth without warning.

“Give a guy some warning, Alexander,” Magnus wheezes and Alec just hums again as he works him over.

A little while later, sated and happier than he can ever remember being, Alec uses all his residual strength to lean over Magnus and kiss him.

Later that night, when they’ve finally left the bed and gotten ready for the evening-- after an exceptionally long shower-- Alec looks up as Magnus comes out of the bathroom, having just finished putting his makeup on.

“God, I love you,” he blurts out, grinning as he takes in his boyfriend.

Magnus had definitely dressed to impress for an evening out and Alec can’t think of anything he’d like more than to show him off.

Magnus laughs at his reaction but as he walks over and wraps his arms around Alec’s neck, he treats him to a slow once over in return. “Love you too, darling. Though I do hope you’re not just saying that because of my looks.”

His voice is teasing and Alec rolls his eyes. “Trust me, babe, if I’m not only willing but excited to listen to one of your diatribes on medieval Southeast Asian pottery, then you have nothing to worry about.”

His voice lowers a little as he continues, “I fell in love with you because you’re wise and you’re generous and you’re brave. You’re incredible,” he says, ducking a little to catch Magnus’s eyes when he tries to look away, abashed. “When you walk into a room, there’s a spark in you that lights everyone and everything up. I’m just lucky that you let a little of your light warm me up.”

“God, Alec, you can’t just say things like that.” Magnus’s voice is raw, awed and disbelieving.

Shrugging, Alec just asks, “Why not? It’s how I feel and you deserve to know how I feel-- how you make me feel.”

“I never expected this,” Magnus says, studying Alec. “I never expected you. But how lucky I am that we ended up in the same shitty diner one night.”

Alec laughs, shaking his head as he leans close for a quick, smacking kiss. “Who knows? Maybe it’s fate. I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.”

“I guess we will,” Magnus says warmly in a voice that’s almost too low to hear.

With that, they leave their room and head towards the lobby, both of them looking forward the rest of the night.

#two updates within a week #who is she #httbt #my writing #malec fic #malec wip #this chapter is a long time coming:')

[jenniferfaye34]

#Giveaway + Excerpt ~ The #Prince and the #Wedding Planner by Jennifer Faye... #books #RoyalRomance #NewRelease #books #romance #readers #amreading #PrincPrism

On Tour with Prism Book Tours

Note from the Author

Thanks so much for joining me for the launch of The Bartolini Legacy trilogy. This family saga filled with secrets, surprises and lots of romance begins with THE PRINCE AND THE WEDDING PLANNER.

Sometimes it’s a choice to change your life—such as starting your own wedding business. Other times, change can be thrust upon you with a phone call or in this case, the turn of a page.

Wedding planner Bianca Bartolini’s life has been thrown into a series of cascading changes when she returns to Tuscany for her parents’ funeral. Yet when she uncovers her mother’s journal, she comes across a bombshell of a secret. The words on those weathered pages put everything she and her brother and sister know about themselves, their parents and their relationships into question.

Crown Prince Leopold’s younger sister is getting married but what should be a joyous occasion is anything but harmonious. Leo needs some peace and quiet if he is ever to choose a wife—a mandated requirement before he can be crowned king. And then he latches onto the idea of hiring wedding planner Bianca—someone who will report to him and bring peace back to the palace…

I hope you’ll join Bianca and Prince Leo in this royal romance as they wrestle with the past and come to terms with the present in order to have a happily ever after future.

Happy reading,

— Jennifer

The Prince and the Wedding Planner (The Bartolini Legacy #1)

By Jennifer Faye

Contemporary Romance

Paperback & ebook, 256 Pages

March 1st 2020 by Harlequin Romance

When different worlds collide…

…sparks fly!

With her family name on the line, wedding planner Bianca Bartolini needs this royal wedding to go perfectly—she can’t afford distractions. Too bad the bride’s dashing brother has other plans! Duty-bound Crown Prince Leo has mere weeks to announce his own engagement, but none of the candidates measure up to Bianca. They’re the most unlikely match, but might that just make them perfect for one another?

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EXCERPT: PROLOGUE February, Tuscany, Italy This was a living nightmare. Bianca creaked open the door to her parents’ bedroom. She peered inside, just like she used to do when she was a little girl. She paused as though waiting to be bid entrance. That would never happen. Bianca tentatively stepped into the room, her gaze hungrily taking in her surroundings. The bed was made just as her mother left it each morning. There was still an indentation on her father’s pillow as though his head had just been there—as though he would return to it that evening. But that wasn’t to be the case. Her parents had died. The acknowledgment made her heart clench. One minute they’d been vibrant and active. In the next moment, they’d died in a horrific vehicle accident. They hadn’t been going anywhere special. It hadn’t been a special day. It had been a perfectly ordinary day on a perfectly ordinary ride to the city to do some ordinary shopping. And yet it had ended with extraordinarily horrific results. The backs of Bianca’s eyes burned with unshed tears. She blinked repeatedly and sniffled. She had to pull herself together. Falling apart now wouldn’t help anyone. The funeral had just concluded and the will was to be read shortly. Everything was being pushed into fast forward as the vineyard had to be maintained. Springtime would soon be here and work would kick into high gear. Without someone in charge, the Barto Vineyard would suffer—her father’s legacy would languish. His precious prize-winning grapes would wither on the vine. The family’s attorney thought with the vineyard at stake, it was reason enough to push her and her two siblings to read the will today of all days—while she was still wearing her black dress from the funeral, while the estate was still filled with mourners that had come to pay their respects. All Bianca wanted to do that day was remember her parents—to bask in the love that lived within the walls of this vast villa. She pushed the door closed before stepping further into the bedroom. It was here, within her parents’ suite of rooms, she felt closest to them. It was here that her mother showed her how to put on makeup for the first time. It was here that her father had told her she could go away to university in the UK. Bianca walked around the spacious room, running her fingers over her mother’s elaborately carved dresser with the huge mirror suspended above it. She picked up her mother’s silver hairbrush and noticed the few long dark strands of hair tangled around the bristles. The last of her mother. Tears clouded Bianca’s vision as she thought of never seeing her parents ever again. It still seemed so utterly inconceivable. She kept walking around the room, her fingers tracing over all the things, that until just days ago, her parents had touched—had used. The thought tugged on her heart strings. How could they be here one moment and then gone the next? Bianca pressed a shaky hand to her mouth, holding back a wave of emotion that threatened to drown her in unbearable sorrow. She struggled to make sense of it. Why had they been stolen away when they were still so vital—still so needed? When she still didn’t have their approval—their blessing for the choice she’d made about her path in life. Knock. Knock. “Bianca, are you in there?” It was her brother’s voice. “Yes.” She’d been found too soon. The door creaked open and Enzo’s somber face met hers. Thankfully, he didn’t ask what she was doing in their parents’ room. She didn’t want to explain how she was grasping at anything that would make her feel close to them once more. “Everyone is waiting for us downstairs in father’s study.” The moment was at hand. Her parents’ final wishes would be known. And then the estate would be divvied up between her, her older brother and her younger sister. It would be so—so final. Her parents’ absence from their lives would be undeniable. “I... I’ll be there.” She turned her back to him, not wanting him to see the unshed tears shimmering in her eyes. She could be strong like him. She could get through this agonizing day without crumbling into a million pieces. She needed to think about anything but the hollow spot in her heart. She lifted her head and her gaze came to land on the old photos on the wall. It was a collage of her grandparents, her parents’ wedding and herself and her two siblings. They’d all looked so happy— “Bianca, they loved you.” And then her brother exited the room, closing the door softly. It was like her brother to cut through everything to get to the heart of the problem. Did her parents love her like they’d loved her siblings? She had her doubts. Bianca paused next to her mother’s nightstand. It was there that she noticed her mother’s journal. She recalled coming across it as a child and her mother shooing her away. She’d asked her mother what she wrote in her journal and her mother said it was a way to vent or a chance to mark something memorable. Her mother didn’t write in it often. Her mother had said she liked to reflect upon where she’d come from, so she knew where she was going. As a teenager, Bianca had tried keeping a journal of her own, but with two nosey siblings close to her own age, it didn’t go well. And when her little sister announced one evening at dinner that Alfio Costa had kissed Bianca after school, she had burned her journal and vowed never to write in one again. She so desperately longed to hear the gentle lilt of her mother’s voice but she couldn’t recall it. It was like her mind had erased the memory. How could that be? If she was already forgetting her mother’s voice, how soon until she forgot what she looked like and their moments together? She knew that she was being overly dramatic, but her emotions at the moment felt amplified. She didn’t know how to calm them. She picked up her mother’s journal. Her fingers traced over the buttery soft binding. Inside were her mother’s final words. Her fingertip traced down over the gold gilded pages. Part of her wanted to open the cover and let her mother’s voice speak to her. And another part of her said not to do it. Whatever was written within those pages was none of her business. The struggle raged within her. Tour Schedule

March 2nd:

Launch

Rockin' Book Reviews

Thoughts of a Blonde

Books and Zebras

March 3rd:

Pause for Tales

Wishful Endings

Bookworm Lisa

Jorie Loves A Story

March 4th:

Deal Sharing Aunt

Reading Excursions

Andi's Book Reviews

Two Points of Interest

March 5th:

Harlie's Books

Baroness' Book Trove

Peaceful Pastime

Splashes of Joy

March 6th:

Locks, Hooks and Books

underneath the covers

Bookish Jottings

Hallie Reads

March 7th:

Grand Finale

About the Author

Award-winning author, Jennifer Faye pens fun, heartwarming contemporary romances with rugged cowboys, sexy billionaires and enchanting royalty. Internationally published with books translated into nine languages. She is a two-time winner of the RT Book Reviews Reviewers' Choice Award, the CataRomance Reviewers' Choice Award, named a TOP PICK author, and been nominated for numerous other awards.

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- One winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card and one of Jennifer's backlisted titles, winner's choice of print (US only) or ebook (if outside the US)

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Ends March 11, 2020

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#The Prince and the Wedding Planner #The Bartolini Legacy #Contemporary Romance #prince #royal romance #royalty #wedding planner #wedding #Harlequin #Mills and Boon #Jennifer Faye #Hearts & Scribbles

[martincooneyart]

BEYOND THE HEADLINES

JUST HOW BAD WAS THE SPILL?

For the first time since The Great Revival

Trouble brews at the Colorado Yule Marble Quarry

~ ~ ~

The other day I thought I would check up on the progress our splendid, revitalized and seemingly thriving Yule Marble Quarry for perhaps some news regarding their new made-to-measure, state of the art (as I am sure it will be) fabrication plant over in nearby Delta, Colorado. Now imagine my shock and surprise at being greeted the following headline.

Colorado Stone Quarries, the operator of Marble’s famed Yule quarry, is facing scrutiny and possible penalties from federal and state regulators after an October diesel spill that shut down operations for nearly two months 

News   link | February 22, 2020 / Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

Rather than an update, or even opening announcement I was confronted with this most unexpected and alarming information instead. What was this? Bad news? Surely not! But alas it’s true. After what has amounted to a tremendous run, Colorado Stone Quarries appear to have, for the first time I might add, blotted their copy book.

Not on purpose mind you. In fact, the quite the opposite. According to the following article by Heather Sackett of Aspen Journalism, the quarry is now dealing with what appears to be a severe setback in the form of a diesel spill that allowed 5,500 gallons of fuel to leak out through a faulty valve – so slowly mind you that it went unnoticed by the crew.

Now, bad as this sounds what happens next is where the oil really hit the fan, as it were.  For instead of reporting the incident right away, as we all know we should – they failed to notify their error to the appropriate authorities, which as we know is simply not how you handle things when it comes to authorities, and especially not U.S. Federal Authorizes.  Now I assume we’ve all taken Health and Safety classes at some point, and so we all know that the absolute worst thing you can do (especially and particularly here in America) is to cover up, or be seen to cover up anything, once the something bad happens. And this was bad.

But for four days apparently no report was made as the quarry struggled valiantly to right their wrongs in the way they knew best, by cleaning up the mess they had made. But please bear in mind as you read on: at no point did water enter the river, and the quarry actually excavated the contaminated soil and took it to a decontamination center. They then filled the remaining soil with microbial spores that devour the diesel as they burrow, and therefore simply consume greedily any and all contaminants in a very short period of time.

So as far as I can tell this whole matter would appear to be, thankfully, a rather straight forward and relatively simple matter: the quarry erred by not only failing to maintain or monitor a vital piece of equipment, but once the spill was discovered they did not make the appropriate phone calls. We all know the protocol, and when Health, Safety and Environmental concerns arise, everyone in America KNOWS not to mess around with the Federal Government, period.

What Colorado Stone Quarries (CSQ in the following article) are guilty of is more of a misunderstanding I suspect. For Red Graniti, as anyone following events surely knows, although global in reach, is headquartered in Massa, Italy.  And so, if any slack is to be cut here, I would say that everyone needs to take a step back and realize that while the new quarry operators might not be perfect (who is ? mistakes happen to the best of us), their not reporting for four days might have something to do with them not quite recognize the full implications of responsibility to report such matters immediately – as they were obviously very busy effectively rectifying their error (time being of the essence in such cases), and did not understand how this whole matter would be seen in hindsight.

Carrara Marble Quarries – Plenty of Run Off – Rivers Often White With Dust

To say that a different set of standards, laws and obligations govern proceedings over in Carrara would be quite the understatement. In regards to the environment I doubt that anything like the rules and regulations that prevail over here are enforced with the same unbending strict obedience over there, I’ve spent enough time in Italy to vouch for that. Good people they are, the Italians, but I always recall the time I was duly informed, in response to my disbelief that my pre-booked rental car simply “wasn’t available”, that I need not make comparisons with “how rental companies operate in England or America” because I “wasn’t  in the rest of the world now” and that I was in fact “in Italy!!!”.

And so in that respect, given the let’s say the Italian perspective, Colorado Stone Quarries have had to reinvent the entire way that they quarry marble, of that I am sure. But as a result they have clearly shown just how marble will be responsibly and sustainable quarried from now on.

Yule Marble Quarry – No Run Off Reaches The Crystal Clean Crystal River

I think the quarry have shown their gleaming environmental credentials time and again throughout their young reign. Maybe in this one instance then they might be forgiven for not thinking or behaving like Americans, because they are not, they are Italian. I am English but have lived here in thee U.S.A. for many years and have experienced many levels of government bureaucracy and I can well testify that – sure, if you grow up here, everything is as simple and straight forward… as a 2 by 4 plank of wood.

Except that is, Americans all know that a two by four is nothing of the sort, it can be practically anything… one and three quarters by three and three quarters is most common, but never have I found one that actually measures two by four inches, and yet, we foreigners are expected to know all of this.  I could fill the pages with instances – just what the heck is a cord of wood? No one knows apparently. And what are “two bits” again?

I think I am digressing now but I do want to labor this point. Red Graniti deserve plenty of praise for how they have conducted themselves so far. For nine years they have carefully renovated and restored what is increasingly being recognized by the global marble industry as some of the finest marble ever to have been quarried anywhere on the planet. And they have achieved this all with their own money, their own expertise and very much in the way of pure physical endeavor.

For decades no one has ever been able to figure Yule Marble out. The immense difficulties and cost of quarrying the world’s finest Contact Metamorphosed Marble are beyond belief. In creating Colorado Stone Quarries specifically to unpick the secret and at last bring this magnificent quarry up to date – and then some, Red Graniti convince me that no one, no other quarry outfit out there, could have even dreamed of doing what the current owners have been busily succeeding at, and for the best part of a decade now.

One little upset shouldn’t overturn the apple cart in my opinion. And, once the conversations have been had, the appropriate fines paid, and the mess truly cleaned up, I suspect that nothing or the sort will ever happen again. These are good, honest, hard working people trying to restore America’s premium white marble back to greatness, and it is to this point all involved must move. Further delay will serve no one.

As anyone familiar with martincooney.com may attest, I Martin Cooney have been followings and reporting on events taking place, and have taken place, up at that remarkable quarry since I began this site back in 2013. During this time I have cataloged the ups and the downs regarding the quite sensational achievements of this remarkable quarry, along with the many frustrating failures and bankruptcies that have plagued the quarry down through the years.

However, since 2011 and the acquisition by Red Graniti, the story has been one of good news centered upon an environmental success worth boasting about to the whole world. For during these nine years or so the fortunes of Colorado’s beloved Yule Marble quarry has indeed been filled to the brim with good, honest and sound decisions, so that up until now barely a misstep appears to have been made.

Numerous are the posts here on martincooney.com whereby I have outlined Colorado Stone Quarries’ thoroughness and integrity as they strove to breath life into a marble quarry that has in all honesty suffered a torrid time, all in all, for well over a century now. I’ve told of the spectacular rise and fall of great epochs, with Yule Marble shipped to some of the most prestigious building projects in the country, as with the sensational success in delivering all of the exterior stone for The Lincoln Memorial (on time and budget I might add) – only to crash into devastating bankruptcy a mere six months later as America entered World War One.

Courtesy of Marble Museum, Colorado

In fact the same thing was to play out again immediately prior to World War Two, when in the aftermath of supplying the marble for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, America promptly entered World War Two, leading to yet another major bankruptcy.

This time the world’s largest marble finishing mill, as it had become in order to supply enough massive marble stones for the Lincoln Memorial project, was almost immediately and brutally torn into pieces, with the metal immediately salvaged for the war effort. But as the old saying goes; ‘it’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it’.  And the way they did it was to leave practically nothing behind of any use, value or quality. Scorched earth it was, and that pretty much describes the scene to this very day. Thankfully however the new regime have practically no need for the place other than to stage a few flatbeds ready for hauling over to Delta and their soon to be deluxe fabrication plant.

You can easily visit what remains of the marble mill by taking a trip to the remote and rugged Colorado Rocky Mountain Town of Marble. Only then perhaps will the full enormity of it all will sink in. Yes, I know there was a war and all that, but really, did they HAVE to destroy such a beautiful facility in their spirited haste?

The Colorado Yule Marble Finishing Mill at the time of its demolition was the largest of its kind in the world.

The quarry itself was shuttered and closed for four decades, with water flooding the workings to a depth of many, many feet. So much water in fact that it eventually took two years simply to pump it all out.

So you see, when all is said and done, the day that Red Graniti purchased the quarry was nothing short of a miracle to those of us paying attention at the time. And, best of all, after decades and decades of struggle it at last seems as though the Colorado Yule Marble Quarry has turned a corner and at last set the quarry straight and on course for a bright and magnificent future, once and for all.

Colorado Stone Quarries are, for me, without doubt the excellent stewards of this grand old piece of American history has cried out for ever since its inception when miners, not quarymen, set about extracting marble in the years following its discovery way – way back in 1873.

photo Ron Bailey

Colorado Stone Quarries has invested heavily in new and state of the art equipment, including this fully automated Fantini cutting machine. At roughly seven hundred thousand dollars a pop, this baby ensures that the finest marble in the world is harvested in THE MOST environmentally efficient mode possible.

~ ~ ~

And so what I propose we do now is to take a look at what is reported to have actually happened revolving around the original spill and what the consequences of such actions may or may not be.  Of course I imagine that much is going on unreported and behind the scenes, but as these two accounts, both penned by Heather Sackett of Aspen Journalism are the only such reports regarding the spill that I have managed to locate so far we will take a look at just what is being said, what the allegations are, and what has been the response from the quarry owners.

In order to make matters as clear as possible I will illuminate and highlight Heather Sackett’s words in italicized blue letters for total transparency. My comments will appear as they do here in the same black standard type that I am using now.  Please click here to read her full article.

Courtesy of Marble Museum, Colorado

Courtesy of Marble Museum, Colorado

Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial was a monumental success for the fledgling Colorado Yule Marble Quarry but required a tremendous amount of investment on the company’s part. Unfortunately, after coming in on budget and six months ahead of time, the quarry was closed, shuttered and bankrupt shortly afterward in the wake of America’s entry into World War One.

~ ~ ~ 

News | February 22, 2020 Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

Quarry in Marble facing scrutiny from federal, state regulators

in wake of diesel spill

MARBLE — Colorado Stone Quarries, the operator of Marble’s famed Yule quarry, is facing scrutiny and possible penalties from federal and state regulators after an October diesel spill that shut down operations for nearly two months.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is looking into whether a special permit is needed for the diversion of Yule Creek, which was done to make way for a temporary mining road. In addition, the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety says it believes the quarry violated state statutes by releasing pollutants into groundwater.

~ ~ ~

Make no mistake, this is a serious and concerning blow for the newly revived quarry. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation the loss of two month’s operations is bad enough for a quarry that prides itself on operating ‘every working day of the year’.

However the resulting fall out from an investigation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sounds ominous indeed for all of us who know how fastidious and bureaucratic the federal government can be regarding such matters as diverting streams, building illegal roads and releasing pollutants into the ground water – all of which would give cause for a great deal of concern is they proved to be true. But what actually did happen? We’ll see as we scroll along.

~ ~ ~

…Representatives from state DRMS (the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety) and the Army Corps visited the site, which is located 3 miles up County Road 3C from the town of Marble, on Feb. 11, four months after 5,500 gallons of diesel fuel leaked from a tank on the property.

Nearby Yule Creek, which flows into the Crystal River, was spared from the Oct. 11 spill because the waterway had been diverted from its natural channel to the east of Franklin Ridge so operators could construct a temporary access road to the quarry…

…Because the access road and creek diversion was supposed to be temporary, officials at Colorado Stone Quarries, or CSQ, claimed the project did not need a permit from the Army Corps. Under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, a project requires a permit from the Army Corps if it includes the discharge of dredged or fill materials into waters, such as rivers, streams and wetlands…

…To qualify for a 404 exemption for the construction of temporary roads for moving mine equipment, CSQ is required to meet 15 best-management practices. CSQ says its activities comply with those practices.

The temporary diversion was approved by DRMS (the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety) in September 2018 in what’s known as a technical revision to the quarry’s permit. But because of ongoing cleanup and water-quality monitoring as a result of the spill, the temporary road and creek diversion will be in place longer than intended — until at least the fall of 2022, according to a report from the company. Until then, the old Yule Creek channel also will remain full of fill material, including marble blocks. That means the project might need a permit from the Army Corps after all.

“Given that the subject haul road will be in place for the foreseeable future (i.e., not temporary), the exemption under which the road was constructed may not be applicable,” reads a letter from the Army Corps requesting more information from CSQ.

Army Corps officials were alerted to the quarry’s plans for a temporary road and creek diversion when the quarry applied for the technical revision in 2018, but the agency did not raise concerns about the quarry needing a 404 permit at that time…

~ ~ ~

Here you can clearly see how close to the quarry the Yule Creek is at the point where it rushes down the steep valley, almost hemming the workings in and blocking off access to the newly developed portion immediate to the left of the quarry.

~ ~ ~

“The temporary diversion was approved by DRMS (the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety} in September 2018 in what’s known as a technical revision to the quarry’s permit” admits the the article, but then adds “Given that the subject haul road will be in place for the foreseeable future (i.e., not temporary), the exemption under which the road was constructed may not be applicable“. Meaning that, had the spill not happened then the road would have been temporary and everything in order, but as things stand it is the ongoing intervention by the Army Corps of Engineers that has greatly elongated the time frame of the ‘temporary’ road.

It is all beginning to seem like a tragic catalog or errors to me, rather than outright skulduggery. I mean, no one went out to create this spill on purpose, it was an accident as we shall see. And furthermore, critically, this was not an operational accident but one brought about by a phase of temporary expansion.

Colorado Stone Quarries has up until this point operated an exceptionally worker safe and environmentally safe marble quarrying operation – indeed an exemplary record by any standard when you consider the epic undertaking involved in saving this relatively small but increasingly world renowned quarry.

Since taking over the operations in 2011 Colorado Stone Quarries have systematically revived the old quarry by pouring millions of dollars into new equipment and manpower, transforming a once struggling and often bankrupt and obscure relic into what is fast becoming the envy of the marble quarrying world.

However unlike their counterparts anywhere else in the marble quarrying world, or  for that matter even over in Carrara, where I recall, from my three month sojourn there back in 2014, rivers often ran white with marble dust, by happy contrast not one drop from the quarry reaches the hallowed waters of our pristine and aptly named Crystal River; a fact that sets our current Yule Marble Quarry owners in a different league from their counterparts anywhere in the world, in my opinion.

In fact, the whole operation they run up there could easily be offered as a working example to each and every marble quarry in the world, and there are a lot of them, believe me, who could sure learn something about stewardship and responsibility from our lovely little Colorado Yule Marble Quarry.

Quarrying Colorado Yule Marble ITALIAN STYLE, high in the Rocky Mountains,

is challenging and of course STYLISH IN THE EXTREME.

But to know that our Colorado Yule Marble Quarry is without doubt THE BEST marble quarry in the entire bloody world, well it gives me great pleasure indeed: the world’s finest marble – quarried in the world’s finest marble quarrying conditions. Even at 9,300 feet in the Rocky Mountain Elk Range they still manage to raise the bar and set the new standard for environmental protection and worker conditions.

Truly, this is a win-win situation for all, if only we keep our heads at this point.  Everyone needs to bring a little perspective to the unfortunate recent events and set them against the bigger picture. Everyone will benefit if level heads are maintained and this whole issue does not become a shouting match of opposing sides. Surely the Town of Marble, the people of the Crystal River Valley and of Delta, everyone, included myself as a marble carver, will benefit by working this out sensibly.

~ ~ ~

…CSQ and its consultant Greg Lewicki and Associates are offering the Army Corps three potential options for remedying the situation: Take no action, meaning the quarry would follow the plan for a temporary road and creek diversion laid out in its technical revision and the quarry would not get a permit from the Army Corps; leave the creek in its current alignment to the east side of Franklin Ridge, which would require an Army Corps permit; or return Yule Creek to its alignment on the west side of the ridge but at a higher elevation than the pre-diversion alignment. The Army Corps has asked CSQ to provide more information on these three scenarios. The affected stream reach is about 1,500 feet long.

CSQ also may face fines and other punishment from DRMS (the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety), which regulates mining in Colorado. According to a Feb. 7 letter from DRMS director Virginia Brannon, the agency believes the quarry is in violation of three state statutes: unauthorized release of pollutants into groundwater, failure to minimize disturbance to the prevailing hydrologic balance with regard to water quality, and failure to comply with the conditions of the permit.

The diesel spill occurred during the relocation process for the generator and associated fuel tanks. The new location was not approved by DRMS. “Therefore, the Division has reason to believe that a violation exists to the Colorado Land Reclamation Act for the Extraction of Construction Materials … and (has) scheduled this matter to appear before the Mined Land Reclamation Board,” the letter reads.

CSQ is scheduled to appear before the board March 25 in Denver. The board could issue a cease-and-desist order or impose a fine between $100 and $1,000 for each day of violation…

~ ~ ~

Now this is where things start getting pretty serious. Anyone who knows anything about orders to cease and desist from such an esteemed body as the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety surely realizes the full implication of such an instruction given the amount of financial and emotional investment involved to those who put up the money and gave their time to this truly wonderful project.

‘The Pride of America Mine’ proud new owners back named it back in 2011, and pride is surely firmly rooted at the heart of this epic venture. For the losses sustained already, due to what no doubt appeared at the time as an unfortunate mishap, have suddenly mushroomed to the point that if the delay is continued and/or the financial punishment is too severe, and although it breaks my heart to say it, then our new Italian friends in the form of Colorado Stone Quarries may indeed decide to simply cut their losses and shut the quarry down completely, and so I feel that we should rule nothing out at this point.

~ ~ ~

The spill at the quarry, which is now known as The Pride of America Mine, was marked by delays in reporting and cleanup.

Red Graniti, a company in Cararra, Italy, owns the quarry, which employs about 30 to 40 people and out of whose pure-white stone has been carved the Lincoln Memorial, the Colorado Capitol building and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In 2016, the quarry was granted a permit for a 114-acre expansion, for a total of 124 permitted acres. According to CSQ, there are enough marble reserves contained in its six galleries to continue mining at the current rate for more than 100 years.

News   link | February 22, 2020 / Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

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And so there you have it. That’s where we are at the moment and as soon as I hear news of a development I will pass it along asap.

Please click the tab at the top of the page, to the right of the banner, titled ‘The Story of Colorado Yule Marble’ to discover more about America’s finest white marble and its remarkable history than any place on the internet.

I’ll leave you with extracts of Heather Sackett’s original news breaking story, with a link to the original article in the Aspen Times. But even though we learn a few new details we already know most of the information from the story above, and so I won’t respond; but I will address any questions, ideas or information you may have in the comment box – which I might add is emptied on a regular monthly basis.

~ ~ ~

Diesel spill halts operations at Marble quarry

News     link / December 12, 2019 / Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

MARBLE — An October spill of 5,500 gallons of diesel fuel that has shut down Marble’s famed Yule quarry for nearly two months took more than four days to report to state authorities and more than two weeks before substantial cleanup efforts began.

The delays are outlined in a spill report submitted to the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, or DRMS, by Greg Lewicki and Associates, a consultant for the quarry operator, Delta-based Colorado Stone Quarries. The spill occurred overnight Oct. 11 but was not reported to state regulators until Oct. 16. Production, which shut down Oct. 16, is expected to resume Thursday or Friday, Colorado Stone Quarries spokesperson Lisa Sigler said.

According to Russ Means, minerals program director for DRMS, mine operators are required to notify the agency of a spill within 48 hours…

Daniele Treves, Colorado Stone Quarries General Manager

…“We acknowledge there were several days between when the accident occurred and when it was reported to regulators,” CSQ general manager Daniele Treves said in a prepared statement. “Our focus at the time was minimizing any environmental impacts of the fuel release and taking steps to make sure the fuel did not reach the creek. … We are fully reviewing the reasons for the delay and our environmental processes, including our past and current reporting procedures.”

DRMS officials decided the spill rose to the level of a violation of CSQ’s mine plan because the fuel tanks did not have the required secondary containment structure to catch the leak. CSQ is scheduled to appear before the DRMS seven-member board in Denver on Jan. 22. The board could fine the mine operators, in addition to requiring they take corrective actions to fix the problem.

“They didn’t follow their own protocols,” Means said. “We had reason to believe a violation exists.”

HOW THE SPILL OCCURRED

According to the report, diesel fuel used to power the mine’s generators is stored in a 12,000-gallon, above-ground tank, which is used to fill a 100-gallon tank for day use. The spill was the result of accidental overfilling of the day tank.

Normally, if the day tank is accidentally overfilled, the fuel flows back into the larger tank through a return-flow system. But on Oct. 11, the power switch was flipped from the 480V position to the 240V position, causing the system to malfunction and resulting in the day tank being overfilled overnight. Fuel flowed out of a faulty pressure release cap and onto the ground.

Crews who first noticed the spill Oct. 12 initially thought it was minor and didn’t realize that 5,500 gallons of diesel was missing from the bulk tank until Oct. 14. The mining company reported the spill to state authorities Oct. 16, at which point all production stopped at the quarry, and workers’ efforts shifted to focus solely on cleanup.

In the prepared statement released by CSQ, Treves said the mine takes environmental protection seriously.

“We are continuing an internal investigation of what went wrong, and how we can work to prevent it from happening in the future,” Treves said.

MORE DELAYS

The report also details what happened in the span of nearly two weeks between when the spill was reported and Oct. 29, when mitigation efforts began in earnest. CSQ, the company’s consultant Greg Lewicki and Associates and environmental cleanup company Clean Harbors came up with a plan. First, they would remove contaminated soil and truck it to South Canyon Landfill in Glenwood Springs, then flush large amounts of water through the ground to dilute the remaining fuel, collect the contaminated water in a sump below the spill and pump it into a tanker to be hauled away to Greenleaf Environmental Services in DeBeque.

But the plan immediately ran into problems with the pumps, which were not able to pump at the required pressure. They were replaced by pumps from Rifle-based Rain for Rent, but these, too, malfunctioned and had to be replaced or repaired over the next several days. During this time, quarry officials concluded that Clean Harbors would not be able to manage and complete the cleanup and they hired Grand Junction-based HRL Compliance Solutions instead.

On Oct. 29, quarry officials decided flushing needed to begin whether or not they had a backup pump on the site. When more water than expected seeped into the sump, officials called for additional water tankers and trucks, including a 20,000-gallon frac tank, to manage the overflow. Workers put in a 25-hour shift to deal with the high volume of contaminated water. CSQ said the delays are explained by waiting for agency approvals, complications in getting the pumps online due to freezing temperatures and steep terrain, waiting for equipment to be delivered and authorization of the facility accepting the contaminated water.

The two-week delay in beginning the cleanup did not violate state regulations, Means said. “We were aware of the situation and monitoring it,” Means said. “While we had concerns, it didn’t amount to any violations.”

YULE CREEK SPARED CONTAINMENT

According to the spill report, “No diesel appears to have left the site and the full spill appears to be contained within the road fill material” and “No detectable amounts of diesel entered Yule Creek.” Even so, the remediation plan laid out by HRL Compliance Solutions calls for ongoing monitoring with groundwater wells and continued water sampling. Also, the company will treat the affected soil with Microblaze, a bioremediation product that uses bacteria to break down the petroleum hydrocarbons found in diesel fuel.

The reason Yule Creek may have been spared from the spill is because it has been diverted from its natural channel to allow for expansion of the quarry. In 2016, DRMS approved additional acreage and the creek diversion so that a new section of the quarry and access road could be built. With the creek in a new channel on the east side of Franklin Ridge, the ridge now separates the spill from the creek. According to the report, “The ridge is composed of marble and is for the most part impermeable, creating a barrier between the spill and the creek.”

Carbondale resident and Crystal Valley Environmental Protection Association president John Armstrong filed a complaint about the quarry with DRMS in late October. It wasn’t about the spill — he wasn’t aware it happened — but about large blocks of marble he saw clogging the original and now-dry streambed of Yule Creek.

“The relocation of the creek really surprised me,” he said, “and I’m really concerned about that.”

Some worry this expansion could have unintended consequences, including, perhaps, October’s diesel spill.

“CVEPA is not out to vilify the marble quarry, but we have also seen the private sector left to its own devices does not adhere to the highest environmental standards,” Armstrong said. “(The quarry expansion) is big. And for that little valley, we don’t know what it means.

Diesel spill halts operations at Marble quarry

Aspen Journalism Breaks Story of Spill at Marble Quarry

News     link / December 12, 2019 / Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

~ ~ ~

In conclusion then: no lasting long-term damage seems to have occurred, and although the hard working quarrymen definitely messed up, their biggest crime appears to be in the way they went about addressing and correcting their mistake. Furthermore, this was not an operational spill but one that occurred during a particularly difficult phase in a one-time expansion program that once achieved would be corrected and restored to nature, much in the same way the quarry has dealt with the 4 mile slip road into town.

Believe me, these guys really know what they are doing. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time but I see no reason why such daring and expert quarriers should be raked over the coals for what seems to be, in the scheme of things, much ado about nothing.

And if you don’t believe me, take a walk along that four mile quarry road yourself and you’ll see first hand how nature not only survives around a well run marble quarry but positively thrives.

~ ~ ~

Diesel Spill Taints The Colorado Yule Marble Quarry’s Otherwise Impeccable Record

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thanks for visiting martincooney.com

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ΛΛĀ®†↑ℵ

~  ⌊   •

 √

Diesel Spill Taints The Colorado Yule Marble Quarry’s Otherwise Impeccable Record BEYOND THE HEADLINES JUST HOW BAD WAS THE SPILL? For the first time since The Great Revival…

#accident #Aspen Journalism #Colorado #Colorado Stone Quarries #Corps of Engineers #Daniele Treves #diesel spill #DRMS #federal #Heather Sackett #Martin Cooney #Microblaze #news #quarry #reclamation #Red Graniti #regulators #state #Yule Creek #Yule marble

[fitnesshealthyoga-blog]

New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/the-benefits-of-a-moving-meditation-and-how-to-start-practicing/

The Benefits of a Moving Meditation and How to Start Practicing

Meghan Rabbitt focuses in on the benefits of moving meditation and how it helped her slow down.

I was lingering over a pasta dinner in Rome over the holidays this year, sitting back in my chair with one hand on my full belly and the other holding my glass of red wine when it hit me: I have to do this more often. Not the trips to Rome or even the pasta—although more of both would be nice. What I found myself craving in that moment was more of that kind of slowing down—giving myself space in everyday, non-vacation life to really experience and even savor what I’m doing.

Slowing down is a serious challenge for me. I’m a self-proclaimed productivity fiend: The more I can get done in a day, the better. My job, writing and editing for YogaJournal.com, stokes this natural instinct in me. In digital media, praise comes flying at you when you work quickly. I’m also a born-and-raised New Yorker, which means my go-to pace is almost always a little (OK, a lot) faster than those outside the big Apple.

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See also Meditation Has Proven Benefits: So Why Is It Hard to Commit?

So, when I returned home from Italy to Boulder, Colo., and was asked to practice moving meditation every day for 31 days, it seemed like a logical fit. I’d been sporadic with my usual, mantra-based meditation practice, solidly in a new habit of making a beeline for my computer—not my meditation cushion—after brushing my teeth each morning. Would moving meditation help me slow my roll, and infuse my life with more mindfulness? I wanted to find out.

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

When practicing moving meditation, you must focus your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step that you take. 

What is Moving Meditation?

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a day-long retreat in beautiful Red Feather Lakes here in Colorado with yoga and Tibetan Buddhism teacher, Cyndi Lee. The retreat was held at the Shambhala Mountain Center, high in the Colorado Rockies and home to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. My first experience practicing moving meditation was there, with Lee guiding me and the rest of the 20-some-odd group, on a walk to the Stupa.

See also Yoga Journal’s Meditation Challenge Will Help You Stick to a Steady Practice

Lee explained that just as in a sitting meditation, where your attention might be on your breath or repeating a mantra, in a moving meditation, you place your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step. How does your foot feel in your shoe, or on the earth? What does it feel like as your heel strikes the ground before rolling onto the ball mound of your foot and then your toes? You get the drift. When you first start out, it’s recommended that you walk a little slower than usual, so you can really feel your feet with every step.

As we practiced this walking meditation on retreat that day, I felt awkward at first. With every step, a thought popped into my head: There’s my heel; What would an outsider looking in think of us walking in a line so freakin’ slowly?! Oooh, so that’s what my foot’s arch feels like when my weight rolls from the back of my heel toward the front; Ugh, how long is this going to take us?!

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Luckily, Lee normalized this common monkey-mind activity. “The idea is not that you’re going to have absolutely no thoughts,” she says. “What you’re doing is cultivating your ability to recognize that you don’t have to buy into everything that comes up. Part of the experience is recognizing that your mind will stray, so when it does, you bring it very gently with precision back to the feeling of your foot on earth. Step, step, step.”

Cyndi Lee normalizes the idea of moving meditation by stating that whenever your mind strays away, focus on the feeling of bringing your foot back to the earth. Step, step, step.

The Challenge: 5 Minutes of Moving Meditation Every Day

While I can’t say my first experience of moving meditation was profound, I was intrigued enough by its potential to help me slow down and be more mindful in all areas of my life that I committed to at least 5 minutes of moving meditation every day for the month of January. Before I got started, I asked Lee if I should continue my already-established (if sporadic) mantra-based practice.

“Will repeating my mantra while practicing moving meditation help me focus?” I asked Lee.

See also This 5-Minute Meditation for Parents Will Save Your Sanity

“No,” she replied. “When trying a new meditation practice, it’s best to stick to just one rather than dabble in many,” she told me.

I started out simple: From the Yoga Journal office, I took solo walks to the coffee shop around the corner and didn’t ask a co-worker to join, like usual. The typically 5-minute stroll took about 8 minutes at moving-meditation speed, and while my mind did wander—mostly to my long list of to-dos—I didn’t beat myself up about that fact. Instead, I kept coming back to the feeling of each step. I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the subtle feeling of my foot on a crack in the sidewalk; the sound of the wooden heel of my favorite pair of booties on a day-old snow-ice mix; the feeling of one part of my foot on pavement and another on grass.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

After each of my walking meditations during my first and second weeks of this challenge, I had to try hard not to brush off the seemingly insignificant sensations I was having. How would it serve me to know exactly what it feels like to simultaneously have my heel on pavement and the ball of my foot on grass? I stuck to the practice on my walks to the coffee shop and abandoned them en route back to my desk.

A simple 5-minute stroll can help you practice moving meditation. If your mind starts to wander, focus on the steps that you are taking. 

The Ah-Ha Moment: When I Knew Moving Meditation Was Working

The third week in to my moving meditation experiment, I had a game-changing therapy appointment which, it turns out, would alter the way I thought about my new, mindful walks.

I was talking to Leah, my therapist, about my near-frenetic pace and its impacts on my life. It was making me more gruff and less compassionate. It was inspiring me to race through my writing and editing, which meant I was more careless with my words. It was making me less present with my boyfriend, friends, and worst of all, myself.

See also Pranayama 101: This Moving Breath Practice Will Teach You to Let Go

“So, what’s the antidote?” I pleaded, practically begging her for an assignment I could add to my to-dos. “If I can’t move to Tuscany, how can I finally slow the heck down?”

Leah shot me a knowing smile.

“You don’t need another to-do,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you to meditate for 20 minutes every morning in order to get more present. You can show up more fully, and in better alignment with who you are and how you want to be in the world, by doing what I call ‘one eye in, one eye out.’”

Think of this concept as the epitome of taking your practices off your meditation cushion and yoga mat and into the world, Leah continued. When the practices are working, the world is your mat. One eye in helps you stay in alignment with your central channel—the place from which you move with your heart, not a head full of fear. One eye out helps you interact with others and field all of the things that will inevitably come flying at you, many of which will be completely out of your control.

See also This Napa Valley Vintner’s Ritual for Inner Calm is a Meditation

“The secret to experience this kind of embodied presence is noticing your physical sensations,” Leah told me. “Try it now. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your thighs on the couch. Feel your back supported by the cushion behind you. Now, can you do all of that and simultaneously talk to me?”

Of course, I thought to myself, smiling at how messages often show up a few times for them to finally sink in. This is what moving meditation is also about. One eye in to feel the sensation of my feet on the ground; one eye out to help me get where I’m going, only more mindfully.

During my final week of this moving meditation challenge, I started looking forward to my daily walks—which became longer than 8 minutes—and found myself tuning in to how I take up space in my body and in the world. Sometimes, this meant that even my 15-second walk to the office printer became an opportunity to clue in to the physical sensation of my feet on the carpet and my hip flexors and thigh bones initiating the movement of each leg. Other times, it meant simply taking a few seconds to feel my finger pads on my keyboard before I started typing.

See also Yoga Journal’s March Meditation Challenge

Best of all, little hits of my newfound sense of embodiment started happening even when work and this moving meditation challenge were the last things on my mind. One night, I sat down to dinner with my boyfriend, Brian, at home. Before I dug in to the grilled salmon and roasted broccoli I’d raced to Whole Foods to buy and then cook for us after a busy day, I consciously felt my feet on the ground, my thighs and back supported by the dining room chair, and I and connected to my heart space—all of which happened in what felt like milliseconds.

And it felt even more satisfying than that belly full of ravioli and glass of Chianti in Tuscany over the holidays.

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#Benefits of Meditation #meditation #yoga asanas #yoga for beginners #Yoga Exercises

[maneatingbadger]

Its axiomatic famousness is essentially a modern phenomenon. Early commentators enthused, but they did not seem to consider the painting particularly extraordinary or unique. The elevation of the Mona Lisa to iconic status happened in the mid nineteenth century; it was born out of northern Europe’s fascination with the Italian Renaissance in general, and Leonardo in particular, and it was given a particular Gallic, or indeed Parisian, twist by the presence of the painting in the Louvre. Her image became bound up with the morbid Romantic fantasy of the femme fatale: that idea of an ensnaring, exotic belle dame sans merci which so exercised the male imagination at that time. An important figure in the Gioconda’s elevation to fatal status was the novelist, art-critic and hashish-smoker Théophile Gautier. For him she was ‘this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously’; her ‘divinely ironic’ gaze intimates ‘unknown pleasures’; she ‘seems to pose a yet unsolved riddle to the admiring centuries’; and so on. In a telling aside during one of his rhapsodies, he remarks, ‘She makes you feel like a schoolboy before a duchess.’ Another who quaked in her presence was the historian and Renaissance-enthusiast Jules Michelet. Looking at her, he wrote, ‘you are fascinated and troubled as if by a strange magnetism’; she ‘attracts me, revolts me, consumes me; I go to her in spite of myself, as the bird to the snake’. Similarly, in the Goncourt brothers’ journal for 1860, a famous beauty of the day is described as ‘like a sixteenth-century courtesan’ who wears ‘the smile full of night of the Gioconda’. Thus the Mona Lisa was co-opted into a chorus-line of dangerous beauties alongside such luminaries as Zola’s Nana, Wedekind’s Lulu, and Baudelaire’s Creole belle Jeanne Duval.  The famous description of the painting by the Victorian aesthete Walter Pater, first published in 1869, was certainly influenced by this extended bout of Gallic swooning. Yeats later paid Pater’s flagrantly purple prose the compliment of chopping it up into free verse, in which form it sits more happily:  She is older than the rocks among which she sits; Like the vampire, She has been dead many times, And learned the secrets of the grave; And has been a diver in deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her… Oscar Wilde comments perceptively on this seductive Pateresque blarney, ‘The picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.’ But the idea of the Mona Lisa’s ‘secret’ continued to reverberate. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), Lucy Honeychurch’s sojourn in Tuscany gives her a touch of the Gioconda mystery – ‘He detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things she will not tell us.’  Others reacted more sceptically, as in Somerset Maugham’s novel Christmas Holiday (1939), where a quartet of art-lovers ‘gazed at the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman’. Iconoclastic young critics like Roberto Longhi poured scorn on the painting, and even Bernard Berenson – though hardly daring to question ‘a shaman so potent’ as Pater – confessed to his covert dislike of this revered work: ‘She had simply become an incubus.’ When T. S. Eliot called Hamlet ‘the Mona Lisa of literature’ he meant it in a negative sense: that the play was no longer seen for what it was, but had become, like the painting, a receptacle for subjective interpretations and second-rate theories. The other life-changing event in the career of the Mona Lisa was her abduction from the Louvre on the morning of Monday 21 August 1911. The thief was a thirty-year-old Italian painter-decorator and petty criminal, Vincenzo Perugia. Born in the village of Dumenza, near Lake Como, he had been in Paris since 1908, one of thousands of Italian immigrants in the city – the macaroni, as the French dubbed them. He had worked briefly at the Louvre, which was why he was able to get into the building unchallenged – and out again, carrying the Mona Lisa stuffed under his workman’s smock. A police hunt ensued, but despite his criminal record, and despite his having left a large thumb-print on the frame, Perugia’s name never came up. Among those suspected of involvement were Picasso and Apollinaire; the latter was imprisoned briefly, and wrote a poem about it. Perugia kept the painting in his lodgings, hidden under a stove, for more than two years. Then, in late November 1913, he sent a letter to an antique-dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, offering to ‘return’ the Mona Lisa to Italy. He demanded 500,000 lire. The letter was signed ‘Leonardo Vincenzo’. On 12 December, Perugia arrived in Florence, by train, with the Mona Lisa in a wooden trunk, ‘a sort of seaman’s locker’; he checked into a low-rent hotel, the Albergo Tripoli-Italia on Via Panzani (still in business, though now called – what else? – the Hotel La Gioconda). Here, in the presence of Alfredo Geri and Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi, Perugia opened the trunk, revealing some old shoes and woollen underclothes; then – as Geri relates – ‘after taking out these not very appetizing objects [he] lifted up the false bottom of the trunk, under which we saw the picture… We were filled with a strong emotion. Vincenzo looked at us with a kind of fixed stare, smiling complacently, as if he had painted it himself.’ He was arrested later that day. Efforts were made to turn Perugia into a cultural hero, but at his trial he proved a disappointment. He said he had first intended to steal Mantegna’s Mars and Venus, but had decided on the Mona Lisa instead because it was smaller. He was imprisoned for twelve months; he died in 1947.  The theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa were the clinching of her international celebrity. Both unleashed a swarm of newspaper features, commemorative postcards, cartoons, ballads, cabaret-revues and comic silent films. These are the heralds of the painting’s modern existence as global pop-icon. Marcel Duchamp’s defaced Gioconda of 1919, saucily entitled L.H.O.O.Q (i.e. ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, or ‘She’s hot in the arse’) is the most famous of the send-ups, though it is pre-dated by more than twenty years by the pipe-smoking Mona Lisa drawn by the illustrator Sapeck (Eugene Battaile). And so the way was open for Warhol’s multiple Gioconda (Thirty are Better than One); for Terry Gilliam’s animated Gioconda in the Monty Python title sequence; for William Gibson’s ‘sprawl novel’ Mona Lisa Overdrive; for the classic citations in Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’, Nat King Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Vision of Johanna’; for the joint-smoking poster and the novelty mouse-pad. Personally I suspect that I first became aware of the Mona Lisa through the Jimmy Clanton hit of 1962, which began: She’s Venus in blue jeans, Mona Lisa with a pony tail…  I’m not sure the ponytail would suit her, but the song’s wonderful bubble-gum blandness illustrates well enough the fate that has befallen this mysterious and beautiful painting.

Charles Nicholl, Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind

#book quotes #the flights of the mind #charles nicholl #la gioconda #la joconde #mona lisa

[chocolate-brownies]

How 31 Days of Moving Meditation Helped One Yogi Slow Down

How 31 Days of Moving Meditation Helped One Yogi Slow Down:

For one always-on-the-go writer, learning to be more mindful while she was on the move helped her find more peace when she was still, too.

Meghan Rabbitt focuses in on the benefits of moving meditation and how it helped her slow down.

I was lingering over a pasta dinner in Rome over the holidays this year, sitting back in my chair with one hand on my full belly and the other holding my glass of red wine when it hit me: I have to do this more often. Not the trips to Rome or even the pasta—although more of both would be nice. What I found myself craving in that moment was more of that kind of slowing down—giving myself space in everyday, non-vacation life to really experience and even savor what I’m doing.

Slowing down is a serious challenge for me. I’m a self-proclaimed productivity fiend: The more I can get done in a day, the better. My job, writing and editing for YogaJournal.com, stokes this natural instinct in me. In digital media, praise comes flying at you when you work quickly. I’m also a born-and-raised New Yorker, which means my go-to pace is almost always a little (OK, a lot) faster than those outside the big Apple.

See also Meditation Has Proven Benefits: So Why Is It Hard to Commit?

So, when I returned home from Italy to Boulder, Colo., and was asked to practice moving meditation every day for 31 days, it seemed like a logical fit. I’d been sporadic with my usual, mantra-based meditation practice, solidly in a new habit of making a beeline for my computer—not my meditation cushion—after brushing my teeth each morning. Would moving meditation help me slow my roll, and infuse my life with more mindfulness? I wanted to find out.

When practicing moving meditation, you must focus your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step that you take. 

What is Moving Meditation?

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a day-long retreat in beautiful Red Feather Lakes here in Colorado with yoga and Tibetan Buddhism teacher, Cyndi Lee. The retreat was held at the Shambhala Mountain Center, high in the Colorado Rockies and home to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. My first experience practicing moving meditation was there, with Lee guiding me and the rest of the 20-some-odd group, on a walk to the Stupa.

See also Yoga Journal’s Meditation Challenge Will Help You Stick to a Steady Practice

Lee explained that just as in a sitting meditation, where your attention might be on your breath or repeating a mantra, in a moving meditation, you place your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step. How does your foot feel in your shoe, or on the earth? What does it feel like as your heel strikes the ground before rolling onto the ball mound of your foot and then your toes? You get the drift. When you first start out, it’s recommended that you walk a little slower than usual, so you can really feel your feet with every step.

As we practiced this walking meditation on retreat that day, I felt awkward at first. With every step, a thought popped into my head: There’s my heel; What would an outsider looking in think of us walking in a line so freakin’ slowly?! Oooh, so that’s what my foot’s arch feels like when my weight rolls from the back of my heel toward the front; Ugh, how long is this going to take us?!

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Luckily, Lee normalized this common monkey-mind activity. “The idea is not that you’re going to have absolutely no thoughts,” she says. “What you’re doing is cultivating your ability to recognize that you don’t have to buy into everything that comes up. Part of the experience is recognizing that your mind will stray, so when it does, you bring it very gently with precision back to the feeling of your foot on earth. Step, step, step.”

Cyndi Lee normalizes the idea of moving meditation by stating that whenever your mind strays away, focus on the feeling of bringing your foot back to the earth. Step, step, step.

The Challenge: 5 Minutes of Moving Meditation Every Day

While I can’t say my first experience of moving meditation was profound, I was intrigued enough by its potential to help me slow down and be more mindful in all areas of my life that I committed to at least 5 minutes of moving meditation every day for the month of January. Before I got started, I asked Lee if I should continue my already-established (if sporadic) mantra-based practice.

“Will repeating my mantra while practicing moving meditation help me focus?” I asked Lee.

See also This 5-Minute Meditation for Parents Will Save Your Sanity

“No,” she replied. “When trying a new meditation practice, it’s best to stick to just one rather than dabble in many,” she told me.

I started out simple: From the Yoga Journal office, I took solo walks to the coffee shop around the corner and didn’t ask a co-worker to join, like usual. The typically 5-minute stroll took about 8 minutes at moving-meditation speed, and while my mind did wander—mostly to my long list of to-dos—I didn’t beat myself up about that fact. Instead, I kept coming back to the feeling of each step. I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the subtle feeling of my foot on a crack in the sidewalk; the sound of the wooden heel of my favorite pair of booties on a day-old snow-ice mix; the feeling of one part of my foot on pavement and another on grass.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

After each of my walking meditations during my first and second weeks of this challenge, I had to try hard not to brush off the seemingly insignificant sensations I was having. How would it serve me to know exactly what it feels like to simultaneously have my heel on pavement and the ball of my foot on grass? I stuck to the practice on my walks to the coffee shop and abandoned them en route back to my desk.

A simple 5-minute stroll can help you practice moving meditation. If your mind starts to wander, focus on the steps that you are taking. 

The Ah-Ha Moment: When I Knew Moving Meditation Was Working

The third week in to my moving meditation experiment, I had a game-changing therapy appointment which, it turns out, would alter the way I thought about my new, mindful walks.

I was talking to Leah, my therapist, about my near-frenetic pace and its impacts on my life. It was making me more gruff and less compassionate. It was inspiring me to race through my writing and editing, which meant I was more careless with my words. It was making me less present with my boyfriend, friends, and worst of all, myself.

See also Pranayama 101: This Moving Breath Practice Will Teach You to Let Go

“So, what’s the antidote?” I pleaded, practically begging her for an assignment I could add to my to-dos. “If I can’t move to Tuscany, how can I finally slow the heck down?”

Leah shot me a knowing smile.

“You don’t need another to-do,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you to meditate for 20 minutes every morning in order to get more present. You can show up more fully, and in better alignment with who you are and how you want to be in the world, by doing what I call ‘one eye in, one eye out.’”

Think of this concept as the epitome of taking your practices off your meditation cushion and yoga mat and into the world, Leah continued. When the practices are working, the world is your mat. One eye in helps you stay in alignment with your central channel—the place from which you move with your heart, not a head full of fear. One eye out helps you interact with others and field all of the things that will inevitably come flying at you, many of which will be completely out of your control.

See also This Napa Valley Vintner’s Ritual for Inner Calm is a Meditation

“The secret to experience this kind of embodied presence is noticing your physical sensations,” Leah told me. “Try it now. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your thighs on the couch. Feel your back supported by the cushion behind you. Now, can you do all of that and simultaneously talk to me?”

Of course, I thought to myself, smiling at how messages often show up a few times for them to finally sink in. This is what moving meditation is also about. One eye in to feel the sensation of my feet on the ground; one eye out to help me get where I’m going, only more mindfully.

During my final week of this moving meditation challenge, I started looking forward to my daily walks—which became longer than 8 minutes—and found myself tuning in to how I take up space in my body and in the world. Sometimes, this meant that even my 15-second walk to the office printer became an opportunity to clue in to the physical sensation of my feet on the carpet and my hip flexors and thigh bones initiating the movement of each leg. Other times, it meant simply taking a few seconds to feel my finger pads on my keyboard before I started typing.

See also Yoga Journal’s March Meditation Challenge

Best of all, little hits of my newfound sense of embodiment started happening even when work and this moving meditation challenge were the last things on my mind. One night, I sat down to dinner with my boyfriend, Brian, at home. Before I dug in to the grilled salmon and roasted broccoli I’d raced to Whole Foods to buy and then cook for us after a busy day, I consciously felt my feet on the ground, my thighs and back supported by the dining room chair, and I and connected to my heart space—all of which happened in what felt like milliseconds.

And it felt even more satisfying than that belly full of ravioli and glass of Chianti in Tuscany over the holidays.

[cedarrrun]

For one always-on-the-go writer, learning to be more mindful while she was on the move helped her find more peace when she was still, too.

Meghan Rabbitt focuses in on the benefits of moving meditation and how it helped her slow down.

I was lingering over a pasta dinner in Rome over the holidays this year, sitting back in my chair with one hand on my full belly and the other holding my glass of red wine when it hit me: I have to do this more often. Not the trips to Rome or even the pasta—although more of both would be nice. What I found myself craving in that moment was more of that kind of slowing down—giving myself space in everyday, non-vacation life to really experience and even savor what I’m doing.

Slowing down is a serious challenge for me. I’m a self-proclaimed productivity fiend: The more I can get done in a day, the better. My job, writing and editing for YogaJournal.com, stokes this natural instinct in me. In digital media, praise comes flying at you when you work quickly. I’m also a born-and-raised New Yorker, which means my go-to pace is almost always a little (OK, a lot) faster than those outside the big Apple.

See also Meditation Has Proven Benefits: So Why Is It Hard to Commit?

So, when I returned home from Italy to Boulder, Colo., and was asked to practice moving meditation every day for 31 days, it seemed like a logical fit. I’d been sporadic with my usual, mantra-based meditation practice, solidly in a new habit of making a beeline for my computer—not my meditation cushion—after brushing my teeth each morning. Would moving meditation help me slow my roll, and infuse my life with more mindfulness? I wanted to find out.

When practicing moving meditation, you must focus your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step that you take. 

What is Moving Meditation?

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a day-long retreat in beautiful Red Feather Lakes here in Colorado with yoga and Tibetan Buddhism teacher, Cyndi Lee. The retreat was held at the Shambhala Mountain Center, high in the Colorado Rockies and home to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. My first experience practicing moving meditation was there, with Lee guiding me and the rest of the 20-some-odd group, on a walk to the Stupa.

See also Yoga Journal's Meditation Challenge Will Help You Stick to a Steady Practice

Lee explained that just as in a sitting meditation, where your attention might be on your breath or repeating a mantra, in a moving meditation, you place your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step. How does your foot feel in your shoe, or on the earth? What does it feel like as your heel strikes the ground before rolling onto the ball mound of your foot and then your toes? You get the drift. When you first start out, it’s recommended that you walk a little slower than usual, so you can really feel your feet with every step.

As we practiced this walking meditation on retreat that day, I felt awkward at first. With every step, a thought popped into my head: There’s my heel; What would an outsider looking in think of us walking in a line so freakin’ slowly?! Oooh, so that’s what my foot’s arch feels like when my weight rolls from the back of my heel toward the front; Ugh, how long is this going to take us?!

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Luckily, Lee normalized this common monkey-mind activity. “The idea is not that you’re going to have absolutely no thoughts,” she says. “What you’re doing is cultivating your ability to recognize that you don’t have to buy into everything that comes up. Part of the experience is recognizing that your mind will stray, so when it does, you bring it very gently with precision back to the feeling of your foot on earth. Step, step, step.”

Cyndi Lee normalizes the idea of moving meditation by stating that whenever your mind strays away, focus on the feeling of bringing your foot back to the earth. Step, step, step.

The Challenge: 5 Minutes of Moving Meditation Every Day

While I can’t say my first experience of moving meditation was profound, I was intrigued enough by its potential to help me slow down and be more mindful in all areas of my life that I committed to at least 5 minutes of moving meditation every day for the month of January. Before I got started, I asked Lee if I should continue my already-established (if sporadic) mantra-based practice.

“Will repeating my mantra while practicing moving meditation help me focus?” I asked Lee.

See also This 5-Minute Meditation for Parents Will Save Your Sanity

“No,” she replied. “When trying a new meditation practice, it’s best to stick to just one rather than dabble in many,” she told me.

I started out simple: From the Yoga Journal office, I took solo walks to the coffee shop around the corner and didn’t ask a co-worker to join, like usual. The typically 5-minute stroll took about 8 minutes at moving-meditation speed, and while my mind did wander—mostly to my long list of to-dos—I didn’t beat myself up about that fact. Instead, I kept coming back to the feeling of each step. I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the subtle feeling of my foot on a crack in the sidewalk; the sound of the wooden heel of my favorite pair of booties on a day-old snow-ice mix; the feeling of one part of my foot on pavement and another on grass.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

After each of my walking meditations during my first and second weeks of this challenge, I had to try hard not to brush off the seemingly insignificant sensations I was having. How would it serve me to know exactly what it feels like to simultaneously have my heel on pavement and the ball of my foot on grass? I stuck to the practice on my walks to the coffee shop and abandoned them en route back to my desk.

A simple 5-minute stroll can help you practice moving meditation. If your mind starts to wander, focus on the steps that you are taking. 

The Ah-Ha Moment: When I Knew Moving Meditation Was Working

The third week in to my moving meditation experiment, I had a game-changing therapy appointment which, it turns out, would alter the way I thought about my new, mindful walks.

I was talking to Leah, my therapist, about my near-frenetic pace and its impacts on my life. It was making me more gruff and less compassionate. It was inspiring me to race through my writing and editing, which meant I was more careless with my words. It was making me less present with my boyfriend, friends, and worst of all, myself.

See also Pranayama 101: This Moving Breath Practice Will Teach You to Let Go

“So, what’s the antidote?” I pleaded, practically begging her for an assignment I could add to my to-dos. “If I can’t move to Tuscany, how can I finally slow the heck down?”

Leah shot me a knowing smile.

“You don’t need another to-do,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you to meditate for 20 minutes every morning in order to get more present. You can show up more fully, and in better alignment with who you are and how you want to be in the world, by doing what I call ‘one eye in, one eye out.’”

Think of this concept as the epitome of taking your practices off your meditation cushion and yoga mat and into the world, Leah continued. When the practices are working, the world is your mat. One eye in helps you stay in alignment with your central channel—the place from which you move with your heart, not a head full of fear. One eye out helps you interact with others and field all of the things that will inevitably come flying at you, many of which will be completely out of your control.

See also This Napa Valley Vintner’s Ritual for Inner Calm is a Meditation

“The secret to experience this kind of embodied presence is noticing your physical sensations,” Leah told me. “Try it now. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your thighs on the couch. Feel your back supported by the cushion behind you. Now, can you do all of that and simultaneously talk to me?”

Of course, I thought to myself, smiling at how messages often show up a few times for them to finally sink in. This is what moving meditation is also about. One eye in to feel the sensation of my feet on the ground; one eye out to help me get where I’m going, only more mindfully.

During my final week of this moving meditation challenge, I started looking forward to my daily walks—which became longer than 8 minutes—and found myself tuning in to how I take up space in my body and in the world. Sometimes, this meant that even my 15-second walk to the office printer became an opportunity to clue in to the physical sensation of my feet on the carpet and my hip flexors and thigh bones initiating the movement of each leg. Other times, it meant simply taking a few seconds to feel my finger pads on my keyboard before I started typing.

See also Yoga Journal's March Meditation Challenge

Best of all, little hits of my newfound sense of embodiment started happening even when work and this moving meditation challenge were the last things on my mind. One night, I sat down to dinner with my boyfriend, Brian, at home. Before I dug in to the grilled salmon and roasted broccoli I’d raced to Whole Foods to buy and then cook for us after a busy day, I consciously felt my feet on the ground, my thighs and back supported by the dining room chair, and I and connected to my heart space—all of which happened in what felt like milliseconds.

And it felt even more satisfying than that belly full of ravioli and glass of Chianti in Tuscany over the holidays.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

[krisiunicornio]

For one always-on-the-go writer, learning to be more mindful while she was on the move helped her find more peace when she was still, too.

Meghan Rabbitt focuses in on the benefits of moving meditation and how it helped her slow down.

I was lingering over a pasta dinner in Rome over the holidays this year, sitting back in my chair with one hand on my full belly and the other holding my glass of red wine when it hit me: I have to do this more often. Not the trips to Rome or even the pasta—although more of both would be nice. What I found myself craving in that moment was more of that kind of slowing down—giving myself space in everyday, non-vacation life to really experience and even savor what I’m doing.

Slowing down is a serious challenge for me. I’m a self-proclaimed productivity fiend: The more I can get done in a day, the better. My job, writing and editing for YogaJournal.com, stokes this natural instinct in me. In digital media, praise comes flying at you when you work quickly. I’m also a born-and-raised New Yorker, which means my go-to pace is almost always a little (OK, a lot) faster than those outside the big Apple.

See also Meditation Has Proven Benefits: So Why Is It Hard to Commit?

So, when I returned home from Italy to Boulder, Colo., and was asked to practice moving meditation every day for 31 days, it seemed like a logical fit. I’d been sporadic with my usual, mantra-based meditation practice, solidly in a new habit of making a beeline for my computer—not my meditation cushion—after brushing my teeth each morning. Would moving meditation help me slow my roll, and infuse my life with more mindfulness? I wanted to find out.

When practicing moving meditation, you must focus your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step that you take. 

What is Moving Meditation?

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a day-long retreat in beautiful Red Feather Lakes here in Colorado with yoga and Tibetan Buddhism teacher, Cyndi Lee. The retreat was held at the Shambhala Mountain Center, high in the Colorado Rockies and home to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. My first experience practicing moving meditation was there, with Lee guiding me and the rest of the 20-some-odd group, on a walk to the Stupa.

See also Yoga Journal's Meditation Challenge Will Help You Stick to a Steady Practice

Lee explained that just as in a sitting meditation, where your attention might be on your breath or repeating a mantra, in a moving meditation, you place your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step. How does your foot feel in your shoe, or on the earth? What does it feel like as your heel strikes the ground before rolling onto the ball mound of your foot and then your toes? You get the drift. When you first start out, it’s recommended that you walk a little slower than usual, so you can really feel your feet with every step.

As we practiced this walking meditation on retreat that day, I felt awkward at first. With every step, a thought popped into my head: There’s my heel; What would an outsider looking in think of us walking in a line so freakin’ slowly?! Oooh, so that’s what my foot’s arch feels like when my weight rolls from the back of my heel toward the front; Ugh, how long is this going to take us?!

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Luckily, Lee normalized this common monkey-mind activity. “The idea is not that you’re going to have absolutely no thoughts,” she says. “What you’re doing is cultivating your ability to recognize that you don’t have to buy into everything that comes up. Part of the experience is recognizing that your mind will stray, so when it does, you bring it very gently with precision back to the feeling of your foot on earth. Step, step, step.”

Cyndi Lee normalizes the idea of moving meditation by stating that whenever your mind strays away, focus on the feeling of bringing your foot back to the earth. Step, step, step.

The Challenge: 5 Minutes of Moving Meditation Every Day

While I can’t say my first experience of moving meditation was profound, I was intrigued enough by its potential to help me slow down and be more mindful in all areas of my life that I committed to at least 5 minutes of moving meditation every day for the month of January. Before I got started, I asked Lee if I should continue my already-established (if sporadic) mantra-based practice.

“Will repeating my mantra while practicing moving meditation help me focus?” I asked Lee.

See also This 5-Minute Meditation for Parents Will Save Your Sanity

“No,” she replied. “When trying a new meditation practice, it’s best to stick to just one rather than dabble in many,” she told me.

I started out simple: From the Yoga Journal office, I took solo walks to the coffee shop around the corner and didn’t ask a co-worker to join, like usual. The typically 5-minute stroll took about 8 minutes at moving-meditation speed, and while my mind did wander—mostly to my long list of to-dos—I didn’t beat myself up about that fact. Instead, I kept coming back to the feeling of each step. I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the subtle feeling of my foot on a crack in the sidewalk; the sound of the wooden heel of my favorite pair of booties on a day-old snow-ice mix; the feeling of one part of my foot on pavement and another on grass.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

After each of my walking meditations during my first and second weeks of this challenge, I had to try hard not to brush off the seemingly insignificant sensations I was having. How would it serve me to know exactly what it feels like to simultaneously have my heel on pavement and the ball of my foot on grass? I stuck to the practice on my walks to the coffee shop and abandoned them en route back to my desk.

A simple 5-minute stroll can help you practice moving meditation. If your mind starts to wander, focus on the steps that you are taking. 

The Ah-Ha Moment: When I Knew Moving Meditation Was Working

The third week in to my moving meditation experiment, I had a game-changing therapy appointment which, it turns out, would alter the way I thought about my new, mindful walks.

I was talking to Leah, my therapist, about my near-frenetic pace and its impacts on my life. It was making me more gruff and less compassionate. It was inspiring me to race through my writing and editing, which meant I was more careless with my words. It was making me less present with my boyfriend, friends, and worst of all, myself.

See also Pranayama 101: This Moving Breath Practice Will Teach You to Let Go

“So, what’s the antidote?” I pleaded, practically begging her for an assignment I could add to my to-dos. “If I can’t move to Tuscany, how can I finally slow the heck down?”

Leah shot me a knowing smile.

“You don’t need another to-do,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you to meditate for 20 minutes every morning in order to get more present. You can show up more fully, and in better alignment with who you are and how you want to be in the world, by doing what I call ‘one eye in, one eye out.’”

Think of this concept as the epitome of taking your practices off your meditation cushion and yoga mat and into the world, Leah continued. When the practices are working, the world is your mat. One eye in helps you stay in alignment with your central channel—the place from which you move with your heart, not a head full of fear. One eye out helps you interact with others and field all of the things that will inevitably come flying at you, many of which will be completely out of your control.

See also This Napa Valley Vintner’s Ritual for Inner Calm is a Meditation

“The secret to experience this kind of embodied presence is noticing your physical sensations,” Leah told me. “Try it now. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your thighs on the couch. Feel your back supported by the cushion behind you. Now, can you do all of that and simultaneously talk to me?”

Of course, I thought to myself, smiling at how messages often show up a few times for them to finally sink in. This is what moving meditation is also about. One eye in to feel the sensation of my feet on the ground; one eye out to help me get where I’m going, only more mindfully.

During my final week of this moving meditation challenge, I started looking forward to my daily walks—which became longer than 8 minutes—and found myself tuning in to how I take up space in my body and in the world. Sometimes, this meant that even my 15-second walk to the office printer became an opportunity to clue in to the physical sensation of my feet on the carpet and my hip flexors and thigh bones initiating the movement of each leg. Other times, it meant simply taking a few seconds to feel my finger pads on my keyboard before I started typing.

See also Yoga Journal's March Meditation Challenge

Best of all, little hits of my newfound sense of embodiment started happening even when work and this moving meditation challenge were the last things on my mind. One night, I sat down to dinner with my boyfriend, Brian, at home. Before I dug in to the grilled salmon and roasted broccoli I’d raced to Whole Foods to buy and then cook for us after a busy day, I consciously felt my feet on the ground, my thighs and back supported by the dining room chair, and I and connected to my heart space—all of which happened in what felt like milliseconds.

And it felt even more satisfying than that belly full of ravioli and glass of Chianti in Tuscany over the holidays.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

[jenniferfaye34]

#Giveaway + Excerpt 12 ~ The #Prince and the #Wedding Planner (The Bartolini Legacy) by Jennifer Faye... #books #romance #royalty #readers #amreading

It’s time for Weekend Sneak Peek! 😀

And there’s only 8 days until THE PRINCE AND THE WEDDING PLANNER releases!

THE BARTOLINI LEGACY

A secret, an inheritance, a journey to happy-ever-after!

A diary...

After their parents’ sudden deaths, the Bartolini siblings Bianca, Gia and Enzo return home to Tuscany and discover one of them is illegitimate!

A will...

As they’re reeling from the bombshell, the will is read. The luxury family estate will be left to the sibling who can generate the greatest income.

A summer to remember...

While they wait for the DNA test results, each sibling embarks on their own vision for the vineyard’s future. They have six months that will take them on a journey of self-discovery and finding love along the way...

Read Bianca’s story in The Prince and the Wedding Planner.

And look out for Gia’s and Enzo’s stories Coming soon!

Back Cover Blurb:

When different worlds collide… …sparks fly! With her family name on the line, wedding planner Bianca Bartolini needs this royal wedding to go perfectly—she can’t afford distractions. Too bad the bride’s dashing brother has other plans! Duty-bound Crown Prince Leo has mere weeks to announce his own engagement, but none of the candidates measure up to Bianca. They’re the most unlikely match, but might that just make them perfect for one another?

Note: If You Missed The Prior Excerpt(S), Click HERE

EXCERPT / Prologue – Part 12

Enzo shook his head. “Whatever it is. It’s none of our business.”

“Did you know Mamma had an affair?” Gia blurted out.

“What? No. That can’t be right. She wouldn’t do something like that.” He shook his head as though to chase away the troubling thought. He stepped back from them, distancing himself from the world-shattering news.

Gia scooted back on the big bed, crossed her legs and focused on the journal. She started to read their mother’s troubling words. Bianca’s gaze stayed on her brother, watching him as the wave of emotions washed over him. It was obvious that he hadn’t known about this affair. And the journal didn’t say when it’d taken place.

Gia turned the page.

He said that he still loved me and forgave me for what happened, but when we fight, when the distance looms between us, I wonder if he remembers that bad time in our marriage when we separated.

I was so sure that he was never coming back. That we would end up divorced. Days turned to weeks and then to months. I was weak and let a handsome man sweet-talk me into his bed. I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life. And then the worst happened...

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#The Prince and the Wedding Planner #The Bartolini Legacy #Contemporary Romance #royal romance #wedding #wedding planner #royalty #prince #Italy #vineyard #Tuscany #Harlequin #Jennifer Faye #Hearts & Scribbles

[amyddaniels]

How 31 Days of Moving Meditation Helped One Yogi Slow Down

For one always-on-the-go writer, learning to be more mindful while she was on the move helped her find more peace when she was still, too.

Meghan Rabbitt focuses in on the benefits of moving meditation and how it helped her slow down.

I was lingering over a pasta dinner in Rome over the holidays this year, sitting back in my chair with one hand on my full belly and the other holding my glass of red wine when it hit me: I have to do this more often. Not the trips to Rome or even the pasta—although more of both would be nice. What I found myself craving in that moment was more of that kind of slowing down—giving myself space in everyday, non-vacation life to really experience and even savor what I’m doing.

Slowing down is a serious challenge for me. I’m a self-proclaimed productivity fiend: The more I can get done in a day, the better. My job, writing and editing for YogaJournal.com, stokes this natural instinct in me. In digital media, praise comes flying at you when you work quickly. I’m also a born-and-raised New Yorker, which means my go-to pace is almost always a little (OK, a lot) faster than those outside the big Apple.

See also Meditation Has Proven Benefits: So Why Is It Hard to Commit?

So, when I returned home from Italy to Boulder, Colo., and was asked to practice moving meditation every day for 31 days, it seemed like a logical fit. I’d been sporadic with my usual, mantra-based meditation practice, solidly in a new habit of making a beeline for my computer—not my meditation cushion—after brushing my teeth each morning. Would moving meditation help me slow my roll, and infuse my life with more mindfulness? I wanted to find out.

When practicing moving meditation, you must focus your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step that you take. 

What is Moving Meditation?

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a day-long retreat in beautiful Red Feather Lakes here in Colorado with yoga and Tibetan Buddhism teacher, Cyndi Lee. The retreat was held at the Shambhala Mountain Center, high in the Colorado Rockies and home to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. My first experience practicing moving meditation was there, with Lee guiding me and the rest of the 20-some-odd group, on a walk to the Stupa.

See also Yoga Journal's Meditation Challenge Will Help You Stick to a Steady Practice

Lee explained that just as in a sitting meditation, where your attention might be on your breath or repeating a mantra, in a moving meditation, you place your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step. How does your foot feel in your shoe, or on the earth? What does it feel like as your heel strikes the ground before rolling onto the ball mound of your foot and then your toes? You get the drift. When you first start out, it’s recommended that you walk a little slower than usual, so you can really feel your feet with every step.

As we practiced this walking meditation on retreat that day, I felt awkward at first. With every step, a thought popped into my head: There’s my heel; What would an outsider looking in think of us walking in a line so freakin’ slowly?! Oooh, so that’s what my foot’s arch feels like when my weight rolls from the back of my heel toward the front; Ugh, how long is this going to take us?!

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Luckily, Lee normalized this common monkey-mind activity. “The idea is not that you’re going to have absolutely no thoughts,” she says. “What you’re doing is cultivating your ability to recognize that you don’t have to buy into everything that comes up. Part of the experience is recognizing that your mind will stray, so when it does, you bring it very gently with precision back to the feeling of your foot on earth. Step, step, step.”

Cyndi Lee normalizes the idea of moving meditation by stating that whenever your mind strays away, focus on the feeling of bringing your foot back to the earth. Step, step, step.

The Challenge: 5 Minutes of Moving Meditation Every Day

While I can’t say my first experience of moving meditation was profound, I was intrigued enough by its potential to help me slow down and be more mindful in all areas of my life that I committed to at least 5 minutes of moving meditation every day for the month of January. Before I got started, I asked Lee if I should continue my already-established (if sporadic) mantra-based practice.

“Will repeating my mantra while practicing moving meditation help me focus?” I asked Lee.

See also This 5-Minute Meditation for Parents Will Save Your Sanity

“No,” she replied. “When trying a new meditation practice, it’s best to stick to just one rather than dabble in many,” she told me.

I started out simple: From the Yoga Journal office, I took solo walks to the coffee shop around the corner and didn’t ask a co-worker to join, like usual. The typically 5-minute stroll took about 8 minutes at moving-meditation speed, and while my mind did wander—mostly to my long list of to-dos—I didn’t beat myself up about that fact. Instead, I kept coming back to the feeling of each step. I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the subtle feeling of my foot on a crack in the sidewalk; the sound of the wooden heel of my favorite pair of booties on a day-old snow-ice mix; the feeling of one part of my foot on pavement and another on grass.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

After each of my walking meditations during my first and second weeks of this challenge, I had to try hard not to brush off the seemingly insignificant sensations I was having. How would it serve me to know exactly what it feels like to simultaneously have my heel on pavement and the ball of my foot on grass? I stuck to the practice on my walks to the coffee shop and abandoned them en route back to my desk.

A simple 5-minute stroll can help you practice moving meditation. If your mind starts to wander, focus on the steps that you are taking. 

The Ah-Ha Moment: When I Knew Moving Meditation Was Working

The third week in to my moving meditation experiment, I had a game-changing therapy appointment which, it turns out, would alter the way I thought about my new, mindful walks.

I was talking to Leah, my therapist, about my near-frenetic pace and its impacts on my life. It was making me more gruff and less compassionate. It was inspiring me to race through my writing and editing, which meant I was more careless with my words. It was making me less present with my boyfriend, friends, and worst of all, myself.

See also Pranayama 101: This Moving Breath Practice Will Teach You to Let Go

“So, what’s the antidote?” I pleaded, practically begging her for an assignment I could add to my to-dos. “If I can’t move to Tuscany, how can I finally slow the heck down?”

Leah shot me a knowing smile.

“You don’t need another to-do,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you to meditate for 20 minutes every morning in order to get more present. You can show up more fully, and in better alignment with who you are and how you want to be in the world, by doing what I call ‘one eye in, one eye out.’”

Think of this concept as the epitome of taking your practices off your meditation cushion and yoga mat and into the world, Leah continued. When the practices are working, the world is your mat. One eye in helps you stay in alignment with your central channel—the place from which you move with your heart, not a head full of fear. One eye out helps you interact with others and field all of the things that will inevitably come flying at you, many of which will be completely out of your control.

See also This Napa Valley Vintner’s Ritual for Inner Calm is a Meditation

“The secret to experience this kind of embodied presence is noticing your physical sensations,” Leah told me. “Try it now. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your thighs on the couch. Feel your back supported by the cushion behind you. Now, can you do all of that and simultaneously talk to me?”

Of course, I thought to myself, smiling at how messages often show up a few times for them to finally sink in. This is what moving meditation is also about. One eye in to feel the sensation of my feet on the ground; one eye out to help me get where I’m going, only more mindfully.

During my final week of this moving meditation challenge, I started looking forward to my daily walks—which became longer than 8 minutes—and found myself tuning in to how I take up space in my body and in the world. Sometimes, this meant that even my 15-second walk to the office printer became an opportunity to clue in to the physical sensation of my feet on the carpet and my hip flexors and thigh bones initiating the movement of each leg. Other times, it meant simply taking a few seconds to feel my finger pads on my keyboard before I started typing.

See also Yoga Journal's March Meditation Challenge

Best of all, little hits of my newfound sense of embodiment started happening even when work and this moving meditation challenge were the last things on my mind. One night, I sat down to dinner with my boyfriend, Brian, at home. Before I dug in to the grilled salmon and roasted broccoli I’d raced to Whole Foods to buy and then cook for us after a busy day, I consciously felt my feet on the ground, my thighs and back supported by the dining room chair, and I and connected to my heart space—all of which happened in what felt like milliseconds.

And it felt even more satisfying than that belly full of ravioli and glass of Chianti in Tuscany over the holidays.

[remedialmassage]

How 31 Days of Moving Meditation Helped One Yogi Slow Down

For one always-on-the-go writer, learning to be more mindful while she was on the move helped her find more peace when she was still, too.

Meghan Rabbitt focuses in on the benefits of moving meditation and how it helped her slow down.

I was lingering over a pasta dinner in Rome over the holidays this year, sitting back in my chair with one hand on my full belly and the other holding my glass of red wine when it hit me: I have to do this more often. Not the trips to Rome or even the pasta—although more of both would be nice. What I found myself craving in that moment was more of that kind of slowing down—giving myself space in everyday, non-vacation life to really experience and even savor what I’m doing.

Slowing down is a serious challenge for me. I’m a self-proclaimed productivity fiend: The more I can get done in a day, the better. My job, writing and editing for YogaJournal.com, stokes this natural instinct in me. In digital media, praise comes flying at you when you work quickly. I’m also a born-and-raised New Yorker, which means my go-to pace is almost always a little (OK, a lot) faster than those outside the big Apple.

See also Meditation Has Proven Benefits: So Why Is It Hard to Commit?

So, when I returned home from Italy to Boulder, Colo., and was asked to practice moving meditation every day for 31 days, it seemed like a logical fit. I’d been sporadic with my usual, mantra-based meditation practice, solidly in a new habit of making a beeline for my computer—not my meditation cushion—after brushing my teeth each morning. Would moving meditation help me slow my roll, and infuse my life with more mindfulness? I wanted to find out.

When practicing moving meditation, you must focus your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step that you take. 

What is Moving Meditation?

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a day-long retreat in beautiful Red Feather Lakes here in Colorado with yoga and Tibetan Buddhism teacher, Cyndi Lee. The retreat was held at the Shambhala Mountain Center, high in the Colorado Rockies and home to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. My first experience practicing moving meditation was there, with Lee guiding me and the rest of the 20-some-odd group, on a walk to the Stupa.

See also Yoga Journal's Meditation Challenge Will Help You Stick to a Steady Practice

Lee explained that just as in a sitting meditation, where your attention might be on your breath or repeating a mantra, in a moving meditation, you place your attention on the sensation of your foot touching the ground with each step. How does your foot feel in your shoe, or on the earth? What does it feel like as your heel strikes the ground before rolling onto the ball mound of your foot and then your toes? You get the drift. When you first start out, it’s recommended that you walk a little slower than usual, so you can really feel your feet with every step.

As we practiced this walking meditation on retreat that day, I felt awkward at first. With every step, a thought popped into my head: There’s my heel; What would an outsider looking in think of us walking in a line so freakin’ slowly?! Oooh, so that’s what my foot’s arch feels like when my weight rolls from the back of my heel toward the front; Ugh, how long is this going to take us?!

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Luckily, Lee normalized this common monkey-mind activity. “The idea is not that you’re going to have absolutely no thoughts,” she says. “What you’re doing is cultivating your ability to recognize that you don’t have to buy into everything that comes up. Part of the experience is recognizing that your mind will stray, so when it does, you bring it very gently with precision back to the feeling of your foot on earth. Step, step, step.”

Cyndi Lee normalizes the idea of moving meditation by stating that whenever your mind strays away, focus on the feeling of bringing your foot back to the earth. Step, step, step.

The Challenge: 5 Minutes of Moving Meditation Every Day

While I can’t say my first experience of moving meditation was profound, I was intrigued enough by its potential to help me slow down and be more mindful in all areas of my life that I committed to at least 5 minutes of moving meditation every day for the month of January. Before I got started, I asked Lee if I should continue my already-established (if sporadic) mantra-based practice.

“Will repeating my mantra while practicing moving meditation help me focus?” I asked Lee.

See also This 5-Minute Meditation for Parents Will Save Your Sanity

“No,” she replied. “When trying a new meditation practice, it’s best to stick to just one rather than dabble in many,” she told me.

I started out simple: From the Yoga Journal office, I took solo walks to the coffee shop around the corner and didn’t ask a co-worker to join, like usual. The typically 5-minute stroll took about 8 minutes at moving-meditation speed, and while my mind did wander—mostly to my long list of to-dos—I didn’t beat myself up about that fact. Instead, I kept coming back to the feeling of each step. I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the subtle feeling of my foot on a crack in the sidewalk; the sound of the wooden heel of my favorite pair of booties on a day-old snow-ice mix; the feeling of one part of my foot on pavement and another on grass.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

After each of my walking meditations during my first and second weeks of this challenge, I had to try hard not to brush off the seemingly insignificant sensations I was having. How would it serve me to know exactly what it feels like to simultaneously have my heel on pavement and the ball of my foot on grass? I stuck to the practice on my walks to the coffee shop and abandoned them en route back to my desk.

A simple 5-minute stroll can help you practice moving meditation. If your mind starts to wander, focus on the steps that you are taking. 

The Ah-Ha Moment: When I Knew Moving Meditation Was Working

The third week in to my moving meditation experiment, I had a game-changing therapy appointment which, it turns out, would alter the way I thought about my new, mindful walks.

I was talking to Leah, my therapist, about my near-frenetic pace and its impacts on my life. It was making me more gruff and less compassionate. It was inspiring me to race through my writing and editing, which meant I was more careless with my words. It was making me less present with my boyfriend, friends, and worst of all, myself.

See also Pranayama 101: This Moving Breath Practice Will Teach You to Let Go

“So, what’s the antidote?” I pleaded, practically begging her for an assignment I could add to my to-dos. “If I can’t move to Tuscany, how can I finally slow the heck down?”

Leah shot me a knowing smile.

“You don’t need another to-do,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you to meditate for 20 minutes every morning in order to get more present. You can show up more fully, and in better alignment with who you are and how you want to be in the world, by doing what I call ‘one eye in, one eye out.’”

Think of this concept as the epitome of taking your practices off your meditation cushion and yoga mat and into the world, Leah continued. When the practices are working, the world is your mat. One eye in helps you stay in alignment with your central channel—the place from which you move with your heart, not a head full of fear. One eye out helps you interact with others and field all of the things that will inevitably come flying at you, many of which will be completely out of your control.

See also This Napa Valley Vintner’s Ritual for Inner Calm is a Meditation

“The secret to experience this kind of embodied presence is noticing your physical sensations,” Leah told me. “Try it now. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your thighs on the couch. Feel your back supported by the cushion behind you. Now, can you do all of that and simultaneously talk to me?”

Of course, I thought to myself, smiling at how messages often show up a few times for them to finally sink in. This is what moving meditation is also about. One eye in to feel the sensation of my feet on the ground; one eye out to help me get where I’m going, only more mindfully.

During my final week of this moving meditation challenge, I started looking forward to my daily walks—which became longer than 8 minutes—and found myself tuning in to how I take up space in my body and in the world. Sometimes, this meant that even my 15-second walk to the office printer became an opportunity to clue in to the physical sensation of my feet on the carpet and my hip flexors and thigh bones initiating the movement of each leg. Other times, it meant simply taking a few seconds to feel my finger pads on my keyboard before I started typing.

See also Yoga Journal's March Meditation Challenge

Best of all, little hits of my newfound sense of embodiment started happening even when work and this moving meditation challenge were the last things on my mind. One night, I sat down to dinner with my boyfriend, Brian, at home. Before I dug in to the grilled salmon and roasted broccoli I’d raced to Whole Foods to buy and then cook for us after a busy day, I consciously felt my feet on the ground, my thighs and back supported by the dining room chair, and I and connected to my heart space—all of which happened in what felt like milliseconds.

And it felt even more satisfying than that belly full of ravioli and glass of Chianti in Tuscany over the holidays.

from Yoga Journal https://ift.tt/2u9Tz2N

#Yoga Journal

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Glimpse Inside New June Issues and Enter Our Giveaway!

Receive $5 off on new June issues. Copy and paste coupon code BLOG0617 when prompted at checkout. (Discount code can only be used once per customer.)

Bella Grace

Embrace the life you live with Issue 12 of Bella Grace.

Summer is a time to embrace relaxation and freedom. Whether you’re traveling, adventuring locally, or maybe enjoying a staycation at home, taking time to find magic in each moment can be life-changing. From astonishing pictures to inspirational stories, you will want to revisit this issue to enjoy each one of these moments over and over

Inside Issue 12:

5 Ways to refill the well when you are feeling depleted

Our favorite ways to spend a summer night

How to feel like a kid again

The uncomfortable manifesto

How to experience a different kind of fairy tale

Kelly Letky takes her mother to the beach for the very first time

Dresses with pockets & other wonderful things

Spend a day in your pajamas

A quilt on the couch and other comforting things

Finding quiet in the big city

Where Women Cook

A shared love of food — whether it’s cooking it, talking about it, or eating it — brings people together. Join us for a culinary adventure within the pages of Where Women Cook, an exciting 144-page publication filled to the brim with stunning photographs and heartwarming stories.

Inside the Summer 2017 Issue:

Spend a summer in Tuscany with Giulia Scarpaleggia

The beautiful desserts and entertaining tips of Jenny Keller of Jenny Cookies

Naomi Gingerich, author of the blog The Cooks in the Kitchen, will inspire your next summer picnic

Personal chef & culinary business consultant, Chef Deb

Take Ten

Start the summer off right by scheduling a sun-soaked crafting session inspired by the latest installment of Take Ten!

Free artist paper included!

Inside the Summer 2017 Issue:

Make your own patterned paper using inspiration from the Masterboard department and see a few different ways to create cards with it once you’re done!

Check out over 300 gorgeous, full-color cards made for all seasons and occasions.

See Kris Lancaster’s collection of succulent- and cactus-themed cards that will surely prickle your creative impulses.

Belle Armoire Jewelry

Discover a world of artisan and mixed-media jewelry inside every issue of Belle Armoire Jewelry.

In the Summer 2017 Issue, see how Kit Salway works with a striking blue patina to create an avant-garde collection of necklaces and cuffs.

Step into Ted Henderson’s elaborate process for hand-forging intricate and inventive torched copper earrings.

Inspired by the phenomenal sight of Mars and Saturn aligning with Earth, Milagros Rivera designed celestial necklaces with hand-poured, wire-wrapped resin beads.

Discover Brooke Bock’s mesmerizing Mermaid Collection with shimmering polymer clay beads and silk strips representing the boundless beauty of the ocean.

Be dazzled by Diane Cook’s renowned torch-fired enamel jewelry in this issue’s Designer Collection.

Sew Somerset

Sew Somerset represents a new way of looking at sewn art. More than ever before, artists are discovering the joy of combining sewing with mixed-media projects, showing the world that stitches are not just for fabric anymore!

In the Summer 2017 Issue of Sew Somerset:

Carrie Payne hand-stitched a flirtatious collection of black and white cards with matching envelopes.

Renee Stien created a mini-accordion booklet that can be tucked away in an altered Altoid tin for safekeeping.

Discover Tina Walker’s eco-dyed stitched journals filled with vintage findings, handmade papers, and inspirational quotes.

Kraft bags are adorably transformed into custom gift bags with collages of paper, lace, and photographs by Halle Gustafson.

Perfect for any artist on the go, Debbie H. Blatt sewed together an art tote with scraps of fabric and a cardboard box, complete with pouches and pockets for holding art supplies.

Art Quilting Studio

Explore the amazing world of art quilts. From painted fabrics to intricate appliqués, see the hottest trends in fabric manipulation and quilting inside every issue of Art Quilting Studio. Expand your quilting knowledge with 144 pages of innovative tips from top artists from around the world.

Inside the Summer 2017 Issue:

Artist Portfolio: Pauline Burbidge

The latest trend in wearable art quilts: a quilted bustier by Tamara Kyser

Ellen Deschatres presents her 3-D art quilt Ragtime in our Quilting the Odd & Unusual feature.

Cindy Richard shares her realistic-looking art quilts, SoleMates and Discovery.

Meet Betsy Abbott and learn about her late introduction to the magic of art quilting.

Alice Beasley shares her underwater ballet series, Undercurrents, with each quilt based on a specific ballet or modern dance.

Carrie Payne gives a sneak peek into her Fairy Tale series in the Series Showcase.

Somerset Studio Gallery

Explore the latest trends in mixed-media and assemblage art inside our 176-page Summer 2017 Issue.

Inside Somerset Studio Gallery:

Donna Salazar creates a stunning cascade of handmade die-cut paper flowers in a monochromic color scheme.

Inspired by life experiences requiring her to be brave, Monica Downing shares her shadow box shrines with Dresden trim, metallic paints, crystal drawer pulls.

Discovered by accident: Lisa Bebi applies correction fluid to photocopied family photographs to produce interesting texture and an eye-catching effect.

Lynne Moncrieff combines driftwood, rusty wire, silk ribbon, and wooden feathers into beautiful mobiles featuring positive affirmations.

  Enter to Win Our Glimpse Inside Giveaway!

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*$5 off coupon code applies to purchases of any of the following (Summer ’17) issues only: Bella Grace, Take Ten, Where Women Cook, Sew Somerset, Art Quilting Studio, Belle Armoire Jewelry, and Somerset Studio Gallery. Coupon cannot be combined with any other offer. Discount code can be used only one time per customer and expires 06/30/17.

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Obama flew to Milan on private jet, 14-car convoy to a climate change conference!

Former President Barack Obama used a private jet and a 14-car convoy to transport him to a conference in Milan where he spoke about food security and climate change.

Obama’s detail also include a helicopter that provided security from the air.

Critics seized on the massive logistical effort and the attendant carbon footprint that is a byproduct of Obama’s trip.

‘It seems like Obama has taken a page out of Leonardo DiCaprio’s book of “do as I say, not as I do”,’ wrote the conservative Independent Journal Review.

Last year, the star actor was criticized for using a private jet to transport him from Cannes to New York to pick up an environmental award, according to the Telegraph.

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DiCaprio then flew back to Cannes on another private jet immediately after receiving his award.

An associate of the Titanic star defended him, claiming that he merely ‘hitched a ride with someone already flying back and to Cannes.

‘Hitching a ride was the only way he could make it in time for both events,’ the associate said.

On Tuesday afternoon the former president delivered a speech on climate change at the annual Seeds and Chips conference – for which 3,500 people have paid €850 each for a ticket, The Times reported.

This has raised almost €3million for the Obama Foundation, which was set up to help further his project of ‘renewal and global progress’.

Obama made the most of his two-day trip to Italy by reportedly staying at a sprawling $20,000-a-night hilltop villa in Tuscany and a five-star hotel in Milan.

The former US president met former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Monday and spoke about climate change at a sold-out conference on Tuesday.

He arrived in Italy’s business capital by private jet with his entourage and reportedly took over two floors of the Park Hyatt hotel – where presidential suite rooms cost almost $10,000 a night.

Obama seemed to be making the most of his post-presidential work routine as he was ferried through the city with a 14-car convoy on Monday.

Crowds flocked to the streets with homemade banners as the former American president was escorted by 300 police officers and helicopters.

He wore shades and went tie-less as he stepped out of the $9,100 a night Park Hyatt hotel later in the day, waving and smiling to hoards of Italian fans.

The visit is his first public foreign foray since leaving the presidency…

MORE HERE: Barack Obama flew to Milan on private jet | Daily Mail Online

from Obama flew to Milan on private jet, 14-car convoy to a climate change conference!

#Obama flew to Milan on private jet #14-car convoy to a climate change conference!