January 6th ~ Epiphany

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Christian feast day, daily devotional, Daily Strength for Daily Needs, definition of epiphany, Epiphany, Frankincense, Gold, Illuminations, intuitive insight, Lives of the Saints, Magi, Myrrh, Son of God, The Three Kings, The Three Wise Men

Today is the Christian feast day of the Epiphany, celebrating the arrival of the Magi (also known as the Three Wise Men) at the humble stable where Jesus was born. One  definition of epiphany is “a sudden, intuitive insight into the essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple occurrence or experience”. The word is derived from the Greek word Epiphania, which means “to show, make known, or reveal.”

This is that time of year where we particularly look for such revelation, await some new perception, hunger for something fresh and hopeful and new; we have already lived through the shortest day and the longest dark night, and celebrated the big feasts of Christmas and New Year’s, and the deep cold of winter is settling into our bones, even as each day is noticeably longer than the one before. The time is right for Epiphany in all senses of the word; to reflect upon both the reality and the metaphor of the visit of the Wise Men bringing their rich gifts to the Son of God in a manger, to wish to experience that flash of personal insight that leads from or leads to the hopeful resolution made at the top of the year.

In all senses of the word, Epiphany is a gift; the gold, frankincense, and myrrh brought by strangers from afar to honor the birth of a King born in a stable; the unanticipated parting of the psychic curtain, allowing the light of truth to illuminate the winter-dark corners of the soul as it cries for such light.

We can seek our epiphanies by studying the lives of saints, heroes and scholars for lessons we can use; we can open ourselves to the unexpected, the unbidden, the unearned, the mystical magical gift of light that somehow comes when we need it most. I’ll take both kinds, thank you very much; both kinds have saved my life many times over.

I wish you epiphanies on this sacred feast day. Let the light illuminate you, through and through.

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Happy New Year!

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doggedness, exercise, fearlessness, health, Illuminations, love, New Year's Day, New Year's Resolutions, persistence, resolutions, responsibility, stubbornness, trust, weight loss

I want to wish everyone a happy, healthy, prosperous new year!
2014 sounds almost like a science fiction Star Date to me…this is the year I will turn 60; I remember when 1984 sounded like a science fiction Star date to me, and now that is (almost literally) half a lifetime ago for me. My resolutions are simple:

1. Lose 30 lbs. by year’s end. (It will make resolution #2 easier…)
2. Swim a mile and half in laps at one time by my 60th birthday. (For those who don’t know: I made my mile in laps one week after my birthday! WOOT!!)
3. Swim at least twice a week. It’s good for my head, my heart, my work, and my art.
4. Draw something every day.
5. Blog something every day.
   It’ll be easier this year, because what I plan to do is post the day’s page from my page-a-day desk calendar, Illuminations, published by Leap Year LLC.
   Here’s the cover:
   

   IIluminations 2014 Desk Calendar

   And here’s today’s page:

January 1, 2014 ~ New Year’s Day

So, those are MY resolutions…I’m trying to keep it simple, doable, and well-integrated into the infrastructure of my life as it is, but incorporating more of the things that make me truly happy. One of the true gifts of 2013 was discovering how much I still loved drawing, and to discover that I hadn’t lost my drawing “chops” even though it had been a reallllllly looooooong time since I last picked up a pencil/pen/conte crayon with intent to draw. I never lost my drawing eye, and I guess I’ve been training it all this time.

I plan to LIVE OUT LOUD in 2014! What about you?

What are your resolutions for 2014? And how are you going to make it all happen? Was there something that really worked for you in 2013?
Please share… we can support each other in our intentions to build on successes and throw away what doesn’t work any more.

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My New Wall Calendar for 2014!

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2014, amazon.com, calendar, calendars.com, Claudia Karabaic Sargent, desk calendar, illustration, New year, persistence, stick-to-it-tiveness, wall calendar

You may remember that last year at around this time I was feverishly working at night (after working days at my then brand-new job at the Y) to finish the pages of my first freelance project in more than ten years.
Well, yesterday, I received my author copies of my Illuminations Wall Calendar. I am SO HAPPY with the way it turned out!

Illuminations 2014 by Claudia Karabaic Sargent, front and back

This was my first project using InDesign. All the artwork in the calendar is a digital remix of my original watercolor paintings from the gift books I did with my friend and partner, Peg Streep. There’s also a Page-a-Day Desk calendar– as soon as I have the ISBN for that, I will post it. Here’s what the box looks like:

IIluminations 2014 Desk Calendar

I taught myself the things I needed to know for the project, using the tutorials on Adobe.com and by trial and error (my favorite way of learning).
Even after all my years of freelancing, it’s still a big thrill to get author copies of something I’ve created. This was my baby from concept, to proposal, to completed project. I thank my friend and agent Melissa Turk for selling this project to Leap Year, and I thank Leap Year for producing it.
I hope you all enjoy it!

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It’s Never Too Early to Be Thankful

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belief, birthday, birthday gift, communities, fate, fortune, friends, full time job, gifts, grace, gratitude, health, Hurricane Sandy, illustration, luck, November, Occupy Sandy, persistence, Point Pleasant, politics, siblings, thankfulness, Thanksgiving, the perfect job, trust. faith, works, YMCA, YouthBuild, youthbuild program

I’m so sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long. It’s been a wild couple of months. The last thing I told you was about my trip to Point Pleasant Beach with my sister Barbara.

When Sandy came up the New Jersey coast almost two weeks ago, a lot of that beach, that boardwalk, those cute little pastel-colored houses by the shore that people live in (some for the summer, but a lot throughout the year) were washed away, flooded, destroyed.

My family is safe. The most that any of us lost was phone or internet for hours or days. None of us lost power. None of us flooded. We are safe, and well, and warm, and thankful for all of that.

In between the time I last blogged and today, I got the MOST PERFECT JOB in the world. To say that I am grateful, and thankful, and blessed, and happy about that doesn’t quite express the depth and breadth of how I feel. I’m the new office manager for the Flushing YMCA YouthBuild program. For the first time in my life, I have the chance to use my skills in a setting that truly aligns with my personal values. I walk to work every day. On days when I take a break, I swim on my break, one floor down from my office. I am in heaven.

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, or if you know me in real life, you know that I’d been looking for a full-time job for about a year. I’d gotten close several times, but somehow didn’t get the jobs I thought I was perfect for, jobs for which I was well-qualified, and where the interviews went really well. In June, I got the first serious freelance assignment I’ve had in a long-time; a wall calendar/desk calendar project for a conventional publisher (i.e., not print-on-demand). My work will once again be sold in stores next year!

So, I thought, the message from God was this:

Claud, forget fulltime, do your freelance gig, take the time to swim and get your body working in good order. I’ll take care of the rest.

Wisely, I decided not to argue with the Supreme Being, and said to myself, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

All summer, I worked on my calendar project, swam laps three or four days a week, went to the beach with Barbara at the end of the summer, and researched health insurance plans for freelancers, since my COBRA would expire at the end of October.

The last week of August, I knew the schedule for the Y pool would be changing, so I went on the website to check it out. While I was there, I clicked on the careers tab, on impulse. I found the posting for the job I would win within the month. I emailed my resume at 11:30 on a Saturday night, and Monday morning (while I was at the pool) the man who is now my boss called me to come in and interview. Three interviews and four weeks later, he hired me for this wonderful, amazing job that every other thing in my life has prepared me to do.

Grateful, thankful, blessed, happy doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

I’m almost finished with the calendar job (the wall is done, I’m finishing up the desk). I’m taking Intermediate Swim with Eddie Langer again on Sunday mornings. I swim once or twice a week on my lunch breaks; once I finish the calendar, I can get back to swimming four times a week.

If I hadn’t joined the Y back in January, I would not now have my new job. If I hadn’t been looking for the new pool schedule, I’d never have seen the job posting almost as soon as it went up. There is more than luck and coincidence at work here; what there is, is grace, the grace that follows the acceptance of the will of God when one’s own works have proven fruitless. It’s a lesson I have to relearn periodically, but every time I relearn it, I absorb it a little more deeply.

This year, my birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day. I have so very much to be thankful for; work and love, the safety of my family and friends, my new friends and students at my new job, the opportunity to use my talents and skills for a higher purpose. Once I let go of my own idea of what I thought God wanted me to do, my journey was made clear to me, and I took it. It was a roundabout route, and I had many doubts and fears. I had some very dark times, but I held fast, even though I didn’t know what would happen next. I had to step out of the boat, and take the Hand that was extended to me, and trust that I would not fall and drown.
And I didn’t.

So, when my sibs asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I told them I had everything I want and need. Instead, I asked them to donate to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

If you and yours are safe and well, and you want to celebrate Thanksgiving (and my birthday) by helping those who have lost so much, here are a few ideas:

The YMCA of Greater New York is helping replace schoolbooks, supplies, clothing, and more for schoolkids from specific NYC schools who lost everything in the storm.

The Occupy Wall Street folks are doing amazing work in the most devastated areas of Queens.
Check out the Occupy Sandy bridal registry, which is a brilliant idea.

A 19 year old Rutgers student named Zoe and her three siblings lost their parents in the storm. She will be raising her siblings herself. She wants to be able to keep the house they’ve been growing up in. They’ve gotten a lot of help so far, which is amazing; at the bottom of Zoe’s story, she shares a link to other NJ families’ stories, if you want to donate to someone who hasn’t been as fortunate as she has, in terms of donations.

Thanks for listening–Now that we’re all caught up, how did you and yours fare in the storm? If you have any links to local charities who are helping people in your neighborhood, post them here, and please share my links with your friends.
Thanksgiving may be two weeks away, but it’s never too early to be thankful.

Illuminations~ November 2014 page

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From Missing Dad ~ Father’s Day Shoes

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Beatle boots, caregiving, children, Cioffi's Restaurant, clothing, dinner out, doggedness, Dr. Joanne Sauer, elderly parents, family, Father's Day, gifts, holy trinity church, New Balance, persistence, podiatrist, responsibility, shoes, shopping, trust, Union NJ

This is a section from Missing Dad about how we celebrated Father’s Day 2009. I hope you will enjoy it.
The main exception to my rule of non-involvement (with Dad’s clothing habits) was his old worn “Beatle boots”. They were close to ancient (they may have actually been Beatle boots), made of worn formerly black leather, now cracked and scuffed with age.
There were deep creases where his foot flexed; he had a chronic blackened callus on one toe that I was sure was caused by those horrid things. The soles were so slick from wear that they were simply not safe for him; he would slip and slide like an ice skater when he wore them in the wintertime. More than once, Dad had lost his footing while going up the stone steps at Holy Trinity Church, and George had caught his arm and held him up before he went down completely.
Even with all this incontrovertible evidence on my side, I had to enlist his podiatrist’s help and get her to actually prescribe new shoes for him in order to get him out of his beloved boots.

During the summer of 2009, amid all of our discussion about Dad’s hearing aids and the ongoing drama of Dad’s leaking roof, Janet and Wally and Nancy, Chris and Grant decided to come up for Father’s Day. I had spoken to Dad’s podiatrist, Dr. Joanne Sauer, before his early May appointment, because he’d complained to me about an intractable sore on his left foot that was getting worse. I was sure it was those Beatle boots of his; if they weren’t causing the problem, they were certainly exacerbating it. I asked Dr. Sauer if she could “prescribe” new shoes for him. If she did that, we would give them to him as his Father’s Day gift. She prescribed a good pair of walking shoes for him; she told me what she’d done; I checked with Dad, and he verified that the doctor had told him he needed a new pair of good, supportive walking shoes; I told my siblings that we would take care of it on Father’s Day weekend. We all knew that if we left buying new shoes up to Dad, he’d never do it, and he’d wear those damn boots until his last day on earth. He was complaining to me about how expensive good walking shoes were, and that he had never spent more than fifty dollars on a pair of shoes, ever.

So, on the Saturday before Father’s Day, after we took him out for a wonderful meal at Cioffi’s (his favorite dish was the grilled chicken over baby greens), we drove to the FootLocker on Morris Avenue.

I could see the thought balloon over his head: Why are we at a shoe store? Why don’t we just go back home and play Uno? 

First I got out of the car, then Walter, then George. We asked Dad to get out of the car. I took his hand and led him up to the door, opened it, sat him down and went to get a salesperson.
He was surprised when the salesperson and I came back with shoeboxes.
I asked Dad to take off his old beloved Beatle boots. I kidded him that those boots were older than I was (and I was not far wrong). I reminded Dad that his podiatrist, Dr. Sauer, had told her that he needed new shoes so that his callus could heal.

“Okay, okay…keep your shirt on,” he said.

He took off the boots. He tried on the black New Balance walking shoes, tied the laces, and walked around a bit.

“How much are they?”

“It’s a gift. Don’t ask how much it costs. You need these. Doctor Sauer said so.”

He walked some more. They were a little heavy, but comfy. His feet felt good in them.

“Okay, we’ll take them,” I said, and I took them to the counter and paid.

The salesperson packed his old boots into the shoebox, the shoebox went into a big shopping bag, and he wore the new walking shoes into the bright sunshine outside.

(“Well, you didn’t need us after all”, Walter said.
“You and George were the muscle, in case he tried to leave without us buying him the shoes,” I replied.)

I took that shopping bag with me when I left Dad’s house. It was my intention to keep the boots at my house until my father departed this life. I wouldn’t throw them out, but I didn’t want him wearing them ever again.

As soon as Dad realized I had his boots, he got Nancy to call my cell. It rang as I was coming up out of the Murray Hill station.
“Did you take my boots?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Don’t throw them out! They’re still good. Promise me you won’t throw them away”.
“Okay, then, I’m getting them fixed. They need new soles so you don’t end up slipping and falling and killing yourself.”

I told Dad that I would take the boots to my local cobbler, John the Shoemaker, who has a wonderful little shop that looks like something out of the 1930s.

(A couple of days later, when I took them to John, he looked at the boots, looked at me, and said, “Why don’t you just get rid of these?”
“My father is 87 years old and he loves these boots. Can you fix them?”
So John did. He was an artist; he put on new heavy non-slip soles, fixed the heels so that they were level again, and polished the uppers as much as was possible, given the sad state of the leather.)

The next time I visited Dad, I brought back his boots. They were much heavier on his feet; he said they didn’t quite feel the same. But at least now, he wouldn’t slip and slide in the ice and snow, the way he had last winter.

Happy Mother’s Day

Tags

appreciation, beauty, bouquet, caregiving, family, flowers, friends, home, Mother's Day, the Fourth Commandment

A little bouquet for all the moms out there.
I wish you a day of love and beauty,
I wish you a day where you enjoy your family
and where they express their appreciation
and love for you and all you do.

Have a truly beautiful day.

Mother’s Day Gifts at My Zazzle Shop

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family, friends, gifts, illuminated alphabet, Illuminated Prayers, illustration, love stamps, Marianne Williamson, monograms, mother s day gifts, Mother's Day, mothers, new mother, personalized, presents, style, wedding postage

http://www.zazzle.com/utl/getpanel?zp=117779065182526577
Click on the link above to see my new Mother’s Day gifts,
based on the alphabet I designed for
Marianne Williamson’s book, Illuminated Prayers.
View more gifts at my Zazzle shop.

Easter, Chez Karabaic, ca. 1980

Tags

Easter, family, food, friends, ham, holidays, home, lamb, Periscope Paw

A snippet from my family memoir-in-progress, Missing Dad:

Easter was always huge in our family. We celebrated both Orthodox and regular Easter, because Dad was Catholic, and Mom Greek Orthodox. Mom’s birthday and my sister Janet’s birthday are in April, and my sister Barbara’s birthday is in March. At least one of those birthdays would fall close to at least one of the Easters every year.

One year­ not too long after Frank and I were married—it must have been a year where both Easters, or one Easter and a birthday, fell on the same day—my folks had a full house, with lots of guests beyond our immediate family. My mother-in-law and her friend Tom were there, Janet and Walter and Walter’s folks, Nancy and her then-boyfriend and a couple of his relatives, Barbara, our brother John. Every chair in every room had someone in it. There had to be close to twenty people in the house.

My parents made lamb, and ham, and all the accoutrements. They had two black and white cats then, Sunny and Tippy (or, as Frank and I called them, Cattus Fattus Major and Cattus Fattus Minor). Sunny and Tippy were incredibly sneaky, even for cats. Throughout the preparation and serving of the Easter meal (on at least 3 tables in at least two rooms), they darted and lurked, darted and lurked, waiting for their moment.

Everyone ate their fill, and (groaning with both pleasure and pain) rose from and left their respective tables. In the moments between the departures from the table and the arrival of the cleanup crew (Janet and me), Frank spied the two cats s..l..o..w..l..y making their way to the seats under the table in the small dining room. They could smell the platters of meats, but not see them from their vantage point under the table.

Then, Frank saw it: a black paw slowly rose up over the table’s edge, like a periscope examining the horizon. It patted around on the table, found a platter, patted some more, found the meat. The paw tapped a small morsel of ham ever so lightly, and then retracted. Frank looked under the table to see Sunny sniffing what would come to be known as The Periscope Paw. The black paw came up again, as the cats readied for launch…and were thwarted by the return of the cleanup crew.

Cat-astrophe averted.