Shake Your Lemons. Blog #5

This weeks assignment asks us to take an insight that is our own and make a poster of it.  I've been stumped all week.  There is something singularly intimidating about making a poster out of your own words.  I mean, I post on social media all the time.  Those words are not really meant to be inspiring or linger on such a lasting thing as, you know, a poster as the assignment requires.

So I scoured through old posts and tweets, I considered plagiarizing my Granny who is funny and succinct, and asked my family 1000000 times if there was anything, uh, appropriate that I say all the time that sticks.  It looks like in the future I will need to work on my inspirational game. *pulls collar*

I kept going back to one thing that I know I tell my kids, which is "Just because it's hard, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it".  See?  I can be deep.  I tell them this every time they complain about XYZ (and ABCDEF……G…W) because they confuse difficult with not worth it.  And then I call them on it.  But it's not very catchy.

So I was making preserved lemons a few years ago.  They're awesome, but a little labor intensive.  You have to stuff lemons into jars with salt and spices and other things, and then you have to shake the jars every day.  For a month.  So I wrote this reminder on my kitchen chalkboard wall:

The original.

And I looked at it every day for a month.  Maybe this makes me delusional, but it started to mean more to me than just the reminder to physically shake jars of lemons.  It made me think about what lemons are.  Sour little citrus fruits that are hard to ignore.  Kind of like flaws.  They enrich, and also sting.  Shake your Lemons started to cheer me up every time I walked past it.  To hell with flaws, shake those babies.  Let your funny little ways be just that.  Be you.

Shake your Lemons. Take it to the bank.

Because look what you could get.